My last 4 songs from people were AI

AI is moving so fast though, it’s improving at rapid speed. People have been talking about it for years but it’s only in the last 12 months it’s gotten to a point where people are really starting to take notice and not just in music.
I have a friend who is an illustrator, his career can easily be replaced by AI and he’s seeing its effects already. Chat GPT can write papers better than most high schoolers already, next year it will likely have advanced much further. I can’t remember which company it is but a guitar pedal company released a pedal this year with a circuit designed by chat GPT, they made a couple of small tweaks but largely left the AI design in place. AI can write code, so that could replace a lot of jobs. AI voiceover has improved rapidly, sure you can still tell it’s AI but will you be able to tell in a year or two.

This thread is about AI being used to write country songs getting pitched to artists right now. It’s only going to get better and better to the point that it will be difficult to tell between AI created music and human created music. The AI will learn the things that make the music sound human, portray emotion etc and just work them into it’s creations.
I think some people will find creative ways to use it, some will adapt and some will deny it until it’s too late.

Wife won us tix to see Rolling Stones a week ago at 49ers stadium. They were good! It hit me that arrangement and production is the good stuff. Leaving space,- not flooding every nook and cranny with more, more, more. It’s just the blues with some rock production. It also made me sad at the same time because nobody can copy that and get anywhere. First, it would be tough to have arrangements THAT tight, and a front man that charismatic. If somehow you get there, you are barely at par with a Stones cover band. You have a huge disadvantage since nobody knows your songs. You can strut up and down to a crowd of people looking at Tictok, will it get you anywhere? Meanwhile, the cover band, the crowd is dancing and drinking and singing along.

Opening band was The Beaches. They had a bunch of really great songs! ..But then had a bunch of songs that seemed boring,.. filler.. and I imagined AI could write that. So after the show I look them up and sure enough.. first album songs seemed good, newer albums they shortened the songs.. skip intros and go straight to voice kinda thing. I figure that approach must have gotten them some fans on streaming enough to open for Rolling Stones. However, live the crowd just kinda not in the mood for rushed compositions. The fast, rushed ADD approach didn’t help win the crowd from what I could tell. And there was a lot of young people … really all ages.

An interesting sidelight that gets borderline into politics - so John, feel free to delete if you need to.

AI content and output is being controlled by the narrative put forth by only a few high end tech oligarchs. So if they like Pop - that's what we'll get. AI will lean into that with plenty of autotune effects. If they turn into country freaks - then we'll get country infused musics and more fiddle and double entendre lyrics everywhere. They will be overall controlling what AI learns and spits out. They set the guidelines that AI works within. At least until AI becomes sentient and takes over....

Case in point - Google's mess this weekend with their AI now saying that Trumps assassination attempt is a fictional event that never happened, and that - in comparison - the Harris campaign has so much rich and varied information for voters. Voter manipulation much? nypost.com/2024/07/29/business/metas-ai-assistant-calls-trump-assassination-attempt-fictional/

This type of narrative control is going to get exponentially more prevalent in all aspects of the arts, society and life. The impact on music and AI generated music will follow hand in hand with other AI intelligence directions.

Until the gov clamps down and creates some rules (not gonna happen anytime soon, cause each individual country is scared death that it will fall behind) this world is gonna start spinning out of control.

We’re never going to agree on this - so let’s just agree to disagree.

Pappy pop has been around since the beginning of popular music, some of the records I bought as a young teen were awful.

Oh my god

Good to know a fellow jazzer. But you shouldn't say such things out loud even if we are in an AI dystopian nightmare...

I know, and I'm exaggerating your point on purpose just for fun. But you DID speculate that maybe your aversion to AI music was because of your British background and, therefore, an affinity for more authentic sounds. 

Just fyi, Meta is Zuckerberg/facebook, not google. 

anywho, this sort of AI misfire is a great example of what I was talking about in an earlier post wrt AI cannibalizing itself. This case here demonstrates that there is enough online misinformation to at least confuse an AI tool, and remember, conspiratorial editorializing about the assassination attempt come from all political corners and are even inspired by diametrically opposed viewpoints (to say nothing of misinfo fed into our streams by adversarial state actors). AI is not good at parsing that out; it’s simply skimming the available information, with limited checks and balances ensuring the info it’s digesting is any good. 

as AI increasingly takes overs the online info sphere, it will push out human contribution, forcing it to digest the content it has already itself created by regurgitating often-dodgy source material. At a certain point, it’s easy to imagine this becoming completely toxic, even radioactive, with users demanding access to properly vetted and curated info.

my wife (a librarian with a particular expertise in research) had what I think is a brilliant notion last night over dinner. She suggested songwriters may find themselves employable by AI companies, tasked with building high quality libraries for the machines to learn from. This would allow for stylistic evolution, avoid copyright concerns,and prevent the sort of cannibalization I’m yapping about. It could also prove a very viable professional outlet for writers. Essentially, AI companies become the new publishing houses.  

