The response of the industry seems like a bit of a distraction to me - this stuff is clearly not organic, is it? These tracks are being injected into common playlists to inflate playtime or something, surely?
If these tracks are so (organically) popular why are they restricted to Spotify, why aren’t they on other services?
They are just fully AI driven on every level but also there are people listening to it. Youtube currently gets swamped with AI generated content - music is only one part of it. For example there are now endless history documentaries.
To get these of the ground there are lots of fake comments and fake views but after a while these videos gain traction and then the algos pick them up for organic views.
Search youtube for "female vocal blues" or "female country songs" and it is all AI and it is really good - good in a sense that you don't realise it immediately. But they garner millions of views. They are not McDonald's but fine dining cooked with convenience products.
I am quite split about algorithmically generated music but I have to admit that I have fallen once into the trap. And only when I searched for the artist I figured out it is AI. Though once you know it you immediately hear it.
Edit: I went to one of the websites offering this as a service and in 5 minutes it creates a very decent song including lyrics. I forgot which but remember it was something like $20 for 1000 songs. Not a surprise that youtube gets swamped with it - it costs next to nothing to produce, neither time nor money.
It's not that complicated, you just agree to give up 30% of your royalties and Spotify autoplays your track more than any other track (and includes it more in Release Radar / Discover Weekly / Daily Mix / Radio): https://artists.spotify.com/discovery-mode
No serious label does this as there's no benefit from those drive-by listens other than making the number go up, but you can bet that nearly every artist without a label that somehow reaches over a million listens on their first release does.
Editorial playlists on the other hand actually require you to do good in some of the niche ones before you get "promoted" to the bigger ones.
I listened to the song in question. It's truly awful. Simplistic and cliche in every way musically possible, and it sounds like it was written about 15 years ago at the height of the indie folk craze.
That said, it shouldn't be illegal to like trash, or to make money off of trash if people want to buy it. It's trivial for a human musician with moderate talent and experience to make better music than this. The musicians who are afraid this is going to replace them are probably not doing much original or creative in the first place.
>or to make money off of trash if people want to buy it
The article is about a chart, not a distribution platform. Regardless, we make laws controlling the ability to make money off of things people want to buy all the time - laws protect humans (idealistically) and our economy/incentives (realistically).
>The musicians who are afraid this is going to replace them are probably not doing much original or creative in the first place.
This is a lie. People of all creativity/originality levels are justified in believing that AI will improve.
You're right, I shouldn't have used the word "illegal". But banning something from the charts is basically saying "people are wrong to listen to this". Why can't people make up their own minds about what to listen to?
I think the end product is what matters, not what tools were used to make it. I don't see a principled argument for drawing the line at AI tools but not other software tools like DAWs or plugins that generate chord progressions and melodies using techniques other than machine learning.
> Typical EU government - ban something people obviously want, say its for their own good.
I don't want AI songs, even though I might be fooled by one.
People also "wanted" snake oil too, in that they bought it, but they didn't actually want it.
The way you use "want" indicates your either misunderstand something or are being deceptive. There's false assumptions behind it, like play counts are an accurate measure of what people want.
Edit: Your profile says you "have lots of experience with digital advertising," your misunderstanding/deception is exactly the one I see a lot of people in advertising use to justify yourself: "my metrics say people click on ads, therefore people want and like ads, and if you don't you're a weirdo."
Just because it may become impossible to detect doesn't mean there's no reason to formally ban it. While many people are dishonest, not 100% of people are. Calling them naive makes no sense, since they didn't announce that they believe they can prevent all AI from making it in forever. You're just name-calling.
Edit: There's a whole lot of replies trying to sell the idea that AI Slop and pop music is the same. It isn't. You can dislike pop music all you want, you can think it's low effort all you want, but it's not AI Slop. This is a false equivalency.
Personally? I dream of a future where everything is McDonald's. Software, books, articles, artwork, movies, podcasts, music, and basically anything that makes life enjoyable.
Everything will be slop, nothing will be spared. 90% of everything is garbage? That's underachieving, let's improve our slop KPIs next quarter and make Sturgeon's law 100% of everything.
