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Here's Udio, a new AI music generator that has emerged as a competitor to Suno. There's less of the audio "artifacting" that exists in a lot of AI music tools, and it can actually do some pretty decent generation from keywords. It's early days and there are limitations and still identifiable signs of AI-ness, but it's quite a large step forward from the previous iterations.
The emergence of all these musical AIs as of late has been quite validating, especially since I've had a good amount of arguments with art people I know about the ability of AI to create music - as someone who makes music as a hobbyist I've come at it from the perspective of "these are all just patterns and systems of rules, and can be imitated easily by an agent familiar enough with those rules". In similar fashion to those who predicted that visual art would be difficult to achieve via AI, those who were predicting that this ability was not generalisable to music were wrong.
To some extent, it's understandable - it must be a pretty big blow to one's ego for the art one prides themselves on to be so easily recreated and automated by the equivalent of a Chinese Room, especially when the field is still in its infancy and hasn't even come close to anything we would consider agentic - but I can't help but see many of the naysayers about the ability of AI to achieve supposedly uniquely "human" tasks as being clearly myopic and wrong.
The people I know that work in music (I've done so a bit myself too) don't really give a shit.
Composition was already a winner takes it all kind of thing and the vast majority of money is made through live performances. To the extent that this replaces anything I don't know anyone that has gotten paid anything meaningful for creating equivalent (or adjacent) audio slop.
We've talked about this previously but these kinds of jobs are not handed out on a merit or cost basis, and there is already an extreme oversupply of people capable of doing them.
I don't think this changes anything at all, but it is certainly interesting.
I think it’s a self-preservation thing. Lots of people just have this odd need to believe that AI isn’t really going to take over the art scene, from movies to music to writing and painting and so on. And it will end those pursuits as a viable career simply because it will be orders of magnitude cheaper to have an AI write and make the next Star Wars movie than it will be for them to waste that money on human writing and acting and so on. Just a few humans to tweak the output is all you really need, and that’s essentially one guy doing the fixing.
It’s already getting hard to tell the difference between a human and a bot, and that’s tools that are pretty stable and probably were developed and trained 3-5 years ago. Give it five more years and the professional arts will be dying because they’re no longer different enough from AI to justify the price.
That's the thing, I don't think it will. The art scene isn't driven by cost or even talent considerations (beyond a certain threshold).
For the things this will be viable for I don't think anyone gives a shit who is doing the composing and it employs a microscopic amount of people.
If you want to look at ai impact on employment i would look at some kind of cost competitive field that actually employs a lot of people, like animation.
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Yup. It doesn't matter if AI, as is the case circa Early 2024 AD (we need to be specific) can't fully replace humans.
Only modest progress is needed till all you need is one very good human, assisted by an AI, doing the work of ten average ones. Or a hundred. And then you have somewhere from 90-99% of the workforce redundant.
Much of the code for Dingboard was written by AI, even if the creator is human. He says he wouldn't have been able to pull it off, not without a lot more money or people, not in this little time.
Of course, I expect that is inevitable, as is complete automation, but even most people being unable to meaningfully contribute to the economy will be catastrophic unless great care is taken, be it in cognitive or physical labor.
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