Thank you! 

Would much rather yak about this... actual creative stuff vs the doom & gloom of digging our own work graves. Or something like that... (still can't say I understand) 

Yes! That's real reverse reverb on what was a snare overdub done in a booth. Lex 224XL that was flipped over correctly (thank you Jeff Aderman!)  

Cymbals... that's a really beautiful room to track in. But also kinda ass-kicking because its so reflective it can eat things alive... 

IIRC & I don't have any notes from the session... always keep a notebook but I gave it to the band on the last day of tracking... there are about 400 pictures on an old drive, now packed away in boxes like the rest of my life. 

Pretty much a "stock" setup for me... pair of earthworks tight & low over the kit. Also put a 414EB w/ck12 in omni roughly 4-5 feet in front of kit, about head height. Like you were actually standing there listening to it. Crazy concept eh?! Forget the inside kick... outside was 414 B/uls about 18-24 inches out in fig 8. There's some other sauce in there, but ZERO samples were used.

Vocals were a 1971 U67... amek 9098 pre/EQ (yes I eq'd to disc!) > LA3A and that's a natural double. He sang that stuff down a billion times & was really consistent. Well practiced for sure! 

But yeah, relevant to the chatter at hand we did 4 songs, tracked & mixed in about 6 days? After a lotta discussion the band rolled the dice & traveled 1500 miles from south Florida to upstate NY... in October where they proceeded to nearly freeze to death!

I still don't get how "AI anything" is going to take over "everything & kill all the work" when there's a certain segment of people who are actively avoiding fake & instant anything and want the full fatty version. 

Like mastering. We had enough juice left in the tank after Big Blue that we could afford to send it to Brad Blackwood... 

The flip side of that is someone who's using something like LANDR for mastering would've never even considered sending it to someone like Brad or Howie Weinberg in the first place. They aren't losing gigs to it. 

Kinda like, I'm not losing gigs to "band in a box" anything. Because I don't really do that... if anything "I" am the band in the box. Multi-instrumentalist music school reject who can talk intelligently about anything from Bill Monroe to Monk to Meshuggah, and probably play it too. 

I'll also say that at this point in my career I'm lucky, and forever grateful & humble that I've been able to work with some of my hero's... players I admired as a kid and now standing there as a peer. Its not lost on me. Building the studio at Mercenary Audio. Running monitors for Living Colour... eating cookies with Warren Haynes & playing his Les Pauls (we kinda like the same setup)... producing a record at the Phish Barn for Swampadelica... 

There's maybe about 3 people on the planet who can say they produced an album at the barn. Vance Powell, Tchad Blake, and this knucklehead. That's not lost on me. 
 
And rightly so, to bring things around... someone who would consider "AI producer" well, I never lost that gig because they don't want what I do. And they most certainly can't fuckin afford it either. To borrow a tagline from an old employer... This is not a problem? We're not happy until your not happy? 

Rad. 

Long post. Absolute last post in this thread and quite possibly last for at least a couple 3 weeks. 

No joke in about 7 days... next Tuesday if all goes according to plan movers arrive to collect thousands of pounds of boxes & move everything from northern NJ, about 20 odd miles from NYC and whisk it all to a spot about 10 minutes outside of Johnson City TN. 

Believe me, I've got WAY bigger things to do then sit here & yak... 

But I don't have my head in the sand. If anything I'm up in the clouds. Dude. Seriously, the view is killer. I'm on a mountaintop... goes in all directions. And there's a couple people who want to get in already even though I'm months away from being up & running. Again, very humbly thankful. At some point on the flip side I'll reappear.  

Peace. 

This will ultimately come down to whether enough human beings continue to wish to interact with one another to create art or not.

There are two parts to this, one can survive without the other but maybe not so much the other way around especially from a financial situation.

The consumer mostly won’t care how art is created and what they spend their money on (or who/what they give their data away to) in order to access it.

The artist/creator needs the consumer more than the consumer needs the artist and this has been increasingly exploited since the first MP3’s appeared for free on file sharing platforms 25 years ago.

Most studio owners are predominantly providing technical solutions to artists. That can now be completely replaced by AI.

The role of the producer is unlikely immune either.

And in the current economic climate the cost of living has to be a major factor in how much discretionary spending people can afford.