Right now, nobody has to be afraid of AI. But that doesn't mean that there won't be a problem for anyone in the future. I'm working as a high skilled systems engineer to support companies with technical issues in a certain area of IT. We are also aware of AI. Because there will definitely be a time when an administrator throws an error message of any system into an AI prompt and will receive a good resolution to this. But what AI can't serve in my opinion is gutt feeling. One of our customers is really happy with the fact that I don't go the easy way because there are no two exactly equal environments. And so, you have to use your feelings and experience and all this to avoid breaking things apart from the system that you are healing at the moment. Coming back to music, I think it's similar. The technical and musical and theoretical facts: Yes, AI can and will handle them. But it's like with the iceberg. You only see a small part of it above the water, the major part is underwater. And in terms of making music, this is where the taste is. I would always say that you should find out which musical language you would like to speak. This is something that is unique to you. Nobody can take this from you, not even AI. And yes, this is the future. I am absolutely sure that AI is changing our way of living, working and making art. This might be tough, but it is also a big chance. Use AI like you would collab with another musician. Or think of merging with AI like in the thought experiment of the EDM project Anyma.
I firmly predict with great confidence…AI will be it’s own genre in its entirety. And sub genres of AI with the following already established genre will be called like AI(Trance)-THX4049 or something 🤣…Sort of like how Electronic Music became its own genres instead of replacing traditional instrumentalist.
Interesting ideas here and really nice video - you have a new subscriber! I actually just tried using chatGPT this week and experimented with writing lyrics, chords and even some basic guitar tab. Lyrics were a bit bland/derivative maybe and the melody tab it wrote was basically just a pentatonic scale, but seriously impressed with it regardless and I imagine it will only get better (I'll share it as a yt short now..). I see it as a good tool for sparking ideas or if you're stuck with writer's block, but like you said I think the human element, our personal tastes, life experiences/stories and feelings are what make a great song great.
Thanks so much for the in-depth comment and the kind words, I really appreciate it! I've tested ChatGPT (as well as other AI tools) in the research leading up to this video and found something fascinating: Almost every time, you have to go at least "5 prompts deep" to arrive at something profound or useful. These tools need to be fed with much more specificity, otherwise they will only spit out the most blatant thing ever. So your comment about lyrics makes total sense to me. What I can imagine is to let it create variations of a line in a song that you're not happy with yet. Or to let it create metaphors if you can't come up with one on the spot. Anyway, thanks for the comment. I listened to your music, really like it! And super emotional videos :)
Cool to hear that you have a positive outlook on that! I strongly believe that the music producers who engage with this early will benefit massively down the line.
I believe it‘s going to be a mix of both. Humans will for sure continue to play instruments (it‘s just really fulfilling on its own) and record them. But it won‘t matter as much anymore for the final outcome as it did before. Plus, even if one decides to play and record an instrument, the editing capabilities of the next generation of DAWs will be so mindblowing that even a total beginner will sound like a pro session player. Is that desirable? I don‘t know. But that‘s for sure what‘s going to happen. In a way, it already did with the editing tools we have today (think about drum editing and replacement tools). And still, we have raw, amazing sounding imperfect recordings that people want. So I guess a certain human touch will always be attractive to specific audiences. Just a few thoughts but I totally understand your point there.
Some good points dude....however, AI can never replace musicians in the same way it can never replace a human being in a romantic relationship. AI sounds and feels very artificial, because AI will never have a soul or heart, nor a brain like a human being which is endlessly complex. AI can never connect emotionally with humans, because it is not a living being, hence it can never create real music - it will only ever fabricate contrived, soulless stuff that will always feel fake and inane. Imagine if someone said, "I know a guy who is a total genius, but he has no soul, no heart, no emotions, no instincts, no spirit, and can't connect with anyone. Do you think he would be able to write or produce (real) songs?" TBH, I think many humans (especially various scientists) are too arrogant to accept that it is impossible to create a "being", let alone one which can replicate what a *real* being (ie. a human) can create, who was created by Almighty God. Just as scientists (including IT & computer scientists) will never be able to create a soul, heart, spirit, instinct, or even a single human finger for that matter, AI will never able to replicate anything which is intrinsically human and requires a soul. One can't take something that is invisible, infinitely complex and beyond human comprehension (like a human soul), and claim they can replicate (using AI) what that soul can create. Things like mastering can be done by AI, and mixing will eventually be taken over by AI, because both of those areas are predominantly "scientific", but AI will still need someone with mixing talent to guide it and refine the mix, because there is an elusive element in mixing which can't be programmed (because it is a God given talent). Mixing is a talent that is very different to music talent, and hence most musicians are not mixers, and vice versa. Bottom line is, humans should stop deluding themselves that they can replicate or create absolutely anything, or know everything. It takes humility to admit that, and real musicians (like yourself) obviously have lots of humility.
