First, they came for the editors. And I was an editor, so I was fucked.

Then, they came for the designers. And I was a designer, so I was fucked.

Then, they came for the writers. And they used too many em-dashes.

Clear enough where this goes. This said, while music and language are obviously both artistic endeavours, the former is far more geared toward generative content.

Gibberish in iambic pentameter is useless, but an eight-bar hook with tried-and-true chord progressions, plus a few layers to keep things marginally interesting? And then a quick prompt for lyrics?

It's unsurprising that decades of formulaic label tripe can't be distinguished from generated music.

Three songs generated by artificial intelligence topped music charts this week, reaching the highest spots on Spotify and Billboard charts.

Walk My Walk and Livin’ on Borrowed Time by the outfit Breaking Rust topped Spotify’s “Viral 50” songs in the US, which documents the “most viral tracks right now” on a daily basis, according to the streaming service. A Dutch song, We Say No, No, No to an Asylum Center, an anti-migrant anthem by JW “Broken Veteran” that protests against the creation of new asylum centers, took the top position in Spotify’s global version of the viral chart around the same time. Breaking Rust also appeared in the top five on the global chart.

“You can kick rocks if you don’t like how I talk,” reads a lyric from Walk My Walk, a seeming double entendre challenging those opposed to AI-generated music.

Days after its ascent up the charts, the Dutch song disappeared from Spotify and YouTube, as did Broken Veteran’s other music. Spotify told the Dutch outlet NU.nl that the company had not removed the music, the owners of the song rights had. Broken Veteran told the outlet that he did not know why his music had disappeared and that he was investigating, hoping to return it soon.

A stat of note:

AI music has improved in quality from its early, clanking days. As part of its study, Deezer surveyed 9,000 people in eight countries and found that 97% could not distinguish between AI-generated music and human-written music.

all 4 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 17 points 1 year ago (1 child)

Without any info on how they compile the "Top 50 viral" list, I'm not sure how significant this really is.

Never heard of that chart before, so this feels like it was just an easy article for click farming.

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    Yeah this is all bit click bait. That broken rust song topped the digital sales charts, which is basically tracking Apple Music downloads. No one buys music anymore. They topped it with 3000 sales at a dollar each.

  • source
  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    ai music is only good for memes, messing around and trying out things humans couldn't possibly do. I can't understand why anyone would want to listen to "normal" ai music.

  • source
  • 66 comments in c/world@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 97 points 1 year ago (22 children)
  • [+] -53 points 1 year ago (20 children)

    Unless you enjoy music regardless of whether it's AI generated, in which case the future's going to have way more options.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 20 child comments
  • [–] 40 points 1 year ago (18 children)
  • [+] -6 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Human slop isn't, either. The issue is that AI slop seems to top human slop now.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] 16 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    The absolute worst human art is better than the best machine art, because art is exclusively human.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] -1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    because art is exclusively human.

    Which is a rather weak redeeming quality. I hate AI generated slop, but that does not excuse the existence of human generated slop. My argument is not "see how good AI is", but "see how much human creativity has fallen".

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [+] 0 points 11 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    If it gets topped by AI, it obviously and undeniably has.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • load more comments (-1 replies)
  • load more comments (-1 replies)
  • [+] -22 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    If 97% of listeners can't tell the difference then I'm not sure the point of quibbling the definition.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 10 child comments
  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    So you're happy that you are being sold a lie?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [+] -12 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    When you watch a movie with computer-generated special effects, are you happy watching a lie?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 14 points 11 months ago* (2 children)

    The movie doesn't pretend that the main character has really jumped from a cliff onto a ship.

    It isn't lying.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [+] -9 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    There are plenty of movies where the CGI is creating elements that could well be real, like people or buildings. There was a movie recently where rather than go through the legal hassle of having live horses on set they just CGIed every last shot that contained a horse, even if they were just standing around in the background. You've no doubt watched plenty of CGI imagery that you had no idea was CGI. It looked good, that was all.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago

    And how many times did the creators (not the marketing people) say that no CGI was used?

    I know it happened in several cases, and I try not to watch those movies.

    But others, where they are upfront about it, I think it is fair play.

    The key is ethics. Always has been.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago

    It is a question of authorship. What I don't approve of is zero effort AI slop. But the use of CGI in movies is OK because it serves the vision of the director. The usage of samples in music is OK if the use is transformative. Autotuning is pushing it but can be OK if use is limited or transformative. Even AI tools can be OK if authorship remains human. But an end-to-end pipeline of endless soulless AI generated slop is not OK. So it is very a question of degrees. AI generated/authored works should be labelled as such. Also the label should contain the degree to which AI was used. Not simply an either/or tag.

