I've played guitar for 23 years, and there is something just off-putting about most of the music on that page, but particularly "Yellow Bus Jam".
The guitar solo sounds very unnatural, especially the phrasing, which is totally random. Blues musicians are actually attempting to say something through their instrument. This was just a random number generated solo played by a 6 finger three handed robot. No thanks, lol.
I think it has to be. It's very similar to others[1].The channel has a SoundCloud link in it's description but this song isn't there.
[1] often being 'modern song lyrics set to a historical style of music'. I don't know how to describe them exactly but they feel 'wrong', in the same way AI text is hard to critique but feels wrong.
I think we're just going to have to get used to it. That is, just drop worrying too much about whether something is AI and just stop at whether you like it or not.
This comment inspired me to click the link and listen to the song. Wow, that was terrible. It's like it had all the individual components of a fast-paced blues/rock song, but they were put together by someone who had no idea of how music actually worked.
Still makes me want to give up. I just started learning keyboard and playing with synthesizers in the last 6 months or so with the intention of making game music and it's tough to not feel like I'm wasting my time. Game devs will go with what they can afford and who can blame them? The output is not perfect, but if the GenAI can do this now, what will it sound like a year from now? Two? Really takes the wind out of the sails of us newbies.
> but if the GenAI can do this now, what will it sound like a year from now
(For reference, I'm responding with such a long post because I have a pretty unique perspective to share compared to the hacker news crowd, and also, I wish someone had told me this too, when I was a teenager.)
I heard it five years ago and hated it because it sounds like slop, I heard it today and hated it because it sounds like slop. Game devs (the ones you actually want to work for that aren't just pulling asset flips), by and large hate AI art, and gamers by and large hate it too (There's a whole movement about not using it in games lol).
On top of that, professional musicians are so, so guilty of using music libraries to produce music — Guy Michelmore on Youtube (@ThinkSpaceEducation) has a really, really good video that I can't find right now, where he demonstrates using music libraries to bootstrap a composition. It's really unlikely to be the case that if you're working as a professional musician, that you're going to be producing all of the work of a given composition (even though it is very, very valuable to do that as a beginner because it helps you learn a shitload). Finally adding to this point, there's a cottage industry of people on Youtube who spend time pulling apart world-famous songs and figuring out who they're reusing for the bassline, what bands they sample parts of the audio segments from, etc. Hell, there's a whole browsable library of this: https://www.whosampled.com/
Separately, as a burned out folk+classical musician whose friends and family went on to be nationally recognized musicians (I dropped out of the folk scene due to gender dysphoria and presentation woes lol, but one family member did tour the world playing music when i was a wee bab), music has never, ever, ever been super profitable for anyone other than the very lucky or the very, very wealthy. You are very, very lucky to break even on the amount of time you spend, let along equipment costs. Even the internationally recognized composer John Cage had his main living selling mushrooms to Michelin star restaurants. Everything else I can say about this already has a really, really good write up about this here: https://klangmag.co/lifers-dayjobbers-and-the-independently-...
So between "You're unlikely to actually make money solely off music", "Professionals rarely write the entire piece themselves and will reuse things from other artists, either from a music library, a sample bank, or making their own samples", and "There's a whole slew of game developers out there that want real, human-made music, with all the soul and artistry that that entails", I don't really see a reason why this would take the wind out of anyone's sails.
But even if all of that wasn't the case, the question is ultimately: Why are you engaging in a hobby if it not being profitable, or you not being successful, causes you to lose any motivation? Why is that the main source of motivation for you, such that the possibility of losing that motivation causes you to lose all pleasure from the wonderful, unique experience of writing, composing, and performing music? I think this comes down to like, is your motivation for making music external, or internal. Does your joy of making something come from making the thing, expressing yourself and being artistic (ultimately being human in the process, because Art seems integral to us as a species, and engaging in it is stepping into and pushing forward this wonderful, complex history of self-expression), or some ephemeral possible future reward? Ultimately, it shouldn't matter whether or not you become a professional game musician (Which, by the way, is *absolutely* doable, and a worthy *goal* to have. I really hope you succeed!!), because the motivation to express yourself through a certain medium should ideally come from the joy you doing that and learning how to do it.