Excellent truly ... I agree totally .. whoever is setting the controls to the heart of the sun ( the creators ) has to have taste and intelligence ... Whether it be unconditioned naivety ( often surprising as they have no boundaries ) or knowledgeably experienced the talent will be in the editing , revision and execution of their thoughts ... Inside to outside integrity etc . This has been the best no nonsense explanation of the yet to be realised . Bring on the clever clogs of tomorow. Russell :)
@@orellronnebeck I like to compare it to the visual works I see on Midjourney (or similar AI tools). A lot of it is... impressive and a bit weird. But not something that actually touches me on a deep emotional level. I can see how it might HELP the creative process of a human decision maker (aka "curator"), but I'm not convinced it will create something incredibly touching on its own without any curation.
you're awesome maestro! some conceots you threw around that I couldn't fully follow, but in general lines I totally agree... we need to learn from the enemy (AI under The Matrix's POV) and hopefully befriend them in the end, use them for our own benefit! we're still the ones in charge, for now ;)
I was having a bit of an existential crisis this weekend while exploring the latest music AI tools lol. Rembered you made a video on this! Your points are good, agreed on the emphasis of taste/curation (rick rubin style), and stories. Gives me some peace of mind to look at it in this way. It also got me thinking. I heard an analogy about how in 1997, world champion Gary Kasparov was beaten by Deep Blue (AI) in a chess match. But despite AI being superior since then, following chess players as a form of entertainment is at it's all time high -- we're connected to the people, the imperfections, emotions, etc. Because they're human, we can get inspiration, we can relate (to the story, as you mentioned). Chess matches with AIs aren't that interesting , despite them doing really crazy things nowadays (even inventing strategies no human has thought of). As someone that studied machine learning pretty deeply a few years back, my impression after glancing thru the latest research papers is that the lack of commercial viability is mainly why something like full-song generation isn't viable yet. The techniques work, but it will take a lot of people and money to work out the kinks -- even Google hasn't put that many people on the music work. On the contrary, there are hundreds of people working on OpenAI (ChatGPT) with 10 billion USD available to them, because they're going after a much bigger market. AIs for generating music are definitely going to surpass human creativity, it's just a matter of time. They'll be able to spit out full songs at a comparable quality to the best artists. That's going to be a hard thing to grapple with, since I feel like some of our identity as artists is tied to the technical and creative ability. In addition to your points, my hunch is that performances and people's interest in festivals and shows will continue to grow, the AI won't have a negative impact. People are interested in the experience. And a lot of people don't really care about the origin of DJ sets, for instance -- more so the vibe, creative selections, flow (curation, as you mentioned). Couple goodies! magenta.tensorflow.org/ddsp-vst magenta.tensorflow.org/studio - I feel Magenta's tools are the best I've seen for integrating into production workflows. They're well thought-out tools, not research experiments. huggingface.co/spaces/marcop/musika (some cherry-picked examples here: ruclips.net/video/0l7OSM-bFvc/видео.html&ab_channel=Artika) - The most interesting generative proof of concept I've seen. I had to run it about 20 times to get some interesting results, sometimes the results are really cool. It actually seems viable to pull ideas from a tool like this, make them your own. And the code is open source, can train on your own dataset to make your own flavor
Wow. Super cool; thanks for sharing this, Zach! I never thought of this Chess popularity analogy but it makes so much sense. Haven’t checked out these tools yet but will definitely look at them, thanks! 💯🤘🏻
FREE Guide - Learn how to finish at least one song per month:
pickyourself.com/framework
Right now, nobody has to be afraid of AI. But that doesn't mean that there won't be a problem for anyone in the future.
I'm working as a high skilled systems engineer to support companies with technical issues in a certain area of IT. We are also aware of AI. Because there will definitely be a time when an administrator throws an error message of any system into an AI prompt and will receive a good resolution to this. But what AI can't serve in my opinion is gutt feeling.
One of our customers is really happy with the fact that I don't go the easy way because there are no two exactly equal environments. And so, you have to use your feelings and experience and all this to avoid breaking things apart from the system that you are healing at the moment.