  • source
  • parent
  • load more comments (1 reply)
  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    AI music is a way to generate propaganda and spread manipulative messages for the masses in a way they won't even notice. This way they don't need to find the talent who are willing to make it, but also they can churn out songs faster. They just prompt the AI with some mean wishes and the recipe for a song people have formerly enjoyed, and the next "top hits" fall out. even if people are not looking for that shit, spotify's next song algorithm will helpfully boost them for some reason.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 55 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    You can't convince me that's not manufactured

  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 38 points 1 year ago

    “Synthetic music”, no you mean AI slop but want to keep inflating the bubble the Guardian

  • source
  • [–] 32 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    I like to not get music advice from charts. I don’t think I’ve heard AI music. I’m going to not look for it.

  • source
  • hideshow 12 child comments
  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    Spotify won't tell you that it is even if you do happen to stumble upon it.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 11 child comments
  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    Serious question: Let's say you hear a song on Spotify, and you like it, add it to your favorites, etc., then later find out it was AI. Do you stop enjoying it? If so, why?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 10 child comments
  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago

    I would. I have a difficult time separating art from the artist and couldn't currently bring myself to willingly listen to AI music. Mostly because it's a soulless conglomeration of what "good music is supposed to sound like" rather than art created by an actual human who has something to say. But to be fair, I feel the same about any pop or country hit that is churned out for the sole aim of getting a hit.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    I’d stop listening to it in simple protest. I want to hear music made by people. I have no interest in ai crap. If we keep allowing ai then the real artists will cease to exist. The young people won’t pursue a career in music. Why would they?

    F ai

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [+] -15 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    The young people won’t pursue a career in music. Why would they?

    MIDI didn't stop people from playing instruments. Digital art didn't stop people from painting. AI can't put on live performances.

    Don't get me wrong, I don't like AI taking peoples' artistic jobs any more than anyone else, but I do think this is a bit of an extreme take.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    The industry does not necessarily care if someone's music is digital or acoustic, but it WILL care if they have to pay you for it.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    And that’s the point. Ai means basically no one is getting paid. But the industry is making money.

    F ai

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    And also, the point is to delete the artist. Artists are problematic; they are anti-establishment, opinionated, queer, vocal. Your billionaire overlords want to silence that, by replacing you with a machine.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago

    It makes indie scene significantly harder to get into. For every mildly successful indie artist, there's thousands of those who failed to break into the scene, now they have to compete with not only their competitor that is more famous than them, they have to compete with 0 effort music from 0 effort producer. It kinda like how game dev is getting harder and harder to get into, as the competition is getting tougher and people expectation is getting higher, even though they don't have to compete with AI slop that plays and looks like a Ubisoft game yet.

    Of course, people who persevere or talented will eventually pops up from the sea of slop, as vocaloid doesn't kill japanese indie scene. But then vocaloid is entirely different thing than what the current AI issue is.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Note that I submitted a San Francisco Chronicle article about this yesterday. One thing that came up during the discussion is that while there may be a lot of people streaming the song on Spotify, at least according to one source, the Billboard chart that was topped was a small-volume one, so it may not be as significant as it sounds.

    https://lemmy.today/post/41573347

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 31 points 1 year ago

    Volume aside, I find Billboard charts equivalent to JD Power awards as they've always been rigged via payola schemes and the fact that nearly the entire nation's radio stations are owned by a single company iHeartRadio/Clear Channel. The music industry is picking winners and losers not the listening public.

    This may be different with streaming but that platform makes it really easy to rig the system with bots.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago

    I don't use spotify but I wonder how many plays were because the next song algorithm "decided" that these songs will now be heard by everyone.

  • source
  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    Can someone make some AI music to counter the alt right AI music?

  • source
  • hideshow 7 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    I'm sure you could, if you want.

    https://suno.com/

    https://udio.com/

    They're either using one of those or a similar service.

    I don't think that it's gonna be all that rewarding, though.

    I mean, do you really want to be trying to get in a yelling match with someone else over politics, each trying to drown the other out?

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago

    If AI generated slop raises to the top of the charts, it tells a lot about the perceived quality of the human-made slop there.

  • source
  • [–] 16 points 11 months ago

    Yes, masses like simple shit. Fast food, superhero movies and simple tunes with easy to understand lyrics.

  • source
  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago

    I wonder how many of the listeners were bots.

  • source
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Turns out a lot of people like how it sounds.