Essentially, it all comes back to the age-old, often stated: do you love learning because you love the idea of having knowledge at the end of it, or because you love the process itself. Learning to love the process is always, always going to be a stronger source of motivation and will last you through times when the progress and process are incredibly difficult.
Reminds those early youtube days shredding overdub videos.. These were funny, but the Yellow Bus Jam seems just hollow and wrong. Feeling there's something from Steely Dan in that song..
Would it be physically possible to play? Yeah, probably. But it sounds terrible, and if I heard a band do it live, I would genuinely consider walking out of the venue.
Get used to it, because it's much cheaper than a musician, and to the average person "attempting to say something through their instrument" and "random number generated solo" are largely the same thing.
I'm not anti-AI, but I strongly believe the human element of music can be imitated but not fully replicated. Listening back to that song I can hear the attempt to stylistically play slightly off-beat to get the feel of a band playing without a metronome. The auditory illusion is there, but it still sounds off. Playing behind the beat is a feeling; it's not a calculation.
As a drummer keeps time, the band reacts by looking at the drummer’s hands and the sway in their posture. A drummer intensifies their playing as they respond to the feeling of air being pushed from guitar cabinets. A lead guitarist looks back at their friends and smiles when they are about to play that sweet lick that the bass player likes to play along with.
These are just simple examples that make all the difference when you listen back. I also can't imagine paying hundreds of dollars to go see an AI "perform" this solo at a concert. When I listen to music, I'm remembering the moment, the feeling, what the artist was doing to create their art. So still... no thanks!
> Get used to it, because it's much cheaper than a musician, and to the average person "attempting to say something through their instrument" and "random number generated solo" are largely the same thing.
it's okay to just say you're not that interested in music
The "Don’t Let Me Go" and "Yellow Bus Jam" examples made me laugh out loud. This kind of thing would be great for a cyberpunk game that dynamically generates a reality, with (unintentional?) faux pas and jank.
If you are an artist you could always slice, embellish, or otherwise process outputs into something so I guess it's not totally silly. But I get at best real estate video vibes, or unironic early '90s clip art and Comic Sans vibes and presumably some team of expensive marketers worked hard to select these examples, which is doubly hilarious.
As a non-music person, can confirm - if someone tried to tell me something through their instrument I would probably tell them it should have been an email.
I can generally understand that music has moods, but don’t think I could distinguish human-generated music from silicon-generated music at this point (unless I recognize a specific artist, of which there are vanishingly few I’m capable of)
I could be wrong, but I think the use case here is mainly for non-artists in domains where the music is not particularly important.
For example, a podcaster/youtuber may want a short intro track. An entertainer or a marketer may want some generic or silly background music.
Does it have a use case for a producer/musician? Maybe. It might give them ideas for chord progressions, melodies, etc. But real music does that too, and much more effectively.
It definitely has a use case for prototyping sound design, which can be either incredibly time consuming or require an awful lot of niche expensive gear. Something like playing around to get an unusual drone can take a lot of time and effort. Being able to 'describe it' and get 80%+ there is a huge win.
And if you're focused on chopping up samples and sounds on an ableton push or similar this can be a tool of endless possibilities.
Polemics about generative AI might indeed benefit from separately addressing art and entertainment. Generative AI in art is worth debating, but entertainment is not even a question: entertainment is a proven market for mass-produced slop, where artless works just fine and art is marginally valued.
Is it more or less dystopia than an army of musicians trying to eke a living out of creating stuff like this (https://www.chosic.com/free-music/presentation/) to go behind your company's PowerPoint about how its Q3 woodchip sales didn't quite exceed expectations?
