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Friday Fun Thread for April 12, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Another aspect is how using technology to automate music production seems to have been more accepted than for illustrations pre-AI, i.e. sampling and stuff like that.

Based on my limited interactions with musicians, they seem to have less of a fetish for authenticity than visual artists do.

Professional commercial art has always been no-rules-anything-goes of course. Even before AI you had photobashing, various digital effects, tracing over 3D models, etc. But there was always a vocal subset of artists (usually on the more hobbyist/indie side) who felt that these methods were "cheating" in a way, and if you couldn't draw something with good ol' pen and paper then it wasn't "real skill". My impression is that this sort of sentiment is largely absent even in indie musicians - they view digital mixing and post-processing as simply a normal part of the process, they never think twice about it.

I think in some sense music is inherently more reliant on technology than visual art is - if you want to create any sort of durable recording of a song, something that can persist even in the absence of the original composer and performer, then you need to rely on technology that's only been around since 1877, whereas people were inscribing paintings onto stone many thousands of years ago. Musicians have just been living with technology longer, they were using electric guitars when most professional illustrators didn't need anything more high tech than ink and oil paints. So I think that's part of the reason why they have a friendlier disposition towards technology in general.