  • source
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    Also, I think the less interesting question is where it is today and more where it's going to be in, say, five years, if you figure that development continues.

    And might be possible to explore more long-tail stuff if production costs drop, or even do stuff customized to a single listener. I mean, we can't economically have humans do that.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] -1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Oh yeah? Tell me more about the long tail. Do you have a pitch deck you can show me?

    God, I fucking hate this shit.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 child)

    Do you have a pitch deck you can show me?

    What?

    The "long tail" refers to niche areas with only a few people who want something in a market. It's talking about the graph of a distribution of potential consumers for something.

    Like, there's normally a lot of people interested in a few things. You can sell a blockbuster to them. But then there's this long tail of people interested in small, niche areas. If you can bring more of them together or reduce production costs, it starts to be viable to make things for them as well. The Internet is often described as bringing people with those niche interests together, so that people on that long tail become numerous enough to make something for. Bringing down production costs has the same sort of effect.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail

    In business, the term long tail is applied to rank-size distributions or rank-frequency distributions (primarily of popularity), which often form power laws and are thus long-tailed distributions in the statistical sense. This is used to describe the retailing strategy of selling many unique items with relatively small quantities sold of each (the "long tail")—usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities (the "head").

    The long tail was popularized by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com, Apple and Yahoo! as examples of businesses applying this strategy.[7][9] Anderson elaborated the concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.

    Anderson cites research published in 2003 by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, who first used a log-linear curve on an XY graph to describe the relationship between Amazon.com sales and sales ranking. They showed that the primary value of the internet to consumers comes from releasing new sources of value by providing access to products in the long tail.[10]

    Before a long tail works, only the most popular products are generally offered. When the cost of inventory storage and distribution fall, a wide range of products become available. This can, in turn, have the effect of reducing demand for the most popular products.

    Some of the most successful Internet businesses have used the long tail as part of their business strategy. Examples include eBay (auctions), Yahoo! and Google (web search), Amazon (retail), and iTunes Store (music and podcasts), amongst the major companies, along with smaller Internet companies like Audible (audio books) and LoveFilm (video rental). These purely digital retailers also have almost no marginal cost, which is benefiting the online services, unlike physical retailers that have fixed limits on their products. The internet can still sell physical goods, but at an unlimited selection and with reviews and recommendations.[31] The internet has opened up larger territories to sell and provide its products without being confined to just the "local Markets" such as physical retailers like Target or even Walmart. With the digital and hybrid retailers there is no longer a perimeter on market demands.[32]

    You have to have at least a certain number of potential sales before it becomes worthwhile for a human to address a niche. If the cost falls, then new niches become viable to sell to. So now you can make, say, R&B aimed specifically at teenage female Inuits or something.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    Gonna stay on YouTube with my subscriptions (music) and on my CDs and Vinyls.

  • source
  • [–] -4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

    "Slop" feels like a weird description when it's something widely loved and appreciated. Like, either you mean it in the snobby "most people don't understand real art" sense, or what's not slop?

    Compare to when it's used to describe, like, one of those SEO clickbait sites, which are full of hallucinated answers to whatever you were looking for. Nobody likes that, but it's hard to shut down.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    Most people don't understand art, as most people also don't understand chess. It's important to accept that art is not something you can understand just because you like it or not, that's not the same thing; in the same way that's important to accept that a move made by a grandmaster chess player cannot be judged by someone who doesn't understand chess at a deep enough level. Science follows a similar conundrum, people don't understand even the most fundamental level of a certain field beyond their high-school knowledge and they still believe themselves capable of judging what science is.

    We, as humans, and as a society, must learn to accept our own shortcomings and take pride in not having an opinion about something that we do not understand enough. It's fine to listen and like some tunes, but that does not give you the qualifications and knowledge to judge the quality of music and art. For that, you'd have to go deeper, and then you would also become a "snob".

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    So are you an art fan who thinks 4'33" is a work of genius? Or one of the ones who thinks it's garbage? I'm almost tempted to go for visual art where these controversies are more common; musicians are actually pretty chill about it most of the time. (And I'll avoid the derogatory term if we're discussing whether it's good, as opposed to just if someone in particular is doing it)

    Scientists come to consensus, and update that consensus in sync as new discoveries are made. Art fans do not. There's also anthropology showing the existence of non-Western systems of music completely different from and alien to our own, divergences between systems within Western music history, and a long history of new kinds of music associated with minorities being deemed "wrong". Meanwhile, other people have known beauty is subjective continuously since Plato.

    All that adds up to gatekeeping art being done for essentially the same reasons people gatekeep anything.

  • source
  • parent