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I got oneshot by AI music recently. Probably not the right term for music, but anyway:
The Strokes released their 7th album a few months ago and I, having always pirated music, duly grabbed the first option I saw on Soulseek when it came out, and for months listened happily. I'd heard their first single from the album already, and it was no different on the files I downloaded.
Last week I headed to see the Strokes in concert in London. Literally a day before the show, I was on the band's subreddit when I saw a meme talking about the album, except that one of the titles was completely different from what I knew. Did they change the title at some point? Hopping on to Youtube and, no, it's an entirely different track, and I can't find any evidence of the one I knew. And so it goes as I listen to the rest of the album, every single track is different.
Turns out someone had taken the initial track list and the first single and generated an AI version to put onto Spotify when it was first announced. It's still up there in fact, if you want to check how it sounds:
https://open.spotify.com/album/6jvDu7nHvR8nI9b22cE3Ic
I guess it's somewhat fortunate I found out a bit before the live show, otherwise I probably would have been confused as hell.
But none of that is particularly interesting: AI music is already very good, and I knew already that there were charting AI songs and what not. It's not too surprising that they could make an entire album good enough to fool a fan.
I think what really surprised me in the end is that now I still prefer the AI album. Not just that, but as I said in a Motte comment about the album when it released, I would probably rank the AI version as better than anything else the Strokes have done.
I was a bit scornful of those comments which said that we were already at the point were people would abandon real musicians and just generate an endless stream of personalised music with AI, but looks like I'm already there.
This is not the only AI killing art story I wanted to bring to your attention. While music may have been solved, video games are still a ways away (so, 6 months at a guess). Over on our
sister/cousin/arch-rival site Datasecretslox, AI skeptic* Conrad has been experimenting with the ability to build an equivalent to 1992 JRPG Lunar: The Silver Star using only AI.https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,16631.0.html
The code has proved no barrier at all, but pixel art appears to be one of the great challenges for current AI models, unable to output character sprites or maps without constant hand-holding and dozens if not hundreds of iterations. They've at least reached a point of finishing the starting village (and also all of the underlying code for the game systems) but will they give up before they can output a finished game?
*yes, I did mostly want to point out how idiotic his argument is without having to register there. Conrad is enraged that AI cannot replicate a 1992 JRPG in one go, apparently completely ignorant that no human could come close to that given that the original Luna was built by a team of ~50 people over more than a year, or 100s of thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars. Even accounting for advances in game engines, Conrad working part-time for a few weeks is still 100x more efficient than the original.
I don't think AI can get me arbitrarily good music in any genre, but it's quite good at producing music I like to listen to in bulk.
My programming/work standard now is Synth Mage, a synth metal AI channel that puts out music in hourlong blocks (the second hour on the video is just a repeat). I got ChatGPT to build me an ffmpeg script to split it into individual tracks based on the description timestamps (which unfortunately weren't accurate for videos where the author put an intro, but I'll get around to fixing that eventually), and now I've got a multi-day music library of stuff I could listen to all day.
The big thing for me is to avoid lyrics: AI lyrics still seem to be a little weak without a lot of human guidance, though a couple of Synth Mage tracks do just kind of treat voice as another instrument and that seems to work pretty well.
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