Lots of popular music is slop. Are you saying that e.g. Spice Girls or Coldplay or whatever is not slop? It is certainly popular with people even if it's musically and creatively bankrupt.
AI slop, Human slop - who cares if people are enjoying it.
But why should you make the distinction between slop that is created by a human or AI? Why should you care if something terrible was created by an AI or a human?
For the same reason some people like buying local, or buying hand-made, or buying "Made in <insert country>". People aren't robots, and we know the consequences of our actions are not limited to the current moment and on the current side of the black box we happen to be on as consumers. Further, even in cases of pure observation, where there is no monetary, verbal, implicit, or indirect support - e.g. just looking at a piece of art we didn't pay to see - we care about things that are not represented solely by the observable qualities of an object, especially when it comes to art and craft and the effort of people we admire.
This is obvious, though. This part of human nature will never change, and there is no argument that can confront it, and no reason to want to formulate one unless:
A. It makes you money.
B. It appears to have dividing lines that match a larger culture war in which you have emotional stock.
>Are you saying that e.g. Spice Girls or Coldplay or whatever is not slop?
Your definition of "slop" seems to be "is popular with the mainstream." That isn't the definition used when applied to AI generated music. Spice Girls and Coldplay are leagues beyond anything an AI can currently produce in terms of artistic quality. Yes, there is artistic quality to popular culture.
And to most people it matters that human beings produce it. It may not matter to you - you may only consider music or any other form of art to be nothing more than a means of producing stimuli intended to create a pleasing endorphine response, but most people don't want to process art the way a machine processes data.
> That response has not impressed the IFPI Sweden music industry organisation, which has blocked the song from appearing in the country's official national charts. ... amid concerns that AI could cut revenues to the country's music creators by up to a quarter within the next two years.
The music industry has a stellar record of fighting against generational trends - mp3s, youtube videos, streaming, now AI songs
Lots of things are "good" in some contexts and "bad" in others. You may disagree that the mere existence of a list that omits AI is "good" for some people, but those people disagree with you.
There are well-known negative side effects. What are the side effects to listening to AI music? If there are negative side effects, then I'd guess they'd be shared with non-AI music, since they sound pretty close to the same by now. Or, maybe the "negative" side effect from the industry's perspective is that the price of listening to music will drop.
No, but if something is going to be close to free to produce the consequence will be that no commercial piece of music will be incentivized to be produced by humans.
Commercial music isn't the only way to make music, but it pays people that want to professionally work as musicians.
In other words, the current system allows a select few artists to make money/fame from doing something they want to do (opposed to have to do to make a living). Or also, AI music will lessen the good feeling some people get when they believe that musicians can make money producing music.
I don't disagree that these things exist, but I do believe that these are mostly propped up by dynamics that will soon no longer exist.
Looking at the surface, it is true, but there are caveats:
- Not all musicians are in the field because it pays, some of them haven't earned a cent
- There are talented people who would like to create music but are forced to work long hours, which leaves them drained. Perhaps in the future, humans won't have to work that much, which will allow them to pursue creative hobbies such as music making
- Artists will be able to continue performing live, which will act as a huge filter for the AI-generated content and keep paying them.
Aside from that I agree, though musicians just one of many groups disrupted by AI and I wouldn't say they'll be the ones hurt most by it, mostly because they can continue to "exist" outside of the Internet, and experiencing music live could become more popular because of it. A lot of assumptions here, I know
> Perhaps in the future, humans won't have to work that much,
I think that this is the fairytale part that I have trouble accepting.
Coming from a country that has a very limited social welfare system I don't believe that the political or social climate is adapted to take such steps in a future where a lot of things are automated.
It goes against everything that we've seen in the last 150 years.
> Artists will be able to continue performing live, which will act as a huge filter for the AI-generated content and keep paying them.
Or AI "musicians" will play live events as holograms.
> Aside from that I agree, though musicians just one of many groups disrupted by AI and I wouldn't say they'll be the ones hurt most by it, mostly because they can continue to "exist" outside of the Internet, and experiencing music live could become more popular behind it.
