How do you think AI will affect this industry?

I believe AI will have a big impact and I'm scared and not very optimistic. At least from a musician's and audio engineer's point of view. A Donald Fagen line comes to mind.. "A just machine to make big decisions/Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision/We'll be clean when their work is done/We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young"

Another aspect is the regrowth of new musicians. Especially in classical there has been a bad trend for some years. It's becoming harder and harder for the symphonic orchestras to find/employ musicians that are up to given standards. Many say that in this digital age it's hard to motivate kids to practice for years to learn an instrument. I don't believe AI will change that, most probably the opposite.

I'm not really worried about the average person using AI. I'm worried about how it will get capitalized on by big corporations and popular music will become even more bland and formulaic. Mastering engineers will probably be the first ones to lose out imo, but the great ones will always be needed. I'm not one to prophesize though, I just hope it makes people more creative and smart, not the opposite.

I wish I could be as optimistic as some of you here, I really do. But after listening to a few podcasts with top AI Engineers saying that they literally don’t know how the AI’s work…that they just program the conditions of the AI to operate and then wait to see what the output is…well, it’s rather frightening to me.

A few years ago AI couldn’t write any songs at all, now we have some mediocre songs that are still better than half the bedroom “producers” out there. Maybe that’s a low bar…but exponential growth is exponential growth. In my mind the question is not “if” AI will be to replace us all (AE’s, songwriters, musicians etc) it’s simple a matter of “when”.

The only thing that really keeps me from worrying about it is the realization that impact on society as a whole will be orders of magnitude greater than anything that happens to our small industry. That’s what really keeps me up at night.

I was listening to a broadcast about how kids are now growing up with "full service" cell phones with the internet, social media, etc. at young ages. The prior generation usually only had phones for phone calls and texting. But the young ones now use the cell phone for everything - instagram, tik tok - news, etc. They are bonding to non-humans. Instead of playtime with kids outside, it is about more insular high tech. And the "likes" are used for addicition and ego catering. This is leaving to a vast emptiness as ego chasing does not lead to "filling up." There is no more patience. So, many kids today are having mental health issues.

So, what does this mean about AI and music? I suppose these kids will grow up not caring about whether the music is made by human beings!

And yes, Eric - I see that modeling expanding. Just like modeling different hardware, now the modeling will be for iconic people. By the way, there are already choir libraries with different consonants, etc. so one can make a choir sing lines without recording an actual choir. The idea this will lead to solists as well is likely.

I live close to the Southwest, where one can see ancient "ruins" showing past people that appear to have a high degree of spiritual awareness, but not very technologically advanced - as the stone age ended here last on the planet I believe. How much porno or violence between humans are on those petroglyphs? Almost none.

But the ancient ruins of today's world will show humans with great technological advancement and demented spirituality if any. Violence is celebrated today in video games, etc. Even wolves generally do not kill for sport.

Where is the Bob Dylan of today?  (Who is shaking these windows and rattling these walls?) Who is raging against this commercial demise of our internal core?

I strongly am in the camp that "Art is a hammer," not just a mirror.  It is time for some real hammering.

Addendum:  I am not really pessimistic.  I just think it is wise to see the benefits and dangers of new technologies.  New activists will arise.  And I do believe there is a spiritual revolution is lying ahead.  Perhaps we just need to "bottom out" first.

Check out these headlines from the latest articles:


AI GETS BUSY HELPING RESEARCHERS CREATE THE FIRST SYNTHETIC BLOOD PLASMA

WALMART’S SUPPLIERS WOULD RATHER NEGOTIATE WITH AI THAN A HUMAN

THIS NEW AI TOOL FROM HEYGEN DUBS YOUR VOICE IN SEVEN LANGUAGES

IN BIZZARE TWIST SCAMMERS ARE SCAMMING SCAMMERS WITH SCAM GPT’S

THE FIRST 247 AI NEWS CHANNEL FINALLY GOES LIVE

IN A FIRST A HACKER IS DEMANDING FULL CONTROL OF A MAJOR COMPANY


There was more stuff. An Ultrasound printer printing organs inside a body. Researchers at Indiana U connected a sort of artificial cortex made from brain cells to a chip packed with electrodes and it could learn. Even beating AI at solving certain math problems. It's called Brainoware. It's looking like we're getting closer to being able to augment ourselves with cybernetics and other things to vastly increase our own abilities. There's just so much going on with emerging exponential tech. It's all connected, so it's tough to look at something like AI and think about it in solely in terms of music. Just because that's assuming music itself won't be completely reinvented with things like the DAW and stereo sound becoming archaic. Very few people could begin to really give a qualified answer as to what happens with all these emerging technologies.

I included the last headline after I read the article. There will be a need to go back and use older technologies or even methods that don't rely on any tech at all in order to keep things secure from hackers. There's really not a huge point in thinking about AI in music aside from how it integrates at the moment and whether you'd rather sell your stuff and do something else while your gear and plugins have some value. The future is really beyond our control. By the time a natural human can be considered obsolete for audio work, a big percentage of current jobs will have been automated, resources won't be as scarce, and prices should have fallen a ton on most things. Eventually AI and augmented humans will be running everything, but that's obvious enough. The average person I know outside of the Internet always tries to forecast the future based on the past. Imagine trying to forecast the future in 1924 without having any real knowledge of the emerging technologies of the time. Television technology had a lot of advances throughout that decade, but the average person of 1924 probably had no idea what was around the corner. Eventually we'll see a radical redesign of human society, much as our society today is radically different from say 1850, but this will be even bigger. I'm not really worried about AI doing something horrendous. AI isn't going to have random robots shooting up buildings or anything.

Nah the hackers will use it to crack your bank account and personal info without fishing😁

I haven’t found a use case for anything. It’s a fun toy! For example.. I asked an image generator to make an image of a sexy woman singing into a mic in the studio. I expected a typical looking singer and LDC.. it gave me a bunch of pics of a supermodel with D cups, topless 😳 holding a blurry SM58 in various positions. Not exactly what I wanted, so I asked for more revisions. No matter how many revisions and multiple sexy singers I ask for, the only mic was a 58 they shared. Just a waste of time

+1

I keep saying it.

It’s called Artificial Intelligence.

Songwriter, creativity doesn’t come from raw brute force “intelligence”

It comes from your mind being connected to your heart and soul.

Not from a Neural Network connected to a farm of Nvidia GPU’s.

No thanks 😁

That would be a hard no.  I know the essence of what will come along with that.

We will be fine as long as Ai doesn’t grow human ears.

It will be interesting to see what happens with the NYT suit against Open AI, in regards to compensation for training sources.