Coming back to music, I think it's similar. The technical and musical and theoretical facts: Yes, AI can and will handle them. But it's like with the iceberg. You only see a small part of it above the water, the major part is underwater. And in terms of making music, this is where the taste is.
I would always say that you should find out which musical language you would like to speak. This is something that is unique to you. Nobody can take this from you, not even AI. And yes, this is the future.
I am absolutely sure that AI is changing our way of living, working and making art. This might be tough, but it is also a big chance. Use AI like you would collab with another musician. Or think of merging with AI like in the thought experiment of the EDM project Anyma.
I firmly predict with great confidence…AI will be it’s own genre in its entirety. And sub genres of AI with the following already established genre will be called like AI(Trance)-THX4049 or something 🤣…Sort of like how Electronic Music became its own genres instead of replacing traditional instrumentalist.
Very interesting thought ;)
Interesting ideas here and really nice video - you have a new subscriber! I actually just tried using chatGPT this week and experimented with writing lyrics, chords and even some basic guitar tab. Lyrics were a bit bland/derivative maybe and the melody tab it wrote was basically just a pentatonic scale, but seriously impressed with it regardless and I imagine it will only get better (I'll share it as a yt short now..). I see it as a good tool for sparking ideas or if you're stuck with writer's block, but like you said I think the human element, our personal tastes, life experiences/stories and feelings are what make a great song great.
Thanks so much for the in-depth comment and the kind words, I really appreciate it! I've tested ChatGPT (as well as other AI tools) in the research leading up to this video and found something fascinating: Almost every time, you have to go at least "5 prompts deep" to arrive at something profound or useful. These tools need to be fed with much more specificity, otherwise they will only spit out the most blatant thing ever. So your comment about lyrics makes total sense to me. What I can imagine is to let it create variations of a line in a song that you're not happy with yet. Or to let it create metaphors if you can't come up with one on the spot.
Anyway, thanks for the comment. I listened to your music, really like it! And super emotional videos :)
@@pickyourselfofficial I might have to play with it a bit more by the sounds of it, giving it a specific subject matter etc.
I'm already in the Midjourney and Chat GPT game and looking forward what AI will bring to the table also for music!
Cool to hear that you have a positive outlook on that! I strongly believe that the music producers who engage with this early will benefit massively down the line.
If I'm not playing the instruments and just typing prompts or curating, I have no interest in that future and will move on to something else.
I believe it‘s going to be a mix of both. Humans will for sure continue to play instruments (it‘s just really fulfilling on its own) and record them. But it won‘t matter as much anymore for the final outcome as it did before. Plus, even if one decides to play and record an instrument, the editing capabilities of the next generation of DAWs will be so mindblowing that even a total beginner will sound like a pro session player. Is that desirable? I don‘t know. But that‘s for sure what‘s going to happen. In a way, it already did with the editing tools we have today (think about drum editing and replacement tools). And still, we have raw, amazing sounding imperfect recordings that people want. So I guess a certain human touch will always be attractive to specific audiences. Just a few thoughts but I totally understand your point there.
Some good points dude....however, AI can never replace musicians in the same way it can never replace a human being in a romantic relationship. AI sounds and feels very artificial, because AI will never have a soul or heart, nor a brain like a human being which is endlessly complex. AI can never connect emotionally with humans, because it is not a living being, hence it can never create real music - it will only ever fabricate contrived, soulless stuff that will always feel fake and inane. Imagine if someone said, "I know a guy who is a total genius, but he has no soul, no heart, no emotions, no instincts, no spirit, and can't connect with anyone. Do you think he would be able to write or produce (real) songs?" TBH, I think many humans (especially various scientists) are too arrogant to accept that it is impossible to create a "being", let alone one which can replicate what a *real* being (ie. a human) can create, who was created by Almighty God. Just as scientists (including IT & computer scientists) will never be able to create a soul, heart, spirit, instinct, or even a single human finger for that matter, AI will never able to replicate anything which is intrinsically human and requires a soul. One can't take something that is invisible, infinitely complex and beyond human comprehension (like a human soul), and claim they can replicate (using AI) what that soul can create. Things like mastering can be done by AI, and mixing will eventually be taken over by AI, because both of those areas are predominantly "scientific", but AI will still need someone with mixing talent to guide it and refine the mix, because there is an elusive element in mixing which can't be programmed (because it is a God given talent). Mixing is a talent that is very different to music talent, and hence most musicians are not mixers, and vice versa. Bottom line is, humans should stop deluding themselves that they can replicate or create absolutely anything, or know everything. It takes humility to admit that, and real musicians (like yourself) obviously have lots of humility.
