Who said AI generated music can't be inspired?

OP i think the real issue here is you are looking for musical inspiration? We have all been there. Maybe as musicians we post great new (last 5 years or so) music that is better than AI? This should not be hard. Personally, I introduce Jeff Sanna.


I like “at winters end”. Not new per se but winter of 2019 and it inspired me to write quite a bit. TY Jeff!

 
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I find AI both fascinating and frightening. I am a high school history teacher and I regularly play around with chatbots to see what they can do. It has definitely changed the way I think about things like homework assignments.

When it comes to music I am equally interested and disturbed. I had thought about using it as a tool to bounce ideas of and see what angles it might generate that I might have missed. AI writing whole songs is a different beast.

One thing this thread has got me thinking about is inspiration and how much that matters. I am a huge Beatles fan, and it used to bother me to read how much John Lennon would comment negatively on Beatles songs after the breakup. Songs that I loved he would dismiss as garbage etc. I don’t let that bother me anymore as I will like what I like regardless of the artist’s view on it.

However it does make me wonder. With songs like Day Tripper and Eight Days a Week, Lennon claimed they work just work songs, things he produced because he had to for a single or album. I am getting a sense on this thread that a criticism of AI music is that it has no creative spark behind it, that it is just repackaged bits. I think that is essentially what Lennon was arguing about the songs he derided, that he had no emotional or creative investment in them. So if a human is just churning out music using a formula, how does that differ from AI doing the same thing. I love Eight Days a Week no matter who or what created it.
 
grandinq said:
I find AI both fascinating and frightening. I am a high school history teacher and I regularly play around with chatbots to see what they can do. It has definitely changed the way I think about things like homework assignments.

When it comes to music I am equally interested and disturbed. I had thought about using it as a tool to bounce ideas of and see what angles it might generate that I might have missed. AI writing whole songs is a different beast.

One thing this thread has got me thinking about is inspiration and how much that matters. I am a huge Beatles fan, and it used to bother me to read how much John Lennon would comment negatively on Beatles songs after the breakup. Songs that I loved he would dismiss as garbage etc. I don’t let that bother me anymore as I will like what I like regardless of the artist’s view on it.

However it does make me wonder. With songs like Day Tripper and Eight Days a Week, Lennon claimed they work just work songs, things he produced because he had to for a single or album. I am getting a sense on this thread that a criticism of AI music is that it has no creative spark behind it, that it is just repackaged bits. I think that is essentially what Lennon was arguing about the songs he derided, that he had no emotional or creative investment in them. So if a human is just churning out music using a formula, how does that differ from AI doing the same thing. I love Eight Days a Week no matter who or what created it.
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AI models mimic the music they're trained on much the way human artists learn from and mimic their favorite artists.
 
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Jason Scott said:
AI models mimic the music they're trained on much the way humans artists learn from and mimic their favorite artists.
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Exactly. Here is John Lennon commenting on ths song This Boy:

“Just my attempt at writing one of those three-part harmony Smokey Robinson songs. Nothing in the lyrics... just a sound and a harmony”
 
To me, generic and boring come to mind more than inspired or moving. That is however also true of a lot of music made by humans, so I wouldn't necessarily be able to tell if it was AI or not.
 
Jason Scott said:
In a previous thread, there were a mix of opinions about AI generated music. I know some people feel AI generated music lacks the human element. I mean, I get it to a degree, but come on.... tell me this isn't inspired and that you'd be able to tell it was AI generated if you didn't know better:

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If a human wrote this and posted it on the forum, no one would've mentioned it being cliche. Just being critical because of the source.

Personally I found it intriguing, if you removed the lead lines and used it as a backing track to solo over it'd be fun.

Only annoying part is the long ooooooo's through the middle/end. Seems like it's trying to be a synth or something but got stuck in an infinite loop.
 
I like music with imperfect performances, voices that are different, ideas that challenge me, artists with their own perspective and sensibilities. I'm always on the lookout for new tools to use in my creative process

AI tools can be powerful and used in many different ways. I do video work and AI has taken a lot of the hard work out of my hands and saves me a lot of time. Like any tool AI can inspire me to try new things, to create Human Generated content.

To my ears most of this AI generated content sounds like cliche, predictable sampled loops combined into predetermined outcomes. It doesn't seem inspired nor inspiring.

So far my sense is that AI generated content is nothing more than sophisticated mash-ups of content plagiarized from human sources.
 
NY Guitarist said:
So far my sense is that AI generated content is nothing more than sophisticated mash-ups of content plagiarized from human sources.
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I respect how you feel. I'd just say AI models actually learn patterns and the relationship between words, shapes, sounds, etc.. When AI generates content, it's not merely retrieving and plagiarizing specific excerpts, images, or sounds from its training data. Rather, it can create entirely new content based on learned patterns and its abstract understanding, much the same way we create new content based on patterns we've learned and the relationships between things.
 
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Jason Scott said:
I respect how you feel. I'd just say AI models actually learn patterns and the relationship between words, shapes, sounds, etc.. When AI generates content, it's not merely retrieving and plagiarizing specific excerpts, images, or sounds from its training data. Rather, it can create entirely new content based on learned patterns and its abstract understanding, much the same way we create new content based on patterns we've learned and the relationship between things.
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That's really what I was trying to say by calling it sophisticated. AI takes the idea of drum machines, samplers, loops etc to a new level yet it's humans that created those ideas. But those ideas are static unless the next human adds their creative input.

The difference is that when humans create their artistic vision is filtered through their life experience, emotions, outlook. When people use AI in their art it's the human decisions that make it truly creative.
 
NY Guitarist said:
That's really what I was trying to say by calling it sophisticated. AI takes the idea of drum machines, samplers, loops etc to a new level yet it's humans that created those ideas. But those ideas are static unless the next human adds their creative input.

The difference is that when humans create their artistic vision is filtered through their life experience, emotions, outlook. When people use AI in their art it's the human decisions that make it truly creative.
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Loops and samples are undoubtedly static. However, it's somewhat reductive to apply the term to AI, in my opinion. Unlike loops and samples, AI is capable of generating new content dynamically and learns from interactions. While there's no question AI doesn't experience personal emotions or have personal experiences, it's capable of mimicking some emotional or stylistic expressions based on its training data. So, even though its output doesn't come from actual personal/emotional experiences, it's capable of reproducing elements of human creativity based on mimicry, in my opinion.
 
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