I am a computer scientist, and the category error problem constantly annoys me. We find a problem that requires a lot of intelligence in humans, like playing chess or go at a grandmaster level, and declare that AI is therefore "intelligent". For some reason, it's only AI that we use this kind of language about. The best human weightlifter is easily outcompeted by a small forklift, but we don't call the forklift "strong". The best human sprinter is outcompeted by a locomotive, but we don't call the train "fit". Hell, computers have been beating humans at mental arithmetic for ages, and that's even a marker of human intelligence. To quote the great computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." One of the under-appreciated aspects of the Turing test is that it was an activity that humans should find easy, not something like playing chess which humans find difficult. It's these "easy for us" problems where AI tends to fail, partly because they are the problems that machines find very hard, and partly because you can't get money to solve unspectacular problems. I want a machine to do things that I find easy but tedious, like cleaning my bathroom.
Sure, I'd like a machine to do the tedious stuff like cleaning. However, I'd also want a machine to cure diseases and make nuclear fusion viable, for example. If a machine can solve hard problems and make life on Earth better, I'm all for it. Also, I don't really like that quote. To me it's very interesting to ponder the question whether a computer can think. It made me contemplate about what thinking actually is and in what way our thinking is different than how an LLM outputs text. What's so special about us that would make this question uninteresting? Not much, me thinks. In the end, we are also just machines, albeit very complex ones.
@@bobrandom5545Prof Roger Penrose has proven that when the human mind understands something, it’s not running algorithms. But running algorithms is all computers can do. Whether computers can think depends on how you define thinking, I guess, but I think there will always be modes of thought that we don’t know how to make computers do because we have no idea how we’re doing them.
@@richardhunt809 He didn't prove anything. Don't get carried away. Keep in mind that his theory about microtubules is an extremely fringe theory, barely considered as more than pseudoscience by most of the scientific community.
Yeah I don’t mean the microtubules thing. That’s more to do with Stuart Hammeroff anyway. I’m talking about Penrose’s mathematical argument in his book Shadows of the Mind. It doesn’t get into neuroscience.
Many voices were stolen, uncredited, spliced together to synthesize that thing we listened to, and zero musicians were paid for training the robot to do it badly
this comment is partially missing the point. the argument isn't just that AI music will never reach a level where it's considered "good" (whatever that means) by most people's standards (not just those who listen to the top 100 pop songs on spotify). the main problem with the Red Lobster AI song is that the inputs into producing the final product is of no importance to 99% of people who consume music. (If the Red Lobster AI song was actually good, would this completely eliminate your criticism of AI music?) replace the Red Lobster song with the newest drake or taylor swift song, the point still stands. nobody cares about the actual action of music, just the final product, which will be what allows these Red Lobster AI songs and more to proliferate so easily and readily.
AI is the new CGI - if capitalism can lower standards enough, people won't notice or care about its use in some low quality contexts. The decline in superhero movies is noticeable as they've been able to get away with more and more "film some people in front of a green screen, generate everything else in post." They drip-fed it to popcorn audiences until expectations were lowered appropriately. But there are still realms in film where you can't get away with that - Monkey Man still requires some belief on the audience's part that the action involves real people fighting, The Lighthouse couldn't get away with Willem Dafoe in a green screen suit and filling in the scene around him. AI can replace already pretty bad or forgettable music - commercials, grocery store radio. Getting to the next level where it can replace some one hit wonder Top 40 might be possible, but the step beyond that to creating the connection Swifties feel with Taylor or a Nick Cave audience feels with him I don't see that as possible in any universe.
AI really will be perfect for corporate music. soulless, lifeless, is as obvious as obvious can be in telling you what to feel, but hey it'll do for what it's meant to do
@@BloodHassassin Write a dad joke about AI music: Why did the AI musician go to school? Because it wanted to learn the "al-gorithm" to hit all the right "notes"!
I really very much like the concept of "musicking", it reminds me of a quote from someone I very much respect a few years back, they were talking about NFTs and the commoditisation of the visual medium, but this hit me so much I don't think I'll ever forget it: "Art is a verb. It's a process. It's an act of communion. What hangs on the wall is a fucking collectible. What you and the artist communicate across centuries is the art." Obviously Small's book and concept well predate this quote, but it honestly changed my perspective on why art and music mean so much to me, and what's truly valuable and meaningful to me as someone who appreciates these things.
