> But if someone gifted me an AI generated song I would ask why they didn't pay a few dollars -- honestly not much more -- to a real artist to do the same.

I literally made a Mountain Goats song about them playing a fantasy video game together with their daughter as we all sat on the couch. This did not rob any artist of any amount of money they ever would have seen. It was a novel moment accentuated and joyful for humans at zero cost to anyone else. The creative world is not zero-sum like you're presenting it to be

The problem with AI music, and in fact AI in general, is that weve spent the last few decades aggressively attacking the idea that art should get paid for at all and yet people still do it, because they love it. So musicians work for pennies, and yet people still need to replace them with a machine.

So even if you just pay someone else to make you a song, its not really any more expensive than this. Same with painting. What does this AI bring to the table, at all? It grosses me out.

People on this site should go pick up a guitar and write a 3 chord song about someone, itll take you a day if that. Its not hard! Its fun!

The problem with real music, is that it requires a hefty amount of musicians to establish a genre. This amount could be somewhere in the range of 100 to 1000 musicians.

When this critical number is not amassed then the genre effectively dies.

With A.I. we can resurrect dead genres, but not only that, we can combine genres together, popular genres with one another, also popular and unpopular genres or popular and dead genres.

Using A.I. for music is easier and much faster than traditional means, and this could greatly reduce the critical mass of musicians to support a genre. It could be reduced as much as 10 times, or 100 times, like one person creating 10000 songs or something similar.

By trying to compare A.I. music to traditional music, you are comparing 10 songs a real band makes, with 10000 songs an A.I. (human) musician makes. It's apples and oranges comparison.

I don't see why human music cannot be a genre, the best of all genres but just one, and an innumerable amount of A.I. genres which may not be so good, but they are infinite.

The real human music genre might be the best forever or just for the next 3 years, but so what? Let there be more genres some good some bad. No one is gonna listen to a cheap copy of an already existing song of an already existing genre, but songs already in existence should be used to train A.I. weights.

Regarding A.I. weights, smaller models forget much of the information they are trained on, and they are cheaper, faster and easier to be fine-tuned, also probably easier to apply RL reasoning on. In that way, A.I. musicians (or real musicians) could run the model in their computers and use it as an instrument instead of relying in companies with big models, slow and expensive.

And some times big and inefficient models copy text/code/music verbatim from the training data. But this is a bug, when small models become competitive enough, most people are gonna use those. They might even carry them around, like a personal band always ready to make melodies for them.

I’m a pretty big music fan and I have no idea what you’re on about. Where did you get this theory?

> The problem with real music, is that it requires a hefty amount of musicians to establish a genre.

Why is establishing genre a goal in the first place?

> This amount could be somewhere in the range of 100 to 1000 musicians.

This is demonstrably false. Genre is defined by critical consensus, and it can arise around one or a handful of bands.

> With A.I. we can resurrect dead genres

What dead genre are you after? I’d imagine there are folk styles that haven’t been kept alive, but I question whether AI recreations would satisfy anyone. I’d rather listen to authentic recordings instead. And if the genre doesn’t have a significant recorded catalog, you can’t train a generative AI to produce it anyway.

Yeah, it seems like a pretty contrived example and theory.

I think what the OP is trying to articulate is that they are aware of more genres now? Maybe AI makes exploration of niche genres more exciting and participatory for them. They are finding new genres and "expanding them", but it's just bc they were ignorant of them (or unengaged with the content of the song style) before they could participate in this way. I dunno, just trying to think what they might have experienced that would make them think some new universal was coming true * shrug *

>Why is establishing genre a goal in the first place?

What is culture, if not a common agreement on what is beautiful and ugly? Establishing a genre in music is not a goal, but we see it happen over and over again. It is how humans operate since forever, we mimic one another in fashion, in music and many other things.

> Genre is defined by critical consensus, and it can arise around one or a handful of bands.

It arises around a handful of bands, but if it doesn't grow past 5 bands let's say, we are talking about 50 songs in total every year. Who listens nowadays to only 50 songs per year?

> And if the genre doesn’t have a significant recorded catalog, you can’t train a generative AI to produce it anyway.

Yes you can. Synthetic data generation is a big thing already and tens of millions of dollars are poured into it every year.

I’m not sure if you misunderstand genre, or the way humans relate to music, or both? Culture is not genre. I don’t know anyone who listens to only the current year’s output from a single genre.

I haven’t done the analysis, but consider someone who listens to pop radio: if one new song per week makes it into heavy rotation I’d say that sounds like the right ballpark.

Personally I’d be ecstatic if there were 50 worthwhile new songs to listen to each year.

I understand synthetic data. I question whether anyone will accept the results.