Maybe the fundamental issue is that this shouldn't compete with a human picking up a guitar and having fun with it, and the only reason it does is because we keep tying questions like "survival" to whether someone can make woodchip earnings reports less boring to read instead of trying some other way to be a community?
Why does a powerpoint about woodchip sales need music? Also, I don't see how anyone is making a living on the royalty-free music you linked, unless there's some business model I'm not understanding.
Just wait until the rush of commenters that insist you’re wrong about being offended that they want to automate and commodify every aspect of your life.
Made this point elsewhere, but the music industry has been on a downward slide towards making music as cheaply as possible for some time now.
If you look at Taylor Swift's first 12 number one hits, each of them was written by a different writer. Compare that to bands from 30 years ago, many of whom wrote and recorded all the songs themselves.
Labels don't sign rock bands anymore because actually recording a rock band well in a studio is 10x the cost of just using a sampler and a single artist singing. I know folks want to blame AI, but it's really just enabling the latest iteration of this trend.
I'm not defending the whole thing. It's a shame, and I love going back and listening to my old Rush albums. But AI is not the problem here. It's the incentives.
Machine-learning for audio is just a different form of audio synthesis.
That is not the issue. The issue is how incredibly generic the music is.
It also doesn't let you combine genres to make really strange sounds like audioLM can do.
This is just another Muzak generator like they use to play at Dennys. As generic music as possible to the appeal to the most average of average listener.
I think you really need to train your own model if you want to explore creative sound design or algorithmic composition. It just isn't going to be a mass market product worth venture capital money.
The thing derpressing to me is all the energy spent making stuff I can enjoy doing or building weapons while the tech industry is still unable to solve real problems and build me a generic cleaning robot that will make my laundry, clean up my bathroom and toilets, wash the windows. All we have are shitty and useless autonomous vaccuum cleaners that get stuck at every other piece of furniture with legs or the first sock on the floor.
I asked it to "create 10secs of a rhythmical Argentine tango in the style of the golden era." (golden era of tango is 1935--1950).
What it gave me was some horrible ballroom-tango like abomination with prominent tempo, like a paso doble. The typical Ballroom tango sound that gives you ear cancer. I.e. it completely failed (Argentine tango sounds nothing like this).
P.S.: You can't mention any names btw, I asked for D'Arienzo (instead of "golden era") but it refused the prompt on copyright grounds.
It also refused for edad d'oro, with the same reasoning, i.e. it seemed to think this was an artist of some sort ("edad d'oro [de tango]" is just the Spanish name for golden era of tango -- go figure).
And re. copyright: as of 2024, all of Juan D'Arienzo's recordings from the 1940s are in the public domain in Argentina.
OT: Has anyone tried the opposite - ask AI to listen to music and determine the notes or chords being played? Or watch someone playing an instrument and give a textual output of what notes/chords they are playing.
I did this for my graduate capstone (https://www.deepjams.com/)
We extracted chord progressions from existing music you would upload and then riffed based on those chords. there are open source libraries for this.
I think these are all using old machine learning techniques and not the modern transformer based architectures that underlie LLMs. These tools won't be able to match the abilities of an expert musician replicating a song by listening to a live recording of it. Check this video channel where they ask professional drummers to replicate a song after only one listen [1].
I use https://moises.ai/ multiple times a week for practicing / figuring out chords being played. For the notes (say in a guitar riff), I dont know if such a thing exists
I would love this! There's a song I like by a band that broke up in 2013 and I am transcribing it by watching a live performance they did and trying my best but realizing I'm trying to take a mandolin/guitar and put it to acoustic. Even just being able to do a similar rendition would be nice by telling the AI "hey, do a twist on this and give me the chords/tabs".
I'm very interested in this too. We're beginning to see models that can deeply understand a single image, or an audio recording of human speech, but I haven't seen any models that can deeply understand music. I would love to see an AI system that can iteratively explore musical ideas the same way Claude Code can iterate on code.
