Did you try out AI generated music?

The Sounds you Hear - Music and Audio Discussion
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I wrote my question already in the subject. Did you try out AI generated music? I stumbled over it around 2 month ago. I only know of ChatGPT and AI image generators, but not heard of AI music.
I was very impressed, what is already possible. I started generating music for my game, what I designed. Kind of soundtrack for it and had a lot of fun writing lyrics and made songs out of it. I have no musical talent whatsoever, so it was all the more impressive for me.

PS: And no, I don’t think this will displace real musicians. In my opinion, people still want to go to concerts and admire real musicians.

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No, I did not. I hope nobody ever tries to sell me any of it.

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I’m not trying to sell you anything. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: I have to say, though, that I don’t have a perfect hearing (I don’t know if this is the correct English word), and I probably wouldn’t be able to tell by now whether the music was created with AI or not.

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Of course – I didn’t think you were trying to sell me anything.

I think I can explain my distaste for it a little further by reflecting on something I really like about Daniel’s whole “ethos” with The Dungeon Dive. Forgive me, but this got long. Best I can do to spare the thread is hide it in this collapsible clicky thing:

A wall of text about why I find AI-generated content uninteresting.

A big part of the appeal of the Dungeon Dive, for me, is that I get to learn about and explore creators across a wide range of media – not just in Daniel’s videos, but through the community here as well. I discover new music, new visual artists, new authors, new filmmakers, etc.

When I encounter a new bit of art in this way, not only do I undergo an immediate sensory experience (auditory, in this example), but I also can pursue a more thoughtful experience as I think and learn about an artist’s projects, their context, and their weird (i.e., human) fixations.Often, with indie creators, I marvel at the improbability of anyone making this thing, and think about what might have motivated them to do so. Very broadly, we can ask: “how did they make this?” and “why did they make this?” And the Dungeon Dive channel/community not only points me towards new art, it often provides neat context about these questions. (Only in writing this do I realize now that perhaps I don’t reciprocate as much as I’d like.)

Art is complicated and I don’t claim to really understand it. But in my experience, I find that I often appreciate art (music, stories, game designs) the most when the “how” seems to have been warped by a compulsive “why” – where the artist seems to have very intentionally done something difficult or idiosyncratic because they felt, perhaps somewhat maniacally, driven to do so. I personally am less interested in creations where the answer to both the “how” and the “why” seems to be no more than: “because I could, within the current limits of my ability, without cultivating any new abilities.” That’s not to say I think artists ought never to rest on well-earned laurels. But I like when artists seem to me driven to grow and try new things.

If you put me in a lab (or just give me headphones) and test whether I can distinguish AI-generated sounds from some artist’s music, maybe I can’t distinguish those sensations. Let’s set aside the likelihood that the AI is just regurgitating that artist’s music in the first place – I want to raise a different issue. To me this is a rigged “test”, an artificial condition that subjects me to an experience of sound but that does not let me experience and explore music as I would like to. For a real test, give me a chance to ask “how?” and “why?”

For me, my disinterest in AI-generated stuff comes in large part from the fact that no matter how interesting the “why?” might be in cases where a human is using AI to create something, nevertheless, something is lost when the answer to “how” is: “by typing words into a box on the internet.” I like when artists grow and do new stuff and learn now ways of “How” to create their art, but I am not fascinated by anyone’s journey of becoming a better “prompt engineer” for generative AI. (Not even my own journey, were I undertake it.) This just is not the kind of act of creation I find fascinating. And so I do not find the created thing (e.g,. the AI generated sounds) to be fascinating beyond the merely sensory.

As a consumer, I have no shortage of human-made music I could engage with, even if I limit myself to only sensory appreciation. So I have no appetite for consuming AI-generated music.

Were I to act as a creator (which, to be clear, I am not, for any of the media I’ve discussed here) I personally would prefer to try to do so in the manner of the artists I admire more – the artists I hear about from The Dungeon Dive. I would aim for a different “how” and “why” than seems to me to be afforded by using AI.

That’s all, of course, only from my perspective.

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Wow, Thank you for the detailed feedback and for sharing your thoughts.

