alt Hacker NewsCurious to see if this will apply to music. YouTube seems to be filled with AI music these days - just do a search for "focus music" or the like, and you'll see creators pushing new 1-hr tracks every few days with no mention of where the music came from or the fact it is AI generated. People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser (or perhaps they're also bots).
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I personally like an AI cover version of Nirvana's "In bloom" song in country style [0]. Just because it is AI generated doesn't mean that I enjoy it less. Labelling videos as AI is fair and I welcome youtubes changes in that regard nonetheless.
> People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser
Or.. they simply like it? Regardless of what we think about it
That's actually how I fell down the rabbithole --- found these long mixes and started listening, enjoyed what I heard, then tried to find out more about the author and realised it was AI-generated.
People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser (or perhaps they're also bots).
I admit to leaving praise on some of them, because they do sound really good, much better than what I thought AI music could be. Someone is creating music I like, and how they do it doesn't really matter; and in some ways, this makes it much easier to "separate the art from the artist".
YouTube music doesn’t seem to care much about where the music comes from. They do have formal album libraries but not everything is carefully sourced and labelled like Spotify. That’s what makes it good, because you can find tons of lost mixes, old unreleased track and vinyl rips, leaks of new stuff from current artists
I use YouTube proper quite heavily and I find it pretty easy to spot the AI stuff. At a minimum there’s usually a comment pointing it out, just like Instagram videos
There are completely fake bands, who are 'on tour', 'giving interviews', cranking out albums. Like "Shunned at a Funeral" [0] for instance, an AI Christian rock band. Mentioning nowhere that it is all fake.
Here is a band member of the real band "Wings of Pegasus" who takes a closer look at these shenanigans in "Are you sure your favourite band is real?" [1]
I was at the gym the other day with my bf and there was some godawful lame crap on the playlist. I asked my bf if it was AI generated in his opinion, he laughed and said it was Harry Styles…
Most of pop music had driven any creative energy it ever had to the ground already in the 90’s and 00’s and listening music from past 10-15 years or so, even if it’s not AI -generated, it might as well be. In a way AI just brings this progression into its logical conclusion. Most people simply don’t care about art and music, and it doesn’t matter who or what made it and if it even sounds like… anything.
People do not want to communicate across oceans, cultures, and centuries the lived experience of what it is to be human, hear stories what it was, say, live as a 28-year-old (possibly gay) composer with syphilis in early 19th century vienna, or standing on the street corner slinging crack in 80’s Brooklyn. They want to stay in their own bubble bed sherts over their heads smelling their own farts. I guess that’s just fine. Just fine. Amazing.
I can easily create a 1 hour track in Ableton and have some minor variations every say 48 measures. It's basically just copy paste with some parameter variation which can be scripted.
So not everything like that is necessarily AI generated!
Curious to see if this will apply to music.
I imagine it'll apply to anything with a SynthID watermark. https://deepmind.google/models/synthid/
Music may be a special case because generative/algorithmic music has been a thing for much longer than AI (in the 2020s sense) has existed. So it's more a question of how/whether it gets integrated into an existing generative market than it being a new category.
Add “before 2024” to searches.
enough music was made already, we don’t need more.
I wonder about false-positives too, or just disagreements with what is stated vs. "detected". In what I guess is a reaction to the huge amount of AI music, I notice a lot of other music gets posted with titles or tags saying in extent "made without AI". Yet when I listen to it, at least half the time I suspect AI was used, and they are just lying to get increased reach from the AI-hater crowd...
Yeah this is why I'm sceptical of just about any video game covers or remixes posted in the last year or two. There's just a flood of blatantly AI generated content in this niche, with many of the channels involved pumping out dozens of videos a day.
They'll use be pretty sneaky about hiding that fact (they'll like any comments that say how awesome it is and how much work was involved while hiding those calling it out as AI, and stick any disclaimer in another language in the description if at all), and it's completely overshadowing legitimate creators in the same space.
I mean the whole point of music like that is you're not really listening to it and it's kind of on/blocking out noise, right? It's hard to think of a situation where completely AI-generated music would be more competitive or less objectionable.
You can tell when a song is not AI generated these days because people put "no AI" in the title.
There is a third option. We don’t care how the music was made.
> People praising it in the comments seem none the wiser (or perhaps they're also bots).
I am pretty certain most comments made on youtube these days come from bots. Google does not understand that this is a problem - no real human wants to "interact" with bots or AI slop. They kind of cannibalize youtube here (not that the youtube comments system was great, but you can find real humans making comments in the past, now you can not distinguish between bot spam and real humans usually, though most short comments are made by bots).
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Easy to solve: just label ALL music uploads after 2024 as AI.
"B-b-b-but what if I create genuine wo—“
You won’t.
NEXT
A friend of mine who is a very non-technical dermatologist listens exclusively to Suno songs she made. All in genres and styles of songs from her era, the 80s and 90s. Who else is going to make new songs for her? New music almost always targets young people.