Reminds me of an example in a similar direction, where AI was used for audio processing to filter out everything except a person's voice. If I remember right, it was able to focus on different people in a crowded room. It might have been also for music, to pick out an instrument and listen to it, filtering out the rest of the band.
There are several tools that do this already - AnthemScore, Spleeter, CREPE, and even Google's AudioLM can transcribe music to MIDI with varying accuracy depending on instrument complexity and audio quality.
It's not as lucrative. For human produced songs you can usually get the sheet music for them. If not, musicians can listen and do it manually, but it's not common enough to need AI to do it. Just transcribing for one instrument isn't that useful for many cases. Often they need an arrangement for multiple instruments, and depending on which instruments, the key may need to be transcribed. This is mostly referring to classical music and traditional western songs.
LLMs can do this well, though, and there are such. They weren't calling themselves AI when I last looked a couple of years ago, but I'll bet any of them looking for VC money have rebranded since.
I really hope we move on from these boil-the-ocean models. I want something more collaborative and even iterative.
I was having a conversation with a former bandmate. He was talking about a bunch of songs he is working on. He can play guitar, a bit of bass and can sing. That leaves drums. He wants a model where he can upload a demo and it either returns a stem for a drum track or just combines his demo with some drums.
Right now these models are more like slot machines than tools. If you have the money and the time/patience, perhaps you can do something with it. But I am looking forward to when we start getting collaborative, interactive and iterative models.
Most VST drum sequencers have pretty powerful groove libraries nowadays. It's not a model or anything like that but just mix-matching and modifying the patterns some give extremely good results
do you have a point of view of this type of collaborative approach applied to other areas, for example, collective understanding for groups of people? We are working on something in that space.
The amount I have to say on this topic would be inappropriate for a Hacker News comment. But some brief and unstructured thoughts I can offer.
For collaboration I believe that _lineage_ is important. Not just a one-shot output artifact but a series of outputs connected in some kind of connected graph. It is the difference between a single intervention/change vs. a _process_. This provides a record which can act as an audit trail. In this "lineage" as I would call it, there are conversations with LLMs (prompts + context) and there are outputs.
Let's imagine the original topic, audio, with the understanding that the abstract idea could apply to anything (including mental health). I have a conversation with an LLM about some melodic ideas and the output is a score. I take the score and add it as context to a new conversation with an LLM and the output is a demo. I take the demo and the score then add it to a new conversation with an LLM and the output is a rhythm section. etc.
What we are describing here is an evolving _process_ of collaboration. We change our view from "I did this one thing, here is the result" to "I am _doing_ this set of things over time".
The output of that "doing" is literally a graph. You have multiple inputs to each node (conversation/context) which can be traced back to initial "seed" elements.
From a collaborative perspective, each node in this graph is somewhat independent. One person can create the score. Another person can take the score and create a demo. etc.
I haven't used the virtual drummer feature of GarageBand recently, but my experience with it was pretty disappointing. The output sounds very midi or like the most basic loops.
I believe there is massive room for improvement over what is currently available.
However, my larger point isn't "I want to do this one particular thing" and rather: I wish the music model companies would divert some attention away from "prompt a complete song in one shot" and towards "provide tools to iteratively improve songs in collaboration with a musician/producer".
We imagined a utopian future where robots did our menial work so we were free to be creative. Instead we got a dystopian future where we do more and more menial work so our robots can poorly emulate creativity. It's not too late to turn it around, but that requires recognizing the humanity of 99.9% of people, and the 0.1% who own everything would rather create their own synthetic (subservient) humans than recognize the basic rights of the ones that already exist (and can make fun of them on Twitter).
They said the same thing about automation when the Industrial Revolution began a century or so ago. That the common worker would be liberated from the drudgery of labor and be free for creative and intellectual pursuits. The people who protested were ridiculed as Luddites who simply feared technology and progress.