I like to define art as a form of communication, which annoys AI art bros to no end because, well... AI art doesn't meaningfully communicate anything because AI doesn't communicate. AI only imitates the act of communication but it's imitation has no parseable information inherent in it. If a Massive Language Model outputs a message telling me tells me it hates my guts I know I'm okay because the AI cannot hate, doesn't know what guts are or who I am and it was prompted to act like an asshole anyway. The output is, functionally, not communication. The art as communication thing also keeps the term "art" useful. If anything I can experience or perceive anywhere from anything, even the natural world is art then that makes the term art so vague to be not practical. Limiting art to communication, preferably communication with meaningful information (so as to not concern ourselves with the question if the stars are alive and are communicating with us through secret signals in how they twinkle in the night sky) keeps it broad enough to encompass most human expression but limited enough to still be useful. Perhaps in the future a true general AI can overcome these hurdles but we're a long ways away from any of that.
I don’t like this philosophy because it inherently gatekeeps art. I don’t get to define what constitutes art anymore than you or anyone else does. It carries an air of elitism and arrogance and frankly, I think is counter-productive to artistic expression.
@@sickcallranger2590 Well words are tools. For a word as a tool to be useful it has to have limits, otherwise it stops having any communicative value. For the word "art" to have meaning something must not be art. Calling a breeze of air "art" might be nice as a metaphor but as a literal statement it has very literal meaning to it. That's why my definition is very very broad. Speaking is an art, posing is an art, walking can be an art. Anything that has communicative value is art, and all humans do is communicate. To be human requires communication, it's hard not to art as a human. So the gate isn't really keeping anyone out... but it does mean trying to rationalize non-human output as art is incredibly difficult. Especially AI output since narrow AI does not communicate anything, it cannot communicate because it cannot think. There is nothing to interpret from raw AI output aside from the skills of the programmer; in a sense the AI itself is art (it communicates the skill of its creators) but it's output has no art in it ( AI output saying "I love you" doesn't not show any thoughts or feelings on behalf of the AI because it doesn't think or feel, only imitate those qualities).
Adam Neely's Blues sessions often explore various keys typical in blues music, including but not limited to E, A, and Bb. These keys are commonly used in blues to accommodate guitarists' preferences and the range of typical blues instruments like guitars and harmonicas.
Or something like, "MAKE IT BANGIN'!" See, "bangin'" is slang term with a largely subjective meaning. What you find bangin', I may find to be a snooze. And visa versa. Due to the subjective nature of a lot of musical slang terms, the AI would only be able to adapt to the situations for which it was coded. E.g.: "LET US HAVE A BANGIN' JAZZ RIFF-OFF!" gives the AI 3 directives: 1) Play Jazz. 2) Make it energetic and exciting. 3) Use riffs as the basis of the jam session. If you coded it to handle all 3 of these, then cool. If not, it's going to try and handle it, BADLY.
Ah, gotcha! In that case, let's jam in the key of G major. It's a pretty versatile key, great for both upbeat and mellow vibes. What instrument do you have in mind?
Seriously great video Adam, I'm a grad student in computer science and musician/composer doing my thesis on generative music right now. I think an important thing to bring up too is the difference between generative systems being built today and those built by the original pioneers of 'generative music' like Brian Eno and David Cope from the 1960s-1980s. I'd argue that a lot of those older processes and systems thought more 'human-like,' in that Eno, Cope and others tried to make systems that extended their own compositional thought process (Music for Airports from Eno, It's Gonna Rain from Steve Reich, EMI, etc...). But today, that compositional curiosity is gone, and companies like Suno, Meta, Google, and others are looking at music like the next 'check box' for AI and trying to achieve greater technical prowess.
As a researcher on social interaction (including social and distributed cognition), I love that you did a deep dive into cognition beyond the computational model that is so prevalent in everyone's imagination at this point. I hope folks learned something from it. (I'm also a little jealous that you explained so clearly in a few minutes what took me years of PhD study to understand. Bravo!)
