Kevin Macleod already shared this sentiment and published AI generated and AI assisted tracks as well.

Kind of interesting considering he’s the king of modern royalty free music.

all I care about is whether it sounds good or not

“I don’t care about anyone but me or anything except for what I want”

You sound selfish and insufferable.

I don’t think you like music. Or even understand music.

That’s ok, you don’t have to, but you do not know what you’re talking about.

Out of curiosity, can you tell me a human artist or band that you really like?

Unpopular opinion checks out.

I don’t think “this thing is good” while ignoring the before and after context is a good policy. Presumably if there were very comfortable shoes made of baby skin and manufactured by child slaves, you would not wear them. (Or maybe you would!)

That’s a very hyperbolic example, but my point remains that for everyone there is a line somewhere. For you, the AI stuff is on the acceptable side.

You can choose to ignore that and come tell me about the ethics of using AI […] just note that you’re no longer addressing what I’m actually saying here.

So, right. It’s a big thing you’re ignoring. AI probably can make competent music and, if research continues, will probably improve. But the ethics and surrounding stuff still exist. People often don’t want to just ignore that.

I listen a lot to deep house and similar kinds of music. Sometimes artists make tracks that are easily 10+ minutes long. And DJs create mixes that are hours long. Each track and mix is like a story, it has a beginning, middle and end and takes me on a journey. I feel like I’m on vacation and the DJ is my tour guide. Tickling my brain with different rhythms and instruments, here is this one, now it’s gone, here is another one, now it’s gone, here is the first one again and in comes the second one. I feel the layers of the track inside of me, letting me feel like floating in the ocean, till the drop comes and the DJ pulls me into the deep water, taking me on a ride. Till I pop out the other end and we calm down again, slowly sliding into the end of the song.

That’s what music is to me, emotion, experience. It’s one soul telling a story to another soul, using our limited communication methods. I’ve heard people who are into for example classical music describe the same thing.

But I also feel like there is a huge difference between actually listening to and enjoying music for music sake and having something on in the background while doing some construction work, or having a casual pool party/bbq or something like that. In those cases it’s usually just some random pop slop and to be fair with today’s pop music I would not be able to tell you if it’s AI generated (except for obvious tells like nonsense lyrics, but when I’m doing other stuff I might not even hear the lyrics fully). That said, I still think AI music is really really bad, I just feel modern pop music is bad as well (with notable exception obv and personal opinion is a thing, no shade on pop enjoyers)

Gross

I have a very pragmatic view on music

You’re quite self aware in your assessment, you just don’t realize that being “pragmatic” about music is like being “efficient” about sex; you’re doing it wrong.

Hey, I get it, you just have zero respect for the effort, creativity, imagination, or sacrifice that an artist has to put in to create a work thats any good. To you, art is merely a product. Who cares who made it, how it was made, or what it even means, or if there was any meaning at all.
I totally understand. I went to the store yesterday and they had this hand crafted chair made of high quality wood for sale for like $300. Fuck that! I’ll just go buy a cheap plastic piece of garbage chair pumped out by the thousands in a Chinese factory. I mean it’s just a chair, right? It has one job, who cares what it’s made of. “Quality, Shmality!” I say.
I just wish more people would understand this, like I entered this fighting game tournament last month. But I’m really ass at Street Fighter, so instead I wrote this bot that would play the game for me so I’d win with double perfect every time. Can you belive they kicked me out for cheating? CHEATING! What kind of shit is that? I just used a helpful tool to totally do all the work for me as my only contribution was giving broad parameters while the computer program makes literally every other decision. The audacity of these people! Don’t they understand this makes me a champion gamer?

i’ll take that muzak/“average radio slop” isn’t bad. but is the energy involved really worth it, to just get muzak out of it?

Ethics aside, can you not hear the noise and artifacts in the vocals? The repeptitive overuse of the same reverb? The heavy handed compression?

AI music keeps showing up in my “stations” and I have to instantly skip. It’s just awful and they cannot fix it because they trained the models with highly compressed music from Spotify and it “learned” that compression nouse artifacts are a natural part of music, so now it reproduces and exaggerates them every time.

Upvoted for unpopularity. Objectively speaking, based on the foundation of how AI models work, their output tends to the mean (average). If the music in the example is considered “good”, then objectively the standard has moved downward a lot. I’ll start with visual AI as analogous to make my point:

Various people and businesses, big and small, have decided that AI generated images fit their needed purpose. I see a few places downtown that have made their store logos AI slop. Is it objectively well drawn image? In a sense that maybe they make fewer mistakes than before, but besides that, “average” is a more objective moniker for it than “good” on a factual basis. Subjectively you can decide whether you like it, I can judge you for it but the decision is yours to make.

Back to AI genned audio, even before it became widespread, people were making Muzak for elevators, phones, commercial jingles etc. It was fit for purpose to keep you occupied in the background. AI soundtracks seem to fit that niche for you and that’s fine. It may be “good enough” for you, but it’s not “good” and I doubt will ever be if judged objectively as music.

I listened to the instrumental track, and sure it is coherent at a very basic level, but the harmonies just keep going back to the same, any semblance of a musical idea or fluorish ends or is replaced with another entirely different one within 4 bars. That’s the reason why I don’t think any song is memorable, without any fundamental changes to the underlying tech I doubt any will. AI generated songs like “We are Charlie Kirk” are memes because they are monuments to conservative tastelessness.

People will tell you not to listen to or support that, I won’t stop you but I’d agree in the sense because I think of it as supporting an industry for elevator and phone hold muzak over real musical artists, that also sucks power and water and pollutes a lot. I personally don’t care about your tastes, you can like it, but calling it “objectively good music” is an affront to art.

I think there are two suitable uses of it: generating a cover or pastiche of two unrelated artists that would never have made something (Frank Sinatra sings “Rock the Casbah”), or completely filler music. Which if the second is meeting your needs, great, but that doesn’t make it objectively good. Perhaps good for Muzak consumers to have a flourishing industry but not for music consumers.

Have you just not spent any time making a playlist of good human made songs you can put on to listen to on the background?

Your argument sounds more like you find AI reliably good at creating Muzak, but not music. I could see that argument.

I don’t think AI is definitionally capable of creating music that matters and has a soul. I don’t mean that religiously, but in the sense of imbuing sound with the expression of meaning and intent. It doesn’t have to be deep or fancy. However, art is human expression on some level. Perhaps a very collaborative version of AI could help a person accomplish that, but nothing that just spits out an entire song or section on its own.

We are not so devoid of available music (the opposite) for it to be necessary. Art is also one of the things we should have more time for if AI delivers on its promises.

There are several uses for music. For some of them, AI music like you pasted works well – like if those were playing as background music in a restaurant there’s no problem. You’re not there to listen to the music.

But if you want to really listen to the music… you usually want to listen to old songs or then something totally new and interesting. Your links were none of those. It was sophisticated elevator music.

Then again, I don’t see any reason why AI couldn’t some day be able to compose something new and interesting. A lot of the music humans create is derivative. The spigot of really new stuff has been kinda dry since the 90s it seems to me.

Lemmy showing again it can’t handle any diverging opinions on ai, and moreover completely missing the point of this community.

While I don’t personally share your opinion, I don’t fault You for it. And I certainly agree that the output is getting better, just as it is for other generative areas like images and video. There will come a time when it will be impossible to distinguish unless explicitly stated by the creator. It’s inevitable.