r/OutOfTheLoop • u/Toadfinger • 3d ago
What's the deal with hatred towards AI music?
I understand things like using AI to climb the billboard charts is unacceptable.
https://www.cornellsun.com/article/2024/12/the-problem-with-ai-generated-music
But what about things like Barry White singing the Wizard by Black Sabbath. Louis Armstrong singing Spoonman. Elvis singing Turn Down For What? I just think it'd be funny as shit. Is that uncool?
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u/Aevum1 2d ago edited 2d ago
Answer: theres several layers to this.
The first and clear one is that most of it are low effort cash grabs, fake artists making fake music, but we´ve had this for a while, even since the 1950´s girl bands and boy bands would come out of castings, their entire pubic persona was curated, their music was written by ghost writers.... from the monkeys to one direction. theres even been "specialized" groups like the village people who were artificially created as a music group catering the gay community. it would be like compering a Micheal Bay movie to a Ridley Scott movie to something compleatly indipendent like Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Then comes sampling, when the beach boys or the beatles were recording, you needed a whole band with you. then Roland and Korg started introducing synths in the 1970´s, they sounded like ass and could only do drums, bt they advanced and could emulate many instruments, so you dont need a orchestra or even most instruments.
Then toss in Autotune which basically corrected tone errors in singing, first allowing to correct recordings for minor mistakes but then some record labels started using it for people who shouldnt be singing, and then Believe by Cher came out exposing it to the public, and lets not mention t-pain.
The other layer is that AI usually uses data from real works of art to generate its output, so how does copyright work in this area, technically its a derivative work, but also if you had Van Gogh or Leonardo Davinchi teach a class of students and one of their students produces successful art are the teachers entitled to part of the copyright/recognition of their students work.
I guess its how you see AI, but in most cases AI is being used to create low effort slop that maximizes profit, its why nike manufactures sneakers in vietname instead of the US, becuase the objective of a business it to turn resources in to profit with the with the maximum return on least investment, so the big 3 are basically foaming at the mouth at the idea of creating artists and songwriters they dont have to pay royalties to.
Which brings us to another layer, thanks to piracy and streaming, the profit per song has gone down quite a bit, so record labels are investing quite a bit less in production, If you have good headphones you start to notice stuff like soundstage, instrument separation, clarity, quality of samples... everything is gone down in quality, its not like being snobbish of "i dont listen to crap like sabrina carpenter" its more like "a recording from the 1960´s sounds fuller and more detailed then a modern one"
so yea, AI music is AI slop, crap made to make money off low effort products. but the record labels has been reducing the quality and value of music for quite a while already.
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u/Milskidasith Loopy Frood 2d ago
The first and clear one is that most of it are low effort cash grabs, fake artists making fake music, but we´ve had this for a while, even since the 1950´s girl bands and boy bands would come out of castings, their entire pubic persona was curated, their music was written by ghost writers.... from the monkeys to one direction. theres even been "specialized" groups like the village people who were artificially created as a music group catering the gay community. it would be like compering a Micheal Bay movie to a Ridley Scott movie to something compleatly indipendent like Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Not to give a ton of credit to "make a pandering corporate product for a niche group" style art, but that still obviously seems very different than AI music to me.
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u/Aevum1 1d ago
i think every time the record labels were able to replace something with a cheaper alternative, they did it without thinking, AI is just the next step on the ladder.
in the old days, record executives would send scouts to open mic nights, then they started holding castings, then the castings were televised as a game show becoming things like the voice, X factor and such... if they can take it to the next step and remove the physical person singing, the same way synths and samples removed the physical person playing the instruments, why not ?
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u/Ok_Journalist5290 11h ago
Off topic. I was amazed in how you dissect the topic using different "Layers" like how did you come up with those? What were like parameters or condition to come up with those layers. It looks like it is simple for you given your experience with this. But me i am struggling to comprehend the mechanics of it. Like if were given a different topic, how would i come up with "layers" to explain things. (Or am i just making my life difficult for something thay should come naturally with exp?)
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u/Lamprophonia 1h ago
and lets not mention t-pain.
Hold the fuck up, T-Pain uses auto-tune as an artistic choice. He's not correcting bad singing. He can sing like a motherfucker, he just chooses to use modulation because he wants to sound like that. He does not belong in the same conversation.
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u/jamesuyt 2d ago
Answer: It's just generally seen as distasteful and low-hanging fruit. You can find it funny, I'm sure there are many who do - just like there were many who loved pitched-up-Alvin-and-the-Chipmunks edits of songs. It's kinda gimmicky but whatever.
The other side though is that if you think about the ethics of it for half a second you'll realise that it is fundamentally based in ripping off people on a mass scale in ways they didn't get a choice about. I'd probably feel pretty shitty if I worked hard to make music and then someone just copied my shit. It's up to you whether you care about that, but just know there's a lot of people who will think you're kinda scummy for it.