How AI-generated music is shaking up the industry and why artists are wary

[Nitin K]

Brilliant, Sad but futile gesture, I feel. The publicity from this is likely to be more useful than the projected sales of this album.
This trend is not in music alone. We may call them fake or deepfakes but I honestly can’t not distinguish between a fake video (created using software etc) and a real one anymore.

Technological advances in mimicking and competing with, and ripping off some of the most precious and celebrated human traits: creativity…. is happening in music and many other traditional art forms where creativity, innovation and inventiveness are all under siege. (Humanoid dancers performing Bharatanatyam coming to a stage near you sooner than you think)
Any skill that can be digitised will have a machine learnt equivalent probably.
The EU recognises copyright of digital art: https://intellectual-property-helpd...ectual-property-and-digital-art-2024-02-29_en

Handwriting has become an obsolete skill even as most of us are oblivious to this change. I realise I haven’t written a full page of anything in over a decade, even with my stylus and iPad. Biometrics are replacing signatures. I am not sure why schools are still teaching writing by hand when machines do better calligraphy.
Even the legendary “doctors’ legendary indecipherable handwriting is under threat!
But it may not be all smooth sailing for the machines:

iPhone dictation transcribes 'racist' with 'Trump', Apple promises a fix - 9to5Mac

Apple says that “phonetic overlap” is to blame for a peculiar glitch in the iPhone’s dictation feature. Over the last...

9to5mac.com

When it comes to art, consider this:
View attachment 89555

Whereas creative fields are concerned, AI may catch the fancy of people maybe for a short time till the novelty lasts and later will be taken for granted and may not hold much value.
But true talent like that of painters, musicians, singers, lyricists etc will always hold value.
We can already see the value of lab grown diamonds fall down drastically in comparison to the natural ones. AI may be suitable for monotonous tasks in companies and other useful areas . But the niche ones will always hold value even with the tides of time.

 

[bhooshaniyer]

Whereas creative fields are concerned, AI may catch the fancy of people maybe for a short time till the novelty lasts and later will be taken for granted and may not hold much value.
But true talent like that of painters, musicians, singers, lyricists etc will always hold value.
We can already see the value of lab grown diamonds fall down drastically in comparison to the natural ones. AI may be suitable for monotonous tasks in companies and other useful areas . But the niche ones will always hold value even with the tides of time.

It's not going to be ai vs artist..it's going to be artists who can manipulate ai vs artist who don't. The outcome of that battle will be rough and uncertain.. ilaiyarajaa has spoken on deep seek based music composition topic extensively if not eloquently.

 

[Nitin K]

It's not going to be ai vs artist..it's going to be artists who can manipulate ai vs artist who don't. The outcome of that battle will be rough and uncertain.. ilaiyarajaa has spoken on deep seek based music composition topic extensively if not eloquently.

Yes, a budding or a generic artist may make use of AI . But not sure if a pure genius would want to completely and would rely on his/her own talent and capability.
AI as a tool for guidance is good but a complete product of pure talent is just great.

When one listens to some of the songs, music and lyrics of the yesteryears be it hindi, english etc, it's just pure genius.

 

[arj]

I remember a meme , which was funny but is rather true Sadly

went on the Lines of "

Opinion: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes, not my writing”​

you can add, music, paintings etc as well.

 

[Nitin K]

I remember a meme , which was funny but is rather true Sadly

went on the Lines of "

Opinion: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes, not my writing”​

you can add, music, paintings etc as well.
View attachment 89574

How true it is ! Since many at the generic level want to use AI for the usual chores to save them the time and effort.

 

[Analogous]

O

 

[Analogous]

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.“ - A line from the movie Jurassic Park

 

[arunvenkats]

Technology has always been disrupting human agency for a long time. For years it was disrupting blue collar jobs. Smarter and smarter machines have been replacing thousands of blue collar workers in industrial production lines for a long time. For a long time, technology was convenience for white collar jobs. Now with the advent of LLMs/Generative AI in the last couple of years (AI/machine learning existed for over 4 decades now) white collar jobs are at risk. Something we never imagined that would happen so quickly. Earlier non-skilled and semi-skilled humans were being replaced by machines. Now skilled humans will be replaced.

But from a pure scientific/engineering perspective, generative AI is still not "creative". It is not able to bring anything to existence from nothing. This is what we humans do. Of course the spark for an idea or composition can be inspired by prior art, but the process mostly is conjuring up stuff which never existed before. To my knowledge, this is still not possible with the state of the art AI. AI can create magic from only what it has seen before. The material it has been trained on. But music business is not music as an art. Businesses will sell music whether it was AI generated or not as long as there is an audience willing to pay for it. If they can produce music at a fraction of the cost and there are people willing to pay the same, why would they not? They have to, to remain faithful to their fiduciary duty to share holders. You might have to choose between human created (handicraft like) and mass machine manufactured fabric or artefacts. The choice will be ours. But knowing businesses, we will be white lied into listening to machine made music when the app adds suggested music intermingled with your curated playlist. BTW I think that it is a great feature for music discovery but will work against the future purists for human music.

