If A.I. took the place of musicians, would you listen to it?

Until AI has emotional trauma, vices, virtues, regrets, and hope, it's music will simply be a reorganization of sounds that were created in response to those lived experiences. Some human songwriters do that already and I'm not interested in their music either.

Great thread. Thanks @hilde45

We are experiencing a preview of A.I. generated music right now. If you have Serius XM try listening to the station of current Pop hits for a couple of hours. There are three or four genres and within those genres this music is regurgitated, homogenous pablum that is made on electronic instruments. There is very little song structure, the beats sound the same, the chord structures are similar, and it is hard to tell one song from the other. It is made purely for profit and directed to an audience that wants to hear the same thing over and over. BTW, I sometimes listen to this station while driving just so I can be judgemental and yell at the radio. It makes me feel good to know that my generation made music that was so much better.

120,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every day. Think about that. 3.6 million songs per month. We are already at the point where music is a fungible commodity.

I will avoid music that is known to be A.I. generated but there won't be a clear dividing line. What if a musician uses A.I. to come up with a catchy riff? How about A.I. lyrics that tell a compelling story but the musician writes the tune? Most of the time we'll never know. I think we are clearly on the road to popular music as a commodity and A.I. will accelerate that trend.

I'm in my late 60's and I'm constantly discovering great music that is decades old (thanks Qobuz). I'm finally doing a deeper dive into jazz, for example. And there are new interesting titles being released all the time by real musicians. My dying words will likely be, "I wish I had more time to listen to music." The music business can completely go to hell and I will be finding great music until I die.

On a related subject, if you haven't seen it already, I highly recommend the movie "Her."

There is a company out there with a business model that involves using computers to generate "music," filing for copyright of that music, then using software to search for instances where new music happens to violate one of their copyrights so that they can sue that person or extract some payment from such person inadvertently violating the copyright.  

This company is right up there in my esteem with the company that is buying Ahi tuna for ultra deep freeze storage so that, in the future, they can sell sushi at incredibly high prices when the tuna is extinct.

I’ve been thinking about this for a bit and it seems to me that my affinity is due to art, music, and literature being a form of human expression and connection.  It is a way for the artist to express sadness, joy, anger, empathy, passion, or whatever other human emotion that drives the creative process.  It is a form of human connection based on sharing the experience of the human condition.  I don’t know if will live long enough to see AI evolve to the point that it has “human” experiences but for now I don’t find that connection with it as opposed to art created by human minds.

@larryi

That's like Monsanto suing farmers when genetically modified seeds are, unbeknownst to them, transported onto their property and germinate. 

There's no ceiling when it comes to human greed and I expect AI will merely provide more tools for those who are so motivated.