Of course, because automation serves the interests of capital (being created by, and invested in, by the capitalist class,) the end result was just that workers worked more, and more often, and got paid less, and the capitalist class captured the extra value. The Luddites were right about everything.
I don't know why people expect the automation of intellect and creativity to be any different. Working at a keyboard instead of on a factory floor doesn't exempt you from the incentives of capitalism.
> I don't know why people expect the automation of intellect and creativity to be any different. Working at a keyboard instead of on a factory floor doesn't exempt you from the incentives of capitalism.
people are, unfortunately, and collectively, not ready to seriously interrogate the economic or political situations in which we find ourselves. we will never see the utopian promise of automation under capitalism. there will always be an underclass to exploit.
I hate to beat up on this because I agree with the spirit of it. But I think this is a little too cliche for my taste:
> that requires recognizing the humanity of 99.9% of people
I will go as far as to say there was never a time in history when people got rights because some other group “recognized the humanity in them” or something. No, it was through necessity. The plague in Europe caused a shortage of workers and brought an end to feudalism. Unions got us Saturdays off through collective action. The post-war boom and middle class prosperity happened because employers had no other options. Software engineering was lucrative because there was a shortage of supply.
Even if there is some future where robots do chores, that’ll only leave time for more work, not poetry writing time, unless there is a fundamental change in how the economy is structured, like I outlined above.
I've been using Suno for a relatively short time, and I regret to say this isn't close yet. Maybe beyond v1, but the quality I've become accustomed to, in stereo, and at relatively high fidelity (sounds a bit like over-compressed MP3s at times) makes this sound a few years old.
Readit News
The guitar solo sounds very unnatural, especially the phrasing, which is totally random. Blues musicians are actually attempting to say something through their instrument. This was just a random number generated solo played by a 6 finger three handed robot. No thanks, lol.
I have no proof but I'm convinced that the song here is AI made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL1Fg1QnDig
I liked it but it still feels like AI to me.
[1] often being 'modern song lyrics set to a historical style of music'. I don't know how to describe them exactly but they feel 'wrong', in the same way AI text is hard to critique but feels wrong.
And those guitar solos were terrible.
I'm actually a little excited to see what happens.
(For reference, I'm responding with such a long post because I have a pretty unique perspective to share compared to the hacker news crowd, and also, I wish someone had told me this too, when I was a teenager.)
I heard it five years ago and hated it because it sounds like slop, I heard it today and hated it because it sounds like slop. Game devs (the ones you actually want to work for that aren't just pulling asset flips), by and large hate AI art, and gamers by and large hate it too (There's a whole movement about not using it in games lol).
On top of that, professional musicians are so, so guilty of using music libraries to produce music — Guy Michelmore on Youtube (@ThinkSpaceEducation) has a really, really good video that I can't find right now, where he demonstrates using music libraries to bootstrap a composition. It's really unlikely to be the case that if you're working as a professional musician, that you're going to be producing all of the work of a given composition (even though it is very, very valuable to do that as a beginner because it helps you learn a shitload). Finally adding to this point, there's a cottage industry of people on Youtube who spend time pulling apart world-famous songs and figuring out who they're reusing for the bassline, what bands they sample parts of the audio segments from, etc. Hell, there's a whole browsable library of this: https://www.whosampled.com/
Separately, as a burned out folk+classical musician whose friends and family went on to be nationally recognized musicians (I dropped out of the folk scene due to gender dysphoria and presentation woes lol, but one family member did tour the world playing music when i was a wee bab), music has never, ever, ever been super profitable for anyone other than the very lucky or the very, very wealthy. You are very, very lucky to break even on the amount of time you spend, let along equipment costs. Even the internationally recognized composer John Cage had his main living selling mushrooms to Michelin star restaurants. Everything else I can say about this already has a really, really good write up about this here: https://klangmag.co/lifers-dayjobbers-and-the-independently-...