But honestly, for casual listening, if AI can weave my favourite 80's music style into modern synthpop/retrowave pieces, I would actually use it. Just as I drive my car not thinking about how it was built with machines replacing a hundred human workers. It is unfortunate but the reality we are living in.

BTW this is just my opinion on the larger debate of AI and reality. I am awed and inspired by artists. Especially paintings, sculpture and music. I am not sure who, but they articulated this incredible statement - If Einstein or Newton was not born at all, some other genius born later probably would have discovered and articulated about gravity and the nature of space and time. But if Picasso or Van Gough were not born, humanity's culture would have been left without some masterpieces forever. That's what we will miss with the current state of the art AI. But that might change, only time will tell.

Eventually I will loose my vocation too, as a person creating software. I guess the only job which AI cannot take is the philosopher's job.

There is also misconceptions about AI. In the Illayaraja interview in this thread, he mentions "soul" of the musician into bringing the note into the physical world. AI need not render music. That is the easy part. That has been done for ages in digital music production. The real kicker is the composition. AI can compose the music. It can still be rendered by a human musician. Robots can even play real instruments given the notes. That's really not AI but robotics. Simple programming. The debate about "soul" is a slippery slope and cannot be discussed objectively.


Regards,
Arun

 

[arj]

Technology has always been disrupting human agency for a long time. For years it was disrupting blue collar jobs. Smarter and smarter machines have been replacing thousands of blue collar workers in industrial production lines for a long time. For a long time, technology was convenience for white collar jobs. Now with the advent of LLMs/Generative AI in the last couple of years (AI/machine learning existed for over 4 decades now) white collar jobs are at risk. Something we never imagined that would happen so quickly. Earlier non-skilled and semi-skilled humans were being replaced by machines. Now skilled humans will be replaced.

But from a pure scientific/engineering perspective, generative AI is still not "creative". It is not able to bring anything to existence from nothing. This is what we humans do. Of course the spark for an idea or composition can be inspired by prior art, but the process mostly is conjuring up stuff which never existed before. To my knowledge, this is still not possible with the state of the art AI. AI can create magic from only what it has seen before. The material it has been trained on. But music business is not music as an art. Businesses will sell music whether it was AI generated or not as long as there is an audience willing to pay for it. If they can produce music at a fraction of the cost and there are people willing to pay the same, why would they not? They have to, to remain faithful to their fiduciary duty to share holders. You might have to choose between human created (handicraft like) and mass machine manufactured fabric or artefacts. The choice will be ours. But knowing businesses, we will be white lied into listening to machine made music when the app adds suggested music intermingled with your curated playlist. BTW I think that it is a great feature for music discovery but will work against the future purists for human music.

But honestly, for casual listening, if AI can weave my favourite 80's music style into modern synthpop/retrowave pieces, I would actually use it. Just as I drive my car not thinking about how it was built with machines replacing a hundred human workers. It is unfortunate but the reality we are living in.

BTW this is just my opinion on the larger debate of AI and reality. I am awed and inspired by artists. Especially paintings, sculpture and music. I am not sure who, but they articulated this incredible statement - If Einstein or Newton was not born at all, some other genius born later probably would have discovered and articulated about gravity and the nature of space and time. But if Picasso or Van Gough were not born, humanity's culture would have been left without some masterpieces forever. That's what we will miss with the current state of the art AI. But that might change, only time will tell.

Eventually I will loose my vocation too, as a person creating software. I guess the only job which AI cannot take is the philosopher's job.

There is also misconceptions about AI. In the Illayaraja interview in this thread, he mentions "soul" of the musician into bringing the note into the physical world. AI need not render music. That is the easy part. That has been done for ages in digital music production. The real kicker is the composition. AI can compose the music. It can still be rendered by a human musician. Robots can even play real instruments given the notes. That's really not AI but robotics. Simple programming. The debate about "soul" is a slippery slope and cannot be discussed objectively.


Regards,
Arun

The question is do we change laws to allow for copyright laws which existed for humans to fit with music made by AI ? and if so why

OTOH, The AI of today is a great helper but why waste time and money on using it on the creative side where there are more than enough humans anyway trying to be gainfully employed, when there are areas like smarter traffic management, food management, security, education ,waste management and even health management which are struggling as Humans are not able to do a good enough job

If we take the funding and got policy related incentives out (despite them being the driver) , thats where AI can do so much good and learning from RD Burman and Micheal jacksons past music to make a new Burman Jackson music with jhankar beats.

