If you manage to curate a large enough collection of AI-generated playlists, would you consider putting it on Kaggle? This way, others could use it to train AI models to automatically detect AI-generated music.
We did something similar by sharing a dataset of around 7,000 AI-generated fake podcasts on Kaggle:
These strike me as momentary throes from a technological/cultural realignment.
Back in the day there were tons of people who were totally opposed to the rising genre of "electronic" music. Today you couldn't call electronic music "not music" without drawing the ire of lots of people.
In the same vein, people opposed the internet, digital drawing tablets, digital cameras.
AI is interesting because it can be use to "just prompt", and those outputs can't be called art. But actual artists are using the technology as just another tool to accomplish even bigger things:
Of course AI will still be used for slop and fan fiction, and people will endlessly try to fix Star Wars and Game of Thrones [1]. But that shouldn't be used to detract from the medium, because there will be an abundance of people doing amazing work that stands on its own legs.
When doing an image search there are times you specifically don't want AI images, ever, period. If I search the name of a real artist I want to see their their works, not a diffusion models half-remembered knock-off of their style. If I'm looking for reference photos then I want reference photos, not synthesized images which resemble photos but may or may not reflect reality. If I'm looking for historical photos then no, a generated image vaguely drawing on the stereotypical vibes of that era isn't going to cut it.
This is a temporary problem that the market will solve for. Either the search companies will fix their algorithms, or curated websites and platforms will arise.
One way or another, this bug will be fixed in time.
>Today you couldn't call electronic music "not music"
I'm not sure anyone is calling AI music "not music." It's just so far a bit rubbish. It mostly gets called AI slop which is kind of fair.
Maybe we'll get a Donna Summer - I Feel Love moment but I don't think it's arrived yet. I Feel Love was probably the first big electronic music hit and did stuff you couldn't do with regular instruments.
There's always resistance to new genres of music. Rock'n'roll was considered evil, a bad influence on children, by the establishment of its day. People didn't like electronic music because they thought it wasn't creative enough, and that it was just "noise".
AI generated music -- at least the current iteration of it -- is different. For the most part it's created in order to flood platforms with low-effort content in order to win advertising dollars. It's spam, plain and simple.
I'm not saying that all AI generated music is spam, or that it won't turn into an art form that people appreciate. But right now, the majority of it is not the result of creative endeavor. EDM and other new genres didn't really go through this initial spam period.
> since then, i really started to notice that my youtube recommendations have been colonized to a very large degree by mixes made entirely out of AI generated music
Turn off your YT watch history and search history. I've advocated for this on HN for years. Watching one or two AI slop videos won't ruin your recommendations, leaving the algorithm to rely on your likes to find you stuff you'd want to watch.
Now if only YT could fix search and allow me to block Shorts.
Those are a cancer on YouTube, they don't offer any way to disable the shit. And on mobile it's even worse, there is a dedicated tab button you can't hide, even if you are a paying customer no way to avoid it.
This isn't even really about the merits of AI music as a whole, it's about the vast majority of these channels being the music equivalent of blogspam. They're not even trying to do anything interesting with the medium, they exist purely to extract ad revenue by mass producing SEO-optimized content slurry.
I picked out a few random channels from this blocklist and some of them are posting new 2-3 hour compilations every day. The person running the channel is probably barely even listening to the tracks before before uploading them, assuming they're listened to at all, the whole process could well be completely automated.
>it's about the vast majority of these channels being the music equivalent of blogspam. They're not even trying to do anything interesting with the medium, they exist purely to extract ad revenue
Honestly, you could say the same about Marvel movies made by humans.
> They're not even trying to do anything interesting with the medium, they exist purely to extract ad revenue by mass producing SEO optimized content slurry.
This sad situation was caused by internet. It made it possible for us to have unlimited art, writing and video to "consume" so any new work has to compete with a backcatalog spanning decades. This makes royalty revenues tank, so creatives moved to ad based revenue. This caused the attention scarcity situation where we are right now, and enshittification is the outcome. It all started long ago when AI wasn't even a blip.
But fortunately AI can clean up web content, so I hope we can distill the good parts and get high quality back. But I don't expect Google or Meta or X to do it for us. We need to power this revolution with local models.
You also didn't have "sampler music". People did creative things with samplers but people didn't seek out music based on the sampler.
As mentioned, current AI music is listening to recordings of Muzak like what they use to play in elevators and at Dennys.
I would say the progress in AI music is basically non-existent. Ironically, MusicLM can make some very unique and interesting sample material. The more popular models though are just slop.
I run a christmas channel with legit music (almost 3 mil subs) and the entire music scene on YouTube is run by bot networks out of vietnam with YouTube’s knowledge
Same, though by surprise. I've been generating a very specific uncommon genre of music on Suno (a sort of Slavic accordion drum'n'bass - a totally random idea I had one day) and found myself listening to it more than I anticipated. I dislike most of Suno's vocal output but the instrumentals can be quite good especially in unusual fusions of genres.