So between "You're unlikely to actually make money solely off music", "Professionals rarely write the entire piece themselves and will reuse things from other artists, either from a music library, a sample bank, or making their own samples", and "There's a whole slew of game developers out there that want real, human-made music, with all the soul and artistry that that entails", I don't really see a reason why this would take the wind out of anyone's sails.
But even if all of that wasn't the case, the question is ultimately: Why are you engaging in a hobby if it not being profitable, or you not being successful, causes you to lose any motivation? Why is that the main source of motivation for you, such that the possibility of losing that motivation causes you to lose all pleasure from the wonderful, unique experience of writing, composing, and performing music? I think this comes down to like, is your motivation for making music external, or internal. Does your joy of making something come from making the thing, expressing yourself and being artistic (ultimately being human in the process, because Art seems integral to us as a species, and engaging in it is stepping into and pushing forward this wonderful, complex history of self-expression), or some ephemeral possible future reward? Ultimately, it shouldn't matter whether or not you become a professional game musician (Which, by the way, is *absolutely* doable, and a worthy *goal* to have. I really hope you succeed!!), because the motivation to express yourself through a certain medium should ideally come from the joy you doing that and learning how to do it.
Essentially, it all comes back to the age-old, often stated: do you love learning because you love the idea of having knowledge at the end of it, or because you love the process itself. Learning to love the process is always, always going to be a stronger source of motivation and will last you through times when the progress and process are incredibly difficult.
The solo was pretty funny though.
I would've believed he's real, just passionate about music on his big yellow bus.
Dead Comment
As a drummer keeps time, the band reacts by looking at the drummer’s hands and the sway in their posture. A drummer intensifies their playing as they respond to the feeling of air being pushed from guitar cabinets. A lead guitarist looks back at their friends and smiles when they are about to play that sweet lick that the bass player likes to play along with.
These are just simple examples that make all the difference when you listen back. I also can't imagine paying hundreds of dollars to go see an AI "perform" this solo at a concert. When I listen to music, I'm remembering the moment, the feeling, what the artist was doing to create their art. So still... no thanks!
it's okay to just say you're not that interested in music
If you are an artist you could always slice, embellish, or otherwise process outputs into something so I guess it's not totally silly. But I get at best real estate video vibes, or unironic early '90s clip art and Comic Sans vibes and presumably some team of expensive marketers worked hard to select these examples, which is doubly hilarious.
I can generally understand that music has moods, but don’t think I could distinguish human-generated music from silicon-generated music at this point (unless I recognize a specific artist, of which there are vanishingly few I’m capable of)
For example, a podcaster/youtuber may want a short intro track. An entertainer or a marketer may want some generic or silly background music.
Does it have a use case for a producer/musician? Maybe. It might give them ideas for chord progressions, melodies, etc. But real music does that too, and much more effectively.
And if you're focused on chopping up samples and sounds on an ableton push or similar this can be a tool of endless possibilities.
But most studio-bunnies already have memorised catalogues of sample libraries like Omnisphere for that
Maybe the fundamental issue is that this shouldn't compete with a human picking up a guitar and having fun with it, and the only reason it does is because we keep tying questions like "survival" to whether someone can make woodchip earnings reports less boring to read instead of trying some other way to be a community?
If you look at Taylor Swift's first 12 number one hits, each of them was written by a different writer. Compare that to bands from 30 years ago, many of whom wrote and recorded all the songs themselves.
Labels don't sign rock bands anymore because actually recording a rock band well in a studio is 10x the cost of just using a sampler and a single artist singing. I know folks want to blame AI, but it's really just enabling the latest iteration of this trend.
I'm not defending the whole thing. It's a shame, and I love going back and listening to my old Rush albums. But AI is not the problem here. It's the incentives.
That is not the issue. The issue is how incredibly generic the music is.
It also doesn't let you combine genres to make really strange sounds like audioLM can do.
This is just another Muzak generator like they use to play at Dennys. As generic music as possible to the appeal to the most average of average listener.
I think you really need to train your own model if you want to explore creative sound design or algorithmic composition. It just isn't going to be a mass market product worth venture capital money.
visionary!
What it gave me was some horrible ballroom-tango like abomination with prominent tempo, like a paso doble. The typical Ballroom tango sound that gives you ear cancer. I.e. it completely failed (Argentine tango sounds nothing like this).
P.S.: You can't mention any names btw, I asked for D'Arienzo (instead of "golden era") but it refused the prompt on copyright grounds.
It also refused for edad d'oro, with the same reasoning, i.e. it seemed to think this was an artist of some sort ("edad d'oro [de tango]" is just the Spanish name for golden era of tango -- go figure).
And re. copyright: as of 2024, all of Juan D'Arienzo's recordings from the 1940s are in the public domain in Argentina.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=drummer+replica...
I was having a conversation with a former bandmate. He was talking about a bunch of songs he is working on. He can play guitar, a bit of bass and can sing. That leaves drums. He wants a model where he can upload a demo and it either returns a stem for a drum track or just combines his demo with some drums.
Right now these models are more like slot machines than tools. If you have the money and the time/patience, perhaps you can do something with it. But I am looking forward to when we start getting collaborative, interactive and iterative models.
Currently, all these AI tools generate the whole song which I'm not at all interested in given songwriting is so much fun
For collaboration I believe that _lineage_ is important. Not just a one-shot output artifact but a series of outputs connected in some kind of connected graph. It is the difference between a single intervention/change vs. a _process_. This provides a record which can act as an audit trail. In this "lineage" as I would call it, there are conversations with LLMs (prompts + context) and there are outputs.
Let's imagine the original topic, audio, with the understanding that the abstract idea could apply to anything (including mental health). I have a conversation with an LLM about some melodic ideas and the output is a score. I take the score and add it as context to a new conversation with an LLM and the output is a demo. I take the demo and the score then add it to a new conversation with an LLM and the output is a rhythm section. etc.
What we are describing here is an evolving _process_ of collaboration. We change our view from "I did this one thing, here is the result" to "I am _doing_ this set of things over time".
The output of that "doing" is literally a graph. You have multiple inputs to each node (conversation/context) which can be traced back to initial "seed" elements.
From a collaborative perspective, each node in this graph is somewhat independent. One person can create the score. Another person can take the score and create a demo. etc.
I believe there is massive room for improvement over what is currently available.
However, my larger point isn't "I want to do this one particular thing" and rather: I wish the music model companies would divert some attention away from "prompt a complete song in one shot" and towards "provide tools to iteratively improve songs in collaboration with a musician/producer".
Of course, because automation serves the interests of capital (being created by, and invested in, by the capitalist class,) the end result was just that workers worked more, and more often, and got paid less, and the capitalist class captured the extra value. The Luddites were right about everything.
I don't know why people expect the automation of intellect and creativity to be any different. Working at a keyboard instead of on a factory floor doesn't exempt you from the incentives of capitalism.
people are, unfortunately, and collectively, not ready to seriously interrogate the economic or political situations in which we find ourselves. we will never see the utopian promise of automation under capitalism. there will always be an underclass to exploit.
> that requires recognizing the humanity of 99.9% of people
I will go as far as to say there was never a time in history when people got rights because some other group “recognized the humanity in them” or something. No, it was through necessity. The plague in Europe caused a shortage of workers and brought an end to feudalism. Unions got us Saturdays off through collective action. The post-war boom and middle class prosperity happened because employers had no other options. Software engineering was lucrative because there was a shortage of supply.
Even if there is some future where robots do chores, that’ll only leave time for more work, not poetry writing time, unless there is a fundamental change in how the economy is structured, like I outlined above.
But it's the fun thing about being humans, I suppose. Our insatiable greed means we demand endlessly more.