Hey all,
Been slowly getting back into the habit of working on MusicBrainz stuff today, and decided to put some focus into adding relations between songs I like, and the songs they sampled. So far it’s been rather run-of-the mill stuff, something sampling Justin Timberlake, another sampling Limp Bizkit, some stuff I was working on few days ago sampling Skrillex, Tech N9ne, Avicii, list goes on.
However, I decided to see where the vocals came from for one of my all-time favourite tracks, that being cynical by N_dog. Song is fantastic, love the energy the track has, instrumentals are great, love the switchups, list goes on.
Decided to search the lyrics and came across the lyrics through Shazam, which matched them to a track called Fuzzy Love by Diluli. If the album art didn’t already make it clear this was AI-generated, looking around further brings up a YouTube channel of the artist where the banner reads “Applied AI Architect”.
I feel conflicted here with what I think about this song now. The first thing that comes to mind is disappointment that the vocals sampled were taken from a track that was AI-generated knowingly or unknowingly. The vocals aren’t from a real person, which feels it should ruin the immersion, and knowing that they’re almost certainly generated from a dataset without the consent of however many artists is honestly gross.
On the other hand, I weirdly almost appreciate the track more than I did before? The song itself is without a doubt made by a person, it just so happens the sample they used was from an AI-generated song. A lot of work went into it, and the fact that they took stuff that was devoid of creativity and gave it creative life honestly feels a bit uplifting, even despite the fact that the vocals would be much preferred to be from an actual person.
What are your guy’s thoughts on this? Is sampling AI music giving acceptance to AI music as a whole thus bringing the music industry down, or does it come off as rejecting the idea of literally lifeless music by infusing it with genuine human creativity?
It’s called cognitive dissonance. You’ve already decided that all AI-generated content is bad - then you stumble across a piece of it that you actually like, and now you’re struggling to square those two conflicting views.
It’s that natural human instinct to want things clear-cut - good or bad, black or white - clashing hard with the nuance that actually exists in the real world.
This is the real answer to the question.
My dude, you have no idea how much of contemporary popular music of any genres that use lots of drum machines and synths and samplers are built with ready made loops. Even top hits from demon producers contain sounds from sample libraries and midi libraries and tools to create them. Electronic dance music, hip hop, pop songs… All of them.
It is inevitable that eventually these samples and loops will be generated by AI. There have been plenty of tools for generating compositions of drums, chords, leads, bass lines and so on for a very long time. Before AI there were tools to do it algorithmically and mathematically. Before computers composers did it by hand by lifting bits and pieces from others, repeating patterns with variations, flipping sequences, imposing arbitrary rules on themselves while composing and so on. In the 1950s there was a sort of culmination with the modernistic movement of Serialism that attempted to liberate composition from all musical parameters into pure algorithmic pieces. Check out Messiaen and Boulez. It sounds pretty much what you’d imagine pure algorithmic music to sound like but it was a milestone for that time and era.
The thing is that while use of technology can be abused by the greedy and the lazy and the untalented to make unoriginal slop, there will also always always always be creative people that use whatever they get their hands on to make stuff that is unique remarkable in ways that the technology itself could never achieve by itself.
I don’t have answer. This something i have been thinking about lately after listening to a podcast saying that most programming productions now employ AI assistants and its become more or less standard.And when going to github to get software, i realized there is no way of knowing which app were coded using AI or even “Vibe Code”. A let’s player i watch has encountered a couple of Games that used AI, especially AI vocals and both her and her audience are now apprehensive(and so am i) about games
Its something i think we need to accept as time goes on, the idea that we can always tell and to be on 24/7 AI alert. Its just not sustainable.
Either way i still avoid AI stuff, especially art but as time goes on, i know i will care less and less. I am still hoping that its all Bubble that will burst in a few years but you cant hold your breathe forver
For GitHub, I was interviewing someone recently who had a large open source project on their portfolio. My coworker pointed out that it had to be vibe coded simply because they wrote an inhuman amount of code in a short period of time. That could be one way to tell.
ive had to suffer artists ‘sampling’ other artists with or without consent for way longer than before llms were a dream in some nerds eye…
that the source of the sample is now “an llm” instead of “other musician” or “random noise sample” or “sci fi movie” or “human farts” doesnt seem to matter to me.
should artists be paid for their shit? yep. but this is not some new phenomenon.
if the whole thing was basically ai generated would i care even then?.. naw. i prolly wouldnt. gettin very nihilistic these days
To me it always boils down to “yes I know the creator of this media (did/does bad things) but I really like this music so I’m fine giving them money and supporting their lifestyle”
Change the media to movies, paintings, anything really. If the creator is shitty, I can’t condone giving them money. Every time you stream a song, buy a Blu-ray, or rent an e-book, the creator gets royalties and their numbers in some imaginary leader board go up.
Basically, if you want to listen to music like this that’s up to you, but at the very least don’t indirectly support the LLM thievery and pirate the song instead. Fuck jk Rowling, get Harry Potter movies at TPB. don’t support EA, torrent their games. Sail the high seas for anything controversial, the creators don’t need your money and you shouldn’t want them to have it.
Do you like it? I mean, not rationally, but emotionally. Do you listen to it and say “nice stuff” or not?
I think ot boils down to it.
Ai is a tool, not evil per se. All new tools at the beginning are the devil, then they get accepted and guess what, they are just tools.
So was for TV, even radio and fax. Now it’s ai time. If we are less luddites and more ready to see it as just a new tech, we might start finding also good ways to regulate it, which is very much needed.
I only partly agree. When we take into account the discussion about AI training and copyright issues, it gets more complicated imho.
Is the artist actively using shit like that in all their music, or is it more of a one off type of thing?
I feel like that would make the difference for me personally.
I don’t care how much flour and sugar you add, you’re not getting a nice cake when you start with a turd. Slop is slop.
And that is an opinion, which is subjective. Also irrelevant here because the OP already said they like the track, which was made by a person even if it used a machine-generated sample (which was, as some others have pointed out, common and perfectly acceptable before machine learning models were a thing).
As to my opinion: “It remembers even a single atom of slop” - you sound like a naturopath. Edit: your cake was made with flour which was ground from wheat which was grown in the ground using fertiliser, therefore: your cake is made of shit. Peak logic.