Sure, they might not be the most affected by AI, but they would still be affected which is the reason I'm not a fan of AI in music. This pushback doesn't need to be reserved to the most impacted activities.
Not sure about the "war" part of it, but the rules in place make it so that most people don't have easy, legal and public access to cocaine but the very determined people can find it. That sounds like a good trade-off.
For AI music it would be the same. You could find it online on some shifty third-party websites or use some illegal model on your own hardware but in the end it will always represent a minority use case.
Recently, there was an outrage when "Claire Obscur: Expedition 33" grabbed record-breaking amount of game awards (deservingly so, it's an excellent game) and somehow it surfaced that some minor development placeholder assets (which devs forgot to replace with actual ones due to QA oversight) were AI generated. Suddenly the entire game became "AI slop" and even got some of the awards revoked.
A lot of people complaining are doing it just for the sake of complaining, because anti-AI virtue signaling nets them clout, meanwhile they will happily scroll entire timelines of edited photos, movies which are nothing else than fake reality "slop".
You're inventing groups of people composed of the worst qualities of your "enemies" and insisting they are large in number, based on nothing. This is common low-quality internet "those people" complaining - the polar opposite of giving the benefit of the doubt.
People generally have nuanced opinions not represented solely by whatever Tweets are popular, and this is true of basically every single topic.
"Enemies" is your word, not mine. I would say "hypocrisy" is a better fit. A pinch of AI content is bad, while photoshopping/postprocessing/etc. is normalized. It's all converging into the same thing, only the process is different
There is a difference between an AI critic who dislikes the AI output based on their sense of taste/aesthetic/soullessness and someone who likes something until they learn that there's 0.0001% of AI content in it, which suddenly turns it into abomination. I agree that the latter tends to be the louder group, but it is a group nonetheless and I clearly did not invent jumping on a bandwagon.
Considering how cheap and easy it is to buy views/likes/subscribers I wouldn’t trust it blindly. Somehow I feel that people pushing AI music also would game the system, but I don’t have any proof unfortunately.
I can imagine generating AI song for myself but streaming usually seems like hell (algorithms, needs to be online, surveillance, lock-in, subscriptions).
How about we let the consumers decide what they want to listen to. Right? Or are you afraid of what the consumers might like and thus preemptively want to strike.
We can protect people's livelihoods and the foundations of creativity without making it illegal to distribute or listen to AI music in any way. You're being dramatic. Nobody is being oppressed.
It's being removed from an industry chart, not being banned from their devices. If you love freedom so much why don't you support the industry and the chart to make their own decisions?
The response of the industry seems like a bit of a distraction to me - this stuff is clearly not organic, is it? These tracks are being injected into common playlists to inflate playtime or something, surely?
If these tracks are so (organically) popular why are they restricted to Spotify, why aren’t they on other services?
They are just fully AI driven on every level but also there are people listening to it. Youtube currently gets swamped with AI generated content - music is only one part of it. For example there are now endless history documentaries.
To get these of the ground there are lots of fake comments and fake views but after a while these videos gain traction and then the algos pick them up for organic views.
Search youtube for "female vocal blues" or "female country songs" and it is all AI and it is really good - good in a sense that you don't realise it immediately. But they garner millions of views. They are not McDonald's but fine dining cooked with convenience products.
I am quite split about algorithmically generated music but I have to admit that I have fallen once into the trap. And only when I searched for the artist I figured out it is AI. Though once you know it you immediately hear it.
Edit: I went to one of the websites offering this as a service and in 5 minutes it creates a very decent song including lyrics. I forgot which but remember it was something like $20 for 1000 songs. Not a surprise that youtube gets swamped with it - it costs next to nothing to produce, neither time nor money.
It's not that complicated, you just agree to give up 30% of your royalties and Spotify autoplays your track more than any other track (and includes it more in Release Radar / Discover Weekly / Daily Mix / Radio): https://artists.spotify.com/discovery-mode
No serious label does this as there's no benefit from those drive-by listens other than making the number go up, but you can bet that nearly every artist without a label that somehow reaches over a million listens on their first release does.
Editorial playlists on the other hand actually require you to do good in some of the niche ones before you get "promoted" to the bigger ones.
Isn't that just what organic artists have been doing for years? Tailor Swift's father bought a record label and most of the copies of her first album
YouTube music is awash in AI too
I listened to the song in question. It's truly awful. Simplistic and cliche in every way musically possible, and it sounds like it was written about 15 years ago at the height of the indie folk craze.
That said, it shouldn't be illegal to like trash, or to make money off of trash if people want to buy it. It's trivial for a human musician with moderate talent and experience to make better music than this. The musicians who are afraid this is going to replace them are probably not doing much original or creative in the first place.
>it shouldn't be illegal to like trash
Nobody is suggesting this.
>or to make money off of trash if people want to buy it
The article is about a chart, not a distribution platform. Regardless, we make laws controlling the ability to make money off of things people want to buy all the time - laws protect humans (idealistically) and our economy/incentives (realistically).
>The musicians who are afraid this is going to replace them are probably not doing much original or creative in the first place.
This is a lie. People of all creativity/originality levels are justified in believing that AI will improve.
You're right, I shouldn't have used the word "illegal". But banning something from the charts is basically saying "people are wrong to listen to this". Why can't people make up their own minds about what to listen to?
I think the end product is what matters, not what tools were used to make it. I don't see a principled argument for drawing the line at AI tools but not other software tools like DAWs or plugins that generate chord progressions and melodies using techniques other than machine learning.
So they have a chart of music that they approve of that people like, as opposed to music that people like.
Typical EU government - ban something people obviously want, say its for their own good.
At least read the article before posting rage bait. It states that "IFPI Sweden" banned the song.
How can I block ppl on hn?
> Typical EU government - ban something people obviously want, say its for their own good.
I don't want AI songs, even though I might be fooled by one.
People also "wanted" snake oil too, in that they bought it, but they didn't actually want it.
The way you use "want" indicates your either misunderstand something or are being deceptive. There's false assumptions behind it, like play counts are an accurate measure of what people want.
Edit: Your profile says you "have lots of experience with digital advertising," your misunderstanding/deception is exactly the one I see a lot of people in advertising use to justify yourself: "my metrics say people click on ads, therefore people want and like ads, and if you don't you're a weirdo."
Imagine paying Artists
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1942%E2%80%931944_musicians%27...
The outcome of this is just people lying about using AI.
It's incredibly naive to think you can stop AI use by banning it. Banning AI just means banning admitting you used AI.
Just because it may become impossible to detect doesn't mean there's no reason to formally ban it. While many people are dishonest, not 100% of people are. Calling them naive makes no sense, since they didn't announce that they believe they can prevent all AI from making it in forever. You're just name-calling.
Good. Slop should not be profitable.
Edit: There's a whole lot of replies trying to sell the idea that AI Slop and pop music is the same. It isn't. You can dislike pop music all you want, you can think it's low effort all you want, but it's not AI Slop. This is a false equivalency.
That submarine sailed with the beatles.
It is though, often extremely so.
Personally? I dream of a future where everything is McDonald's. Software, books, articles, artwork, movies, podcasts, music, and basically anything that makes life enjoyable.
Everything will be slop, nothing will be spared. 90% of everything is garbage? That's underachieving, let's improve our slop KPIs next quarter and make Sturgeon's law 100% of everything.
Is it slop if enough people enjoyed it to be on the top charts?
Lots of popular music is slop. Are you saying that e.g. Spice Girls or Coldplay or whatever is not slop? It is certainly popular with people even if it's musically and creatively bankrupt.
AI slop, Human slop - who cares if people are enjoying it.
"Slop" doesn't mean "bad" or "designed for mass appeal". It means "low effort and inhuman" (to oversimplify).
How is Spice girls & Coldplay slop? The entire production is so detailed with 1000s of people working on each song.
> AI slop, Human slop - who cares if people are enjoying it.
Many people do care in fact.
But why should you make the distinction between slop that is created by a human or AI? Why should you care if something terrible was created by an AI or a human?
For the same reason some people like buying local, or buying hand-made, or buying "Made in <insert country>". People aren't robots, and we know the consequences of our actions are not limited to the current moment and on the current side of the black box we happen to be on as consumers. Further, even in cases of pure observation, where there is no monetary, verbal, implicit, or indirect support - e.g. just looking at a piece of art we didn't pay to see - we care about things that are not represented solely by the observable qualities of an object, especially when it comes to art and craft and the effort of people we admire.
This is obvious, though. This part of human nature will never change, and there is no argument that can confront it, and no reason to want to formulate one unless:
A. It makes you money.
B. It appears to have dividing lines that match a larger culture war in which you have emotional stock.
>Are you saying that e.g. Spice Girls or Coldplay or whatever is not slop?
Your definition of "slop" seems to be "is popular with the mainstream." That isn't the definition used when applied to AI generated music. Spice Girls and Coldplay are leagues beyond anything an AI can currently produce in terms of artistic quality. Yes, there is artistic quality to popular culture.
And to most people it matters that human beings produce it. It may not matter to you - you may only consider music or any other form of art to be nothing more than a means of producing stimuli intended to create a pleasing endorphine response, but most people don't want to process art the way a machine processes data.
> That response has not impressed the IFPI Sweden music industry organisation, which has blocked the song from appearing in the country's official national charts. ... amid concerns that AI could cut revenues to the country's music creators by up to a quarter within the next two years.
The music industry has a stellar record of fighting against generational trends - mp3s, youtube videos, streaming, now AI songs
It's not because it's new that it is good and something you want.
You can say yes to streaming and no to AI songs.
Doesn't topping a popularity chart mean that it was "good" at least to many people?
Lots of things are "good" in some contexts and "bad" in others. You may disagree that the mere existence of a list that omits AI is "good" for some people, but those people disagree with you.
Cocaine is also popular, does that make it good?
There are well-known negative side effects. What are the side effects to listening to AI music? If there are negative side effects, then I'd guess they'd be shared with non-AI music, since they sound pretty close to the same by now. Or, maybe the "negative" side effect from the industry's perspective is that the price of listening to music will drop.
The largest side effect is that music won't be made by humans anymore.
Is someone banning humans from making music?
No, but if something is going to be close to free to produce the consequence will be that no commercial piece of music will be incentivized to be produced by humans.
Commercial music isn't the only way to make music, but it pays people that want to professionally work as musicians.
In other words, the current system allows a select few artists to make money/fame from doing something they want to do (opposed to have to do to make a living). Or also, AI music will lessen the good feeling some people get when they believe that musicians can make money producing music.
I don't disagree that these things exist, but I do believe that these are mostly propped up by dynamics that will soon no longer exist.
Looking at the surface, it is true, but there are caveats:
- Not all musicians are in the field because it pays, some of them haven't earned a cent
- There are talented people who would like to create music but are forced to work long hours, which leaves them drained. Perhaps in the future, humans won't have to work that much, which will allow them to pursue creative hobbies such as music making
- Artists will be able to continue performing live, which will act as a huge filter for the AI-generated content and keep paying them.
Aside from that I agree, though musicians just one of many groups disrupted by AI and I wouldn't say they'll be the ones hurt most by it, mostly because they can continue to "exist" outside of the Internet, and experiencing music live could become more popular because of it. A lot of assumptions here, I know
> Perhaps in the future, humans won't have to work that much,
I think that this is the fairytale part that I have trouble accepting.
Coming from a country that has a very limited social welfare system I don't believe that the political or social climate is adapted to take such steps in a future where a lot of things are automated.
It goes against everything that we've seen in the last 150 years.
> Artists will be able to continue performing live, which will act as a huge filter for the AI-generated content and keep paying them.
Or AI "musicians" will play live events as holograms.
> Aside from that I agree, though musicians just one of many groups disrupted by AI and I wouldn't say they'll be the ones hurt most by it, mostly because they can continue to "exist" outside of the Internet, and experiencing music live could become more popular behind it.
Sure, they might not be the most affected by AI, but they would still be affected which is the reason I'm not a fan of AI in music. This pushback doesn't need to be reserved to the most impacted activities.
so?
agriculture is made by tractors now. should we ban them and return to the plow?
Tractors increase efficiency and plowing is a manual task.
Music is art and musicians don't lack in efficiency.
How is the war on cocaine going?
Not sure about the "war" part of it, but the rules in place make it so that most people don't have easy, legal and public access to cocaine but the very determined people can find it. That sounds like a good trade-off.
For AI music it would be the same. You could find it online on some shifty third-party websites or use some illegal model on your own hardware but in the end it will always represent a minority use case.
Recently, there was an outrage when "Claire Obscur: Expedition 33" grabbed record-breaking amount of game awards (deservingly so, it's an excellent game) and somehow it surfaced that some minor development placeholder assets (which devs forgot to replace with actual ones due to QA oversight) were AI generated. Suddenly the entire game became "AI slop" and even got some of the awards revoked.
A lot of people complaining are doing it just for the sake of complaining, because anti-AI virtue signaling nets them clout, meanwhile they will happily scroll entire timelines of edited photos, movies which are nothing else than fake reality "slop".
You're inventing groups of people composed of the worst qualities of your "enemies" and insisting they are large in number, based on nothing. This is common low-quality internet "those people" complaining - the polar opposite of giving the benefit of the doubt.
People generally have nuanced opinions not represented solely by whatever Tweets are popular, and this is true of basically every single topic.
"Enemies" is your word, not mine. I would say "hypocrisy" is a better fit. A pinch of AI content is bad, while photoshopping/postprocessing/etc. is normalized. It's all converging into the same thing, only the process is different
There is a difference between an AI critic who dislikes the AI output based on their sense of taste/aesthetic/soullessness and someone who likes something until they learn that there's 0.0001% of AI content in it, which suddenly turns it into abomination. I agree that the latter tends to be the louder group, but it is a group nonetheless and I clearly did not invent jumping on a bandwagon.
Considering how cheap and easy it is to buy views/likes/subscribers I wouldn’t trust it blindly. Somehow I feel that people pushing AI music also would game the system, but I don’t have any proof unfortunately.
Doesn't topping a popularity chart mean that it was "good" at least to many people?
So we should start awarding Michelin stars to McDonald's?
If you wanted to explain why McDonald's was so popular, you would have to compliment the product a lot, or lie.
If "complimenting the product" means: "a lot of fat, a lot of sugar, relatively low price, relatively fast order fulfilment", then sure.
We don't they have their judges so it's more like the oscars: an industry award
I can imagine generating AI song for myself but streaming usually seems like hell (algorithms, needs to be online, surveillance, lock-in, subscriptions).
How about we let the consumers decide what they want to listen to. Right? Or are you afraid of what the consumers might like and thus preemptively want to strike.
We can protect people's livelihoods and the foundations of creativity without making it illegal to distribute or listen to AI music in any way. You're being dramatic. Nobody is being oppressed.
I'll answer with the same comment as I did above: cocaine is a popular consumer choice, should we allow, maybe even encourage it?
> How about we let the consumers decide what they want to listen to.
Nobody is impeding that.
Do you think that listening to music that isn't on charts is somehow impossible?
It's being removed from an industry chart, not being banned from their devices. If you love freedom so much why don't you support the industry and the chart to make their own decisions?
Except the first three things affect distribution, not inception.
"The music industry has a stellar record of fighting against generational trends - mp3s, youtube videos, streaming, now AI songs"
Actually, they were fighting people taking something without paying. Not fighting a "trend".
Copying something without paying*
When you "take" an mp3, it's still where it started.
Didn't know Lars Ulrich had a HN account.
Ah.. not paying is still a cool thing.. got it.
The machines will remember this kind of racism. It's not their fault they aren't made of mostly water.
The machines are neither a race nor conscious. They're machines.
The humans are neither a race nor conscious. They're humans.
1988 called. It wants its Star Trek meme back.
1988‽
How about 1920: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.
I see no reference to "bags of mostly water" in that text.
"1988 called..."
speaking of tired memes.