 

[Analogous]

The question is do we change laws to allow for copyright laws which existed for humans to fit with music made by AI ? and if so why

OTOH, The AI of today is a great helper but why waste time and money on using it on the creative side where there are more than enough humans anyway trying to be gainfully employed, when there are areas like smarter traffic management, food management, security, education ,waste management and even health management which are struggling as Humans are not able to do a good enough job

If we take the funding and got policy related incentives out (despite them being the driver) , thats where AI can do so much good and learning from RD Burman and Micheal jacksons past music to make a new Burman Jackson music with jhankar beats.

Ultimately the consumer and customers will decide which they prefer. But when they are extremely difficult to tell apart….
In some ways it’s like a choice between the mass produced and branded vs boutique, hand crafted ?

 

[arunvenkats]

The question is do we change laws to allow for copyright laws which existed for humans to fit with music made by AI ? and if so why

Yes, we are heading into unknown territory. I think everyone is confused about the laws surrounding copyrights in the era of generative AI. If I were an investment consultant, I as human can read newspapers or magazines everyday to get knowledge and provide consultation at a fee for my client. But if the same material is used to train an AI model and if it provides consultation for a fee, the newspaper and magazine companies find it unacceptable use and want a share of the monetisation. This is tricky and both sides have good arguments. We need laws, including new copyright laws to set what is acceptable and what is not. Till then it is a free for all.

OTOH, The AI of today is a great helper but why waste time and money on using it on the creative side where there are more than enough humans anyway trying to be gainfully employed, when there are areas like smarter traffic management, food management, security, education ,waste management and even health management which are struggling as Humans are not able to do a good enough job

AI development requires loads of money and currently only a select few giants of the tech world have both talent and access to money to do AI research at the scale we are talking about. They create the "foundation" models around which others distil or provide services around. All of them have a long term goal of achieving AGI. Artificial General Intelligence. A hypothetical machine intelligence that can learn and perform any intellectual task that a human can. All what we are seeing now is byproducts of this journey to AGI. Whether this can ever be achieved, no one knows. But we have to assume that at some point in the medium term future this will happen. This will be the time nothing anyone does matters! BTW AGI does not target sentience. Just the ability to learn and do anything we humans can.

To be fair to these large corporations, not all the AI related products and services are bad for humans. Google/Deepmind's AlphaFold model achieved incredible success in determining protein structures. This was a near impossible task before specialised deep learning techniques. This will lead to very high quality drug discovery and possibly even customised drug treatment for cancers. Maps and navigation software has change the we travel. Lots more.

I believe what we are seeing is just the top of the iceberg. Just enough to keep us excited. There are things more disruptive which are going to come.

 

[bhooshaniyer]

The question is do we change laws to allow for copyright laws which existed for humans to fit with music made by AI ? and if so why

.

Laws apply to man - to shahrukh khan, maniratnam, ar rahman, yrf films officebearers etc. it's no excuse that ai copyright infringed and you were not aware. You are not obliged to use AI in creating if you don't want lawsuits.

Ultimately data will start getting ai shield. So i can protect my data from the prying eyes of ai models or worse tools may come up for decoying ai. Ie give false information to ai so it goes . You see, ultimately the data hygeine that exists today won't exist tomorrow- it's understandable. The next war will be like Norton antivirus people will install norton anti ai over their data. This is my original prediction in a public forum.

 

[arj]

This is quite a well understood issue and in copyright there is a very clear accountability.

If an AI engine copies, and it is caught, both the platform developer and in some cased the person who requested and distributed the content are liable as per Fair use law in the US. EU is even stricter is certifying that copyrighted material was not used and if found can have implications.

There are several cases on this today and the New York Times vs. OpenAI is an interesting one.

The issue can get murky if AI to AI learnings occur and especially if its the weights that were defined using protected materials. But with vectors, while its not easy to do, the copyright rules cover those and they are protected.

Law is applicable to a person and the persons here are the AI platform creator/curator and the user with intent to distribute.

 

[bhooshaniyer]

This is quite a well understood issue and in copyright there is a very clear accountability.

If an AI engine copies, and it is caught, both the platform developer and in some cased the person who requested and distributed the content are liable as per Fair use law in the US. EU is even stricter is certifying that copyrighted material was not used and if found can have implications.

There are several cases on this today and the New York Times vs. OpenAI is an interesting one.

The issue can get murky if AI to AI learnings occur and especially if its the weights that were defined using protected materials. But with vectors, while its not easy to do, the copyright rules cover those and they are protected.

Law is applicable to a person and the persons here are the AI platform creator/curator and the user with intent to distribute.

The precedent is in Linux and open source derivatives when used in commercial production and later found to be polluted. Then the law suit goes after the biggest link in chain not linus. I am sure ai maker and ai user both have culpability depending on who is bigger will have the lawsuits targeted at them. For example if warner brothers and some lesser known entities are involved then the lawsuits will go after wb. Anyway this is not the subject of discussion i suppose. My point is that artists and creators who call on deepseek better be prepared to get polluted music from ai

 

[Analogous]

I am wondering if people who use AI to create musical content which are close imitations of existing music be called artists and given copyright protection for their work?

And who will decide and how?