If you ever think that AI music sounds good, it probably means you have bad taste in music.
Seriously.
Most people are perfectly happy with generic as f*ck music from real artists and are thus unlikely to be bothered by generic as f*ck music by AI (especially if they don’t know they are AI generated). AI music is catchy, but vacant. The compositions often sound enough like slick radio singles that it takes a listen or two before you realize there’s an emptiness to both the vocals and the music that you rarely hear in human music, even the terrible stuff. AI can’t make anything original; it can only generate content based on everything it’s fed and then basically auto-fill the likely next series of sounds and lines that its program to think should be appropriate. This means that because 1) it takes a very, very, very large amount of content for a LLM to sound even remotely human when making anything beyond text and 2) most music is mediocre or bad, AI music can never excel beyond making something mediocre or bad. And a lot of people don’t care about the difference and therefore don’t spend the mental energy trying to tell them apart.
We’ve already had the death of the monoculture; we are about to witness the death of the subcultures. More specifically, it will soon just be individualized art for each person that they create, which sucks for anyone who makes a living off it currently. I mean, it’s less the death of subculture and more an extension of the isolated way people consume media. That’s been an issue for a long time, and it’s really intensified since COVID. Ironically, it’s the recreation of monoculture, with the twist that the monolith is the means of consumption, rather than the actual content being consumed. AI lowers the “worth” of music, it opens it up so everyone can just make their own stuff for themselves that’s good enough. Just like technology has done for other art forms over human history and now, it’s unclear whether this level of isolated consumption is sustainable long term.
At the very least, there probably will be a generational response as we move farther away from the pandemic. Right now, there’s a whole generation of people in their early 20’s who were forced to spend their formative years in COVID isolation. Basically, the entire media and tech landscape reflect that. But people age, and the pandemic didn’t have the same impact on the kids who are currently tweens and teens. It will be interesting to see what they want out of culture or if they want anything new at all? And look, it’s not necessarily reading/watching/listening to anything new … it’s how you source it. Basically, if you let an algorithm (whether it’s TikTok’s feed or Spotify Discovery) be your source of discovery, you’re asking to be fed AI generated slop. Most of my discovery comes from reading various outlets written by actual humans and word of mouth from friends and such. I haven’t used a platform-generated playlist EVER and I’m not on TikTok.
It’s getting to the point where, if this trend continues, I can just catch up on the backlog for the rest of my life. There are thousands upon thousands of movies, books and songs I haven’t experienced yet from the past couple of thousand years of human endeavor. I hear some of them are quite good. However, I am sure I will still be exposed to AI ISHT when it’s played at a store, I’m in, or something, but by continually taking a more active role in searching for new music, I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to avoid intentionally engaging with it. And if I found out a song I like is AI generated? I would literally never listen to it again. There is enough good, human music out there that I don’t think I’d miss it.
– Dagobot