I think we actually will see software that can "jam". There isn't necessarily a "ghost in the machine", however. What we'll be getting is a reflection of the spirit of the people it's playing along with. If we fail to recognize that we're dealing with a sophisticated mirror, then it'll seem to have a spirit of its own. We're still probably going to be flooded by algorithmic music though, and "artists" that can do a great job pretending to play for "live performances". This is just a continuation of formulaic pop. My guess is that we'll get some genuinely novel creativity on the periphery which draws on AI, in the same way that digital audio has introduced entirely new genres. What I'm really curious about when it comes to generative AI art is whether the masses will actually get tired of it. If they've got a constant supply of generated pop-on-demand, I could imagine that there is a threshold where it's "too good", and they lose interest. Perhaps the "AI music revolution" will result in a retro movement, back to in-person performances where we can easily see that real humans are playing together.
You've made me recall how MTV was riding the "Unplugged" wave for a bit in the early '90s. It was a minor badge of honour for artists to be capable of playing their sets sans electric guitars/studio beats, as a contrast to the distortion and synthesizer heavy 80s. Maybe the next wave won't even be online at all!
Yes, for sure, the cheaper something is to create, the less value it has. When we can mass-produce any musical experience we want just by asking for it, it turns the experience into something disposable. Music (mainstream pop music) has been on that trajectory for a long time now. Every big hit is a flash in the pan, and people forget it as quickly as they embraced it.
I spent something like a week trying to get good tracks from Udio, and at first it was exciting to find something good. But with time it became pretty exhausting to listen bad take after bad take in search of something I deemed acceptable so when I finally had a finished track I was so tired of it, just listening to it made me feel nauseous.
After a while, AI generated music will all sound very generic, typical and sound similar to each other. What AI does is mix and match existing music that is out there, but it is unable to reinvent or improvise/create.
amazing comment. made me think of a quote from brian eno, "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature" i feel like the same way generations now are getting back into vinyl because of the vinyl distortion and scratches will be how people in an age of AI music will look back on more "primitive" and "imperfect" creations of music.
your point about AI needing to be able to play an instrument with a physical body ignores that music can be made entirely electronically. In software. Which the AI could theoretically interact with, since it is also software.
the same patreon that is closing accounts of Ukrainian bloggers, because "we're all about peace and love, so the fact that you guys are getting screwed over by russians is kind of ruining our hippy vibes, man".
Hi Adam, this is one of the best "AI will never be able to do " argument I've ever seen ! For context, my current job *is* about GenAI (for instance I know exactly the ElevenLabs settings you used for Xenakis), and I started doing machine learning 20 years ago. So I've heard my share of silly "AI will never be able to do " arguments, that proved to be wrong in the end. I'm also an amateur musician who knows what jamming is, and the very subtle body language communication it can involve. I was very skeptical at the beginning of the video, but this is maybe the first time I hear such a compelling argument against AI taking the place of humans. Two thoughts to slightly moderate your argument : * I do think that machines will be at some point able to pass your musical Turing test, but it might require a big paradigm shift in architecture, training procedure, etc. (a shift that will not likely happen soon for the reasons you describe around economic incentives). * In a sense I feel that that Turing test is a bit unfair in the sense that it involves doing a thing well "with humans", and not "between AIs". It is like saying "Oh but humans will never pass the spider test which consists in being able to get offsprings with spiders". I'm sure that AIs will be able to jam "between them" because they will find digital ways to replace the subtle body language and so on. (It reminds me the "Hanabi" card game test : it is a cooperative game that AI can do very well when they are playing together, but do badly if they try to play with humans.) Keep up the good work !
Good points! Yes I felt Adam framed the argument strangely by giving AI a test it’s not even trying to solve (as far as I know). Generative AI music is just that: it’s all about the output, not the performance. Even IF we got to a point where we had robot bands…well, it’s utterly pointless, right? Performative AI is extremely pointless, and solves no problem - other than being a novelty for 5 minutes. Generative AI however DOES solve problems in that it can create things like ad / stock music very quickly. I’ve used Udio to “discover” new music and I’m finding it very fun. Of course it’s way less creative than building a track in Ableton but then Udio can be used to create only vocals (for example) so I could use it as another tool in the toolbox.
I don't think it'll take a paradigm shift in the way the technology is built. I'm pretty sure a transformer model with enough context would work. But I speculate that we're more likely to accidentally build something that can do it before any of the major players find it worth their time to intentionally do it.