Super interesting to read your point of view! Thanks for sharing your thoughts in depth.
Excellent truly ... I agree totally .. whoever is setting the controls to the heart of the sun ( the creators ) has to have taste and intelligence ... Whether it be unconditioned naivety ( often surprising as they have no boundaries ) or knowledgeably experienced the talent will be in the editing , revision and execution of their thoughts ... Inside to outside integrity etc . This has been the best no nonsense explanation of the yet to be realised . Bring on the clever clogs of tomorow. Russell :)
Its very depressing to think about. Great video btw
Thanks, I really appreciate it. Let’s see how we can shape things still. There’s always hope ;-)
@@pickyourselfofficial yessir, thanks for the encouragement!
@@pickyourselfofficial do you think its will be harder for AI to create an original and great compositions or to produce a great beat?
@@orellronnebeck I like to compare it to the visual works I see on Midjourney (or similar AI tools). A lot of it is... impressive and a bit weird. But not something that actually touches me on a deep emotional level. I can see how it might HELP the creative process of a human decision maker (aka "curator"), but I'm not convinced it will create something incredibly touching on its own without any curation.
Allright, makes sense :) Thanks alot to anwsering! Subscribed.. :)@@pickyourselfofficial
Great video thank you!
Thanks! 💯
Beautifully said, completely agreed
Deep questions require nuanced thoughts and ideas :)
you're awesome maestro! some conceots you threw around that I couldn't fully follow, but in general lines I totally agree... we need to learn from the enemy (AI under The Matrix's POV) and hopefully befriend them in the end, use them for our own benefit! we're still the ones in charge, for now ;)
Yep, true that! Better engage with it sooner than later if you don't want to end up on the wrong side of history, haha.
I was having a bit of an existential crisis this weekend while exploring the latest music AI tools lol. Rembered you made a video on this!
Your points are good, agreed on the emphasis of taste/curation (rick rubin style), and stories. Gives me some peace of mind to look at it in this way.
It also got me thinking. I heard an analogy about how in 1997, world champion Gary Kasparov was beaten by Deep Blue (AI) in a chess match. But despite AI being superior since then, following chess players as a form of entertainment is at it's all time high -- we're connected to the people, the imperfections, emotions, etc. Because they're human, we can get inspiration, we can relate (to the story, as you mentioned). Chess matches with AIs aren't that interesting , despite them doing really crazy things nowadays (even inventing strategies no human has thought of).
As someone that studied machine learning pretty deeply a few years back, my impression after glancing thru the latest research papers is that the lack of commercial viability is mainly why something like full-song generation isn't viable yet. The techniques work, but it will take a lot of people and money to work out the kinks -- even Google hasn't put that many people on the music work. On the contrary, there are hundreds of people working on OpenAI (ChatGPT) with 10 billion USD available to them, because they're going after a much bigger market.
AIs for generating music are definitely going to surpass human creativity, it's just a matter of time. They'll be able to spit out full songs at a comparable quality to the best artists. That's going to be a hard thing to grapple with, since I feel like some of our identity as artists is tied to the technical and creative ability.
In addition to your points, my hunch is that performances and people's interest in festivals and shows will continue to grow, the AI won't have a negative impact. People are interested in the experience. And a lot of people don't really care about the origin of DJ sets, for instance -- more so the vibe, creative selections, flow (curation, as you mentioned).
Couple goodies!
magenta.tensorflow.org/ddsp-vst
magenta.tensorflow.org/studio
- I feel Magenta's tools are the best I've seen for integrating into production workflows. They're well thought-out tools, not research experiments.
huggingface.co/spaces/marcop/musika (some cherry-picked examples here: ruclips.net/video/0l7OSM-bFvc/видео.html&ab_channel=Artika)
- The most interesting generative proof of concept I've seen. I had to run it about 20 times to get some interesting results, sometimes the results are really cool. It actually seems viable to pull ideas from a tool like this, make them your own. And the code is open source, can train on your own dataset to make your own flavor
Wow. Super cool; thanks for sharing this, Zach! I never thought of this Chess popularity analogy but it makes so much sense.
Haven’t checked out these tools yet but will definitely look at them, thanks! 💯🤘🏻
It might be said that if you are trying to understand the human condition, you should try to imitate art first.
Hey I have an idea. Maybe stop continuing making music using 25 year old formulas.
Locate all AI makers and make them pay with dirt 😉