Largely no, but I did upload one of the very first ones I generated at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP5eOdyRhYw – For some reason I find this sort of thing good background music, though suspect most would not!
I quite like music with uncommon modes and weird scales and Suno isn't too bad at emulating this - especially with Arabic music (e.g. "swirling dramatic orchestral arabic music with oud guitar" will yield many good, if stereotypical, results). I'm not familiar enough with traditional regional music to pick out all the flaws so it works for me, but a "local" would probably say it sounds unrealistic in the same way that Suno-generated typical Western pop and rock sounds off to my ears.
That's interesting, but my brain can't stop thinking that it's impossible to play the instrument that fast and precisely. Plus, it clearly feels somehow that it was created to mimic the actual live performance of some sort. I guess this "suspension of disbelief" kind of thing is easy for some, but triggers something deeply unpleasant for others.
Oh, there's real music that's as scatty and uptempo as this from the region! My gateway to it was encountering a Romanian/Serbian musician called Benny Sarbu on YouTube who plays really fast accordion and synth pieces like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plmVGVUFUJw .. his sound basically inspired my prompting. I wanted something that sounded like what he's playing but with drums.
The beginning of a new kind of discrimination - call it 'synthetic racism.' AI-generated music is being dismissed outright even before listening to it, not based on quality or enjoyment but purely on its artificial origin. Just as past prejudices dismissed art based on heritage rather than merit, we're now seeing a new bias against anything not 'human-made.'
Art is an emotional experience. Sometimes people enjoy art because it elicits an emotion in them. And sometimes they enjoy art because of the emotional effort that went into it from the creator.
It’s the same reason some people don’t like generic pop music due to its formulaic commercialism.
So if people are discriminating AI art because they want to experience the emotions that the authors put into the pieces, then I’m ok with that right up until it can be argued that AI experiences emotions.
Humans are not the center of the universe. There is nothing intrinsically magical in being a human. Humans don't have soul. We were not created in "God"'s image. We are not special. We are just like other animals and continuously evolving. AI is just the next step in the evolution.
All the emotion serve as a shortcut for behaviors that make evolutionary sense.
Things suck before they get better and then keep on getting better.
100% atheist here. Humans are the center of my universe, and humans are special to me. I'm team human. I don't care if AI is the next step in the evolution, I would absolutely kill it if necessary to save humanity.
You may get most of that by prompting. You can create really based or emotional characters even with “aligned” models (with a little realignment). Have you ever talked to an LLM that allows system prompting? Heard of [E]RP? You can even teach them to not produce idiotic bullet points.
I won’t argument on the art part, but these common AI stereotypes are not true.
The AI does not possess those attributes. It’s behaving as told. It has no experience. It has no senses. It has no thoughts or ability to reason. It has no motivation.
Could we not - for the sake of argument here - surmise that, since these AIs need prompts, and usually a few rounds of refinement, and then a selection for uploading to (in this case) YouTube, that the -human- in charge of prompting/refinement/uploading has a point of view, an opinion, an aesthetic preference, emotions?
After all, there are artists that collate "samples" from other artists and produce music from all those different samples. They did not play any instrument, they merely arranged and modified these samples into a product that they presumably find pleasing.
The only way we can make that assumption is if the -human- makes it obvious. Tell me the people mass producing AI slop for YouTube/Spotify are approaching this with sincere intent.
It’s not even told, it continues a text (or denoises an image) in a way that closely resembles what was in the training data. Experience, senses, thoughts, reasoning and motivation were all there in original human- and nature-produced data. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43003186
Doesn’t mean the result is ideal, far from that. But your “bullet points” imply some specialness which has to be explained. Personally I don’t love the style of refusal you’re demonstrating, because it’s similar to if you know you know and other self-referential nonsense. At least add some becauses into your arguments, because “it has no X” is a simplification far below the level of usefulness here.
Anyway, how does that prevent creating AI personas again?
Here is where you are wrong. The AI art is built on even more "art consciousness" than any one of us has ever seen. It's a mirror reflection of our own culture, and we should respect it as such.
But you say there is no one there, just a model? No, there is someone. There is a real flesh and blood human prompting the model. It's the result of many iteration cycles. At the very least it has some meaning for the prompter.
It’s ridiculous that YouTube doesn’t allow blocking of channels. I find the prevalence of fake movie trailers to be absolutely infuriating, and I do not understand why YouTube and the IP holders don’t nuke those channels, or at least let people block them!
YouTube fundamentally does not respect the time or attention of users - even if you pay for YouTube Premium.
The only way I can stomach YT at this point is with blocktube and unhook; I can disable parts of the interface, block channels and content individually or with regular expressions, and filter comments with regex - a necessity given how many scams are being run right now.
I dread the day they drop RSS feeds for channel updates.
It's always interesting to see how people use a site entirely differently from myself. I've only used YouTube to find a specific song/artist, so the only search result I'd click on is what I was looking for. From there, the recommendations are surprisingly decent. Do you usually search for a genre or something?
Yeah, nothing makes me go to YouTube Music. Usually, if I'm listening to music on YouTube, it's because a YouTube video of a song came up in a search. If I was on YouTube already, then I had just used the search bar there. If I wasn't, the search engine wouldn't send me to YouTube Music. For music in general, I just use Spotify.
I can't be that weird about using music on YouTube rather than YouTube Music, the post shows someone doing the same thing.
Why nuke them when you can "divert" the revenue and enjoy free work, free eyeballs on your IP and so on? This is a "problem" that has been solved by the music industry. They leave every song with shitty lyrics on top but get the ad revenues via the tagging systems that Google implemengted. (agree with you that you should absolutely be able to ban channels)
I find this medium is one of the best to showcase what people _can_ do with AI, because it requires manual integration of so many different techniques and inputs.
When more real artists start doing this (and fewer early adopters / hypesters), the future is going to be explosively indie. A Cambrian explosion that will cater to the long tail of super niche interests. I'm all for it. Less boxed Disney/Marvel/Star Wars spam, and more super edgy and innovative drama and fantasy.
Hollywood hasn't really given us much good sci-fi or fantasy. Now all of the world's creatives can start visually articulating their ideas.
A good set of analogs to predicatively compare this to might be the overwhelming number of amazing YouTube creators, or indie game designers. That's what will happen with "AI" art.
"AI" art is 99.9% of the time ephemeral art, see it once and throw it away. Who's got the time to see my AI art shit when they could be generating their own? It's more of a personal exploration tool, closer to imagination than to publishing.
Most digital photos are garbage, too. It doesn't discount the medium or the technology.
Perhaps you're not a part of the growing community that spends entire weekends making a singular "AI" art pieces. It's a growing creative medium, and the things being created can't simply be "prompted".
You might generate a photo of a consistent character, pose them using DwPose / 3D IK, extract them, comp them into another scene. Do the same for two other characters and a prop. Then use that composition as a single shot from a shot list for your AI film. Animate it, then rinse and repeat for a few hundred shots. After the shot list is complete, record the lines, capture facial performances, fix the errors, fix lighting, upscale, and publish. Easily a week of work for one person.
AI can be used in workflows by actual artists. It's a tool.
Unfortunately it is a tool that is also used to generate a lot of content for the sake of views capture. For this to work it needs to be created with lowest effort possible. As a result the bulk of AI stuff I have seen so far was not worth my time to consume it or the hardware cycles to generate it.
I wish literally any mainstream music discovery service (my sample size: youtube and Spotify) would let you block specific artists and genres from discover queue and searches.
Why "awful"? In what is different AI generated music and organic, free range, supposedly human made one? I mean, how do you tell what percent of today's commercial music has been generated more with a calculator than through inspiration or whatever?
In the end, made by inspiration or by some algorithm, following patterns, marketing studies or whatever, by AI or not (if there are cases you can tell), what matters is your experience.
For many people, the human factor is the most important point. I'm not against AI music if it was as good as human music (it still very much is not for anything that's not extraordinarily generic and mainstream, or free form jazz), but many people see most arts as a conversation, not just consumption.
But the conversation part is something happening only in your side. Music, books, a good part of modern media seem to be done because the algorithms said that it will be sold more than someone having the intention of having a conversation with you.
And then the AIs are making something that, from your point of view, are indistinguishable from whatever happened before. What makes it more or less real than what was already happening, from your side?
I'm not against AI music. From my point of view, perception is everything, and it's all relative to one's point of view. I do understand, though, that for some people, the whole point is to gain a real understanding and connection to another real human's feelings and insight. I can't really fault somebody for considering art to be about more than the end result, and feeling that it's empty without the process.
Also, I do feel at my core that creation is superior to consumption, so even though I'm not bothered by AI output (even as a musician and an artist), I have a feeling of respect and admiration for those who create that I simply do not feel for people who type a request into a prompt. Effort and work for a goal are respectable.
The ends do not always justify the means, and even if the end result is identical, there is a greater implication on what it means to be an artist, and possibly many negative (and positive) externalities as a result of being able to get the same results with little effort. The art is identical, but the effect on humans is not necessarily. We are changed by the journey, both the artist and consumer. The actual effects of short circuiting the journey isn't something we can fully appreciate until we've had generations of humans who have lived with this. It might be a good thing, but it's not guaranteed that it won't be potentially more negative than positive in the long run. I'm optimistic, but I think it's foolish to not be cautious and skeptical about potential side effects.
We did something similar by sharing a dataset of around 7,000 AI-generated fake podcasts on Kaggle:
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fak...