@@codahighland Transformers are not realtime and none of them currently work with a context of other music + human spatiotemporal posture. So by that measure, there will indeed need to be architectural changes.
Sorry, but I don't get your point. If you say that you _do_ think that machines will be able to pass the musical Turing test, how do you agree with him at all?
@@ldlework Transformers are as realtime as you want them to be; it's not an architectural limitation, just a user interface one. There are definitely some transformer models that have been used for music already. And adding additional data inputs isn't an architectural change. There's nothing fundamentally new that would necessarily need to be invented; it's just a matter of putting together the pieces with the necessary intent and collecting enough data.
As someone who works in data and AI, but also creates and plays music, I can say you did a fantastic job. I have been thinking about many of the points you raised for a long time since GenAI became all we talk about in my workplace. You basically provided me with the missing bits to see the whole picture in the music space. Very good narrative and overall video. 👌🏼
I don't understand why pop-science AI media has focused singularly on art. It is, especially in the context of music, one of the few situations in life where the human performing it is as, or more, important than the art being performed. "Another box to tick" is a good way of phrasing how many companies think about this problem. It is a briefly entertaining imitation of a human experience.
Because it gets the clicks, is my guess. There's so much more important and usefull stuff AI is doing like helping develop new medications or researching material science but no one is gonna be outraged by that
Kurt Vonnegut once said something like, “Some of the important things in life are food, sex, but also a philosophical idea called becoming. This is why I don’t like computers in the home. You need to become. And Bill Gates is saying you don’t have to. Your computer can do it for you.” Part of his idea of how a person becomes was the creative process. He spoke often about how people need to write stories and poems for each other without caring whether or not they “make it”-it’s just a human thing to do, same as jamming with friends or playing sports or having a conversation. You need a creative outlet. I am totally convinced that machines cannot make music or art or literature. They can make things that look and sound like it, but they can’t make it because to make it you have to be a human and you have to mean something, and machines can’t mean.
While AI art might be ruining parts of art, it is still a fantastic tool to further the ability of artists, much like a sample library can limit the exposure of instrumental players, but has made way for so much creativity for artists in music like rap. We see that professional artists often have apprentices prep canvases with a simple or even somewhat detailed background that may not be the subject of a painting. It's quite amazing that an artist can prompt an AI to do that dirty work for them, it gives more time to spend on the parts that they care about. In fact, I view AI in the same way for almost all applications. People might say that engineers graduating on chatgpt aren't good to hire, but I heavily utilize chatgpt so that when I am approaching a problem that involves information I am not brushed up on, I can ask chatgpt to streamline the info relevant to the problem. Before I would have to find the topic, then backtrace through textbooks until I find the necessary concepts I needed to brush up on. It's just a tool after all. Every tool merely has the purpose of making a job easier, whether that be going from a rock to a sharp rock as our ancestors did, or from google searches to AI prompts.
A lot of people want to have their dreams realized but don't have the means to develop the skills to a satisfying level. Many of my friends who can't draw love being able to put a vision in their head into the real world. In that regard, i think being a director of a creation is a feeling everyone should try at least once, and Ai has been an excellent tool for that. But as always, greed and such ruins the beauty of being able to print out as many iterations as your heart desires. And you see tech bros mechanizing whatever they can
I think that i could work like a Transformer maybe... Supose that you have an AI that given a Input plays something... Train it with a lot of jams, and then just give the Model some pseudo random variables to start the song, a little clip makes the deal or some ramdom generated thing, and then Just kept the model listening for some seconds, then let him play and train the model i a way that it plays things that are close to the space where the input lands, in the same way a transformer predicts the next word, let it predict the next notes... and there you go. You can add a randomness value in order to make it more predictable or crazy, just like you do with Transformers
Yeah I think this possibility is a lot closer than Adam thinks. I think the only reason generative AI can't "jam" is simply because no one has tried to develop such a thing yet. All the pieces are there. I've heard some pretty good AI generated sax solos over Giant Steps. Adding the ability to visually and auditorily observe and respond to cues is just a matter of integration.
The reason the AI generated music is so good, is because AI is basically copy-pasting. But instead of literary, it's copy-pasting the underlying patterns. You don't have to hate that the music was so good, humans were the original authors of the patterns, so it's basically still something we've created. It's just that we can't hear only the patterns.