In contrast to image prompting, which I’ve also used for one of my games, there’s more to it here, as I’m writing lyrics and spending a lot of time on the rhythm and rhymes. So, in my opinion, there’s more human involvement than in creating the image.

But why do I use it and why do I have so much fun with it.

For one thing, I use it to create individual songs for my children. I incorporate what they’ve just experienced and, of course, include their names. The expressions on their faces alone when they heard it for the first time were priceless.

Personally, I have little connection to music, which is because I have very specific tastes. I like very lyrically driven and depressive music in my native language. Even though I still have many CDs at home from various bands, there’s only one small indie band that I really love. It’s called Janus. They make exactly the kind of music I love, and I haven’t found any other band that fascinates me as much. But since the band only releases a CD every five years, I don’t get to listen to much. Now I can create my own music that I personally like and enjoy listening to. It sounds strange, but I really enjoy it.

I don’t know if my view on the topic is understandable, but these are the reasons.

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I appreciate your reply! I don’t know if anybody’s views on this topic are fully understandable, but thank you for hearing my reasons/experience and sharing your own.

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This is a really great conversation guys, and thank you for keeping it so respectful. This is a “hot button” topic that could easily fall into name calling and disrespect. The fact that we’re keeping it so cordial and informative really is a testament to the kind of people in this community, and this is exactly what longed for in a forum environment.

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Happy to do it. If I had started name-calling I wouldn’t have learned that @GWRaoul is using AI music in part as a scaffold for poetry/songwriting for their kids. That’s art, whatever genAI might be on its own.

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Sorry it took me 2 days to reply. I was on the road and it’s hard to write on my cell phone and I also wanted to run your text through a translator, not that I only half understood your initial answer (since I unfortunately have a language barrier). I think thanks to DeepL I understood your argument against AI generated content better than I did before. And I can completely understand you.

A little background on me as a person and how AI relates to me and my work. Large parts of my work can be replaced by AI in the future and we are looking at this in my work right now. For me, this also means partly retraining or doing something else. My wife is an artist herself (but not an illustrator), so the whole issue affects her too. Maybe that’s why I should be a bit more critical of the subject, but I’ve always been fascinated by progress and enjoy watching it (also so as not to be left behind somehow).

And I have to say, it simply helps me to make up for deficits that I couldn’t before. I’ve always enjoyed writing. I’ve written short stories, I’ve written poetry and music lyrics and I’ve written screenplays. Back then (about 20 years ago) I sat at the computer and made electronic music for the lyrics and I bought a camera and turned the scripts into short films. So I understand, at least in part, what you mean by the madness that drives people to realize their vision. Although I have to say, I only ever enjoyed the beginning, i.e. inventing the story, the writing and the result at the end. The middle part, i.e. creating the music or shooting and editing the movie, unfortunately less so. And my problem was that I always did everything mostly on my own because I didn’t want to or couldn’t rely on other people.

AI helps me to partially skip this middle part and only do what I enjoy. Because only then can I keep my motivation high and continue working on a project. The game I’m working on already has over 700 unique cards and over 160 pages of text. If I had to illustrate it myself, which I can’t do, because I really have no talent in drawing, I would probably have given up by now. If I had to buy illustrations, I would be heavily in debt. And if I did it via Kickstarter, because I have no commercial education, I’d probably soon be financially ruined too. :blush: That’s why I’m leaving it all out and only publishing my game as print and play (and, at the urging of others, also via TheGameCrafter, which I didn’t actually want initially.).

When I wrote this down now, I really realized why I use AI partially and only in certain places: To avoid wasting time on things I don’t want to do and that would otherwise demotivate me. Because we all already waste enough time on things in life that we don’t enjoy, such as cleaning the house or maybe even your job. That’s why we have hobbies, isn’t it? :wink:

So, I’m afraid I’ve digressed a bit. But the same applies here. I have incredible fun writing these lyrics. Be it for the children’s songs or for the soundtrack to the game. It used to only be on paper, but now I can listen to it and that gives me and/or my kids pleasure. I don’t want to motivate anyone to listen to AI music by other people, but if you’ve never been able to let your creativity out before because you might not have any talent in a certain area or a mental or physical limitation has prevented you from doing so, then you can finally give it a try.

I hope you could understand my ramblings (of course, you don’t have to agree with them or be of the same opinion).

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