What a shame. We wanted technology to automate the boring stuff for us, like factory jobs, and give us time to make art and music, and instead we’re all working and the machines are making art.
It's horrifying, it should be illegal. There's no way to imagine any real social benefit behind this door they're unlocking. You can't even frame it in the context of "if we don't the Chinese will." Let them - who cares? AI generated music is not of some immense strategic value. The techies and Silicon Valley have betrayed us all to enrich themselves.
Yeah. But where I live there is an significant uptick in audience of live performances. I hope there will be a revival of analog life styles as soon as people get overfed by fast (music)food, fast everything. I am not holding my breath though... Most folks want cheap and fast.
I think the line about making music a problem to solve is what really irks me. This AI push feels like the final stage of reducing all art to a product, to something to sell or show off for status rather than appreciate in any meaningful sense. I hope it all burns out, but I'm uncomfortable with the environment around it.
Why can't we have both? Like maybe ~10% of my musical time is playing the guitar, checking info, videos or playthroughs from the artists I like (or even watching a video like this one about the meta of music). But the other ~90% of the time, I just listen to music. That's it. And I don't see why I should care that machine learning was involved. I don't believe in souls and ghosts and magic. I think we are biological machines bound the laws of physics. So all those arguments about ai-art being soulless mean absolutely nothing to me. souls don't exist to begin with...
exactly this when these models first began rolling out, i was hopeful about their potential as a tool. something that could lay down a rough foundation for a song or an image or a story but that hope is long gone. they are not tools, or at least are not being used as tools - they are being used to mass produce superficially pretty at best but ultimately garbage 'art' that is pure commodity. it is so clearly and purely the 5% wanting a second go after their NFT project imploded and died can art produced by a large language model have meaning? maybe, but there's not even a genuine effort to do that right now, and certainly all of this 'art' produced for the sake of selling it alone will never mean anything
We're going to burn out and become uncomfortable with the environment, as vulture capital and pirate equity set billions of dollars and the literal atmosphere on fire, to power these large language models that will never produce a real ROI.
when you see AI evangelists discuss their vision of the future, it's obvious they view all media, not just music, as passing, pleasurable aesthetics to briefly consume before discarding. their utopian future is one where all media is slop designed to appeal to the lizard brain with no further thought put into it. nothing unique, nothing interesting, no consideration of connection to and of the artist through the music, no auteurism, etc. their goal is reduce the production of media to a method that appeals to the most base art consumer and nothing more.
@@hastesoldatour souls are our experience as humans. Which is entirely unique to each one of us. A machine doesn't have that so anything it makes will be hollow.
Professor of computer science & amateur musician from the Netherlands here. First, thanks for all the thorough and well-researched videos, always a joy to watch. "AI cannot do X" arguments are, in my opinion, always tricky: AI has surprised all of us, even researchers in the field, with its incredible progress. In particular, I am not convinced about the interaction argument. Reinforcement learning is branch of AI that is specifically tailored to interacting agents learning behavior in a dynamic environment. Amazing progress by companies like Boston Dynamics has enabled robots run and do back flips. I see no reason why in several years this technology would not be able AIs to play in jam sessions. Sure, there are challenges, like there were in AI before. So the real question is how should we musicians, writers, scientists and all other relate ourselves to AI? This video makes a good contribution to that debate and the various aspects.
Yeah, Adam is a great resource when it comes to musical knowledge but he’s out of his depth here, and just flat out wrong. If there was any money in doing so, I’m fairly certain that one of the big AI labs could train a model _right now_ that could pass the musical Turing test. Let alone many years into the future.
You're absolutely right! I've been involved in a cancer reseaerch lab which was training an AI to do the pathologists' job. Back in 2020, their "current" version after two years of coding was slightly better than a panel of 12 pathologists with 20 years experience in the field each in the first world (they were from different countries). That made the software better than 99% of pathologists world wide at cancer detection and determination what kind of cancer it was and how to treat it. Same in drug development, ALL molecules are first designed by software to find out if they'd work in theory and only those with the highest potential are created in real life for further up studies. We tend to say that 1 in 10K potential drugs are followed up in a lab, and from those, another 1 in 10K make it to the market. Software again does the bulk of the work and that with companies actively keeping their work secret and not helping each other much in fear of losing profits.
The soccer analogy is the best way I’ve heard to show the difference between the end product and the process/creators behind it. An AI could very feasibly be trained to generate HD video of a full sports game. But I’d be very interested to ask sports fans if they’d be invested in the outcome of a game that wasn’t physically played and where none of the players are real people. Would they watch excited to find out who will win, worry about their team making a mistake, believing that any outcome is possible? Would they wear the jersey of their favourite AI player? Art isn’t art without artists the same way that sport isn’t sport without athletes.
@@JonBrase I'm tempted to say that in the case of movies or novels, people (as you say) are drawn in by the underlying story, whether it be grounded in reality or not. They attach emotion and value to certain moving story arcs, which can be often-used tropes or new, unique plots. As for sports, people tend to be strongly drawn in by the underlying human aspects: athletes pushing their boundaries, teams 'clutching' against all odds, sportsmen delivering a stellar performance despite injury. Perhaps most important of all: the prior expectations weighed against the actual outcome of a match or contest. A match played by a completely dominating soccer team against a significantly inferior one will not be engaging at all, because the outcome will in most cases follow expectation. Hence such matches, when played by machines, will not have the same unpredictability (and are in fact much more deterministic because of the fixed capacities of the machinery).
@@boristerbeek319true, but its a different kind of spectacle, human chess players have been outmatched by AI long time ago, but people still watch humans play chess as it's more about the human abilities against one another, rather than as a whole, since as a whole even the best human players lose to the AI. But if AI can create an interesting story in that match, then maybe some people will. It's true that people get invested in things that aren't real all the time, we usually call that art.
@@boristerbeek319 so do we think music is closer to novels/movies where the end product can be engaging without knowledge of a creator? Or is music closer to sports where the human beings behind it provide most of what we love about it? I think this would inform us on if AI music could really capture attention as art in itself or if it’ll never surpass marketing/elevator music because we need the story of an artist behind the art.
@@TheManinBlack9054 This raises another extremely pertinent point: AI chess has become its own category, and millions of people love to watch it. It's not about the story, but about the technical precision and how far AI can push the bounds of perfection which makes it so interesting to watch.
A few weeks ago I tried out the Udio AI. The more specific you are, the more impressive it is. Kind of fun. I asked it to make a funky jazz fusion track with heavy use of B3 and interesting polymeter. And it made a pretty cool song! But I forgot to select "instrumental" so it had some James Brown type voice shouting excitedly about organs and time signatures.
I don't know. I had an opposite expirience a few days ago. Like I asked a very specific thing - a violin solo. Generated 3 times, got six results. Only one had any strings in it at all and far from solo. It seems like it actually works better if you give it broader description on what to do. But then the problem comes that you have far less control over the content. Personally, I'd prefer these AI to output midi/sheet music because it seems like the most useful it can be to actual musicians and more precise music writting if it is used to suggest ideas. It is a common thing to borrow something from others in music (a long list of classical pieces that influenced Star Wars sound track comes to mind) and AI crudly speaking is first and foremost statistics, so AI could be a great tool to suggest you what to borrow. but unfortunally the people who make these AI don't care about music and musicians like Adam said. For them music is only data and business.
Really, I found the opposite to be true. When I try to get specific it gets weird. I have the same issue with image generators. It's like they really want to do their own thing, not what I want. I like weird though so it's all good
Never is a long time, Adam...! LOL. But I get your point and loved the video. Reading halfway thru Musicking and loving it. I think the salient point for this video was "as long as it's good enough". That's it. If we look at our current lives, we usually settle for good enough all the time and not much about the process. Hopefully this will change once most jobs are rendered obsolete by this Coming Wave (another great book, btw). I wonder how we'll pay our bills then though...
I am just completely and utterly terrified by the idea of removing creative people from the process of making art, because then what you are essentially getting is raw output straight from the boardrooms. For things like commercial music, the bad ideas and tastes of people with the money wont even have the buffer of being filtered through some creative individual. Truly, a fresh hell awaits us all.
This might unfortunately happen if big companies capture the space. We need to protect open source at all cost. And combat the push for license requirement on training data.
truly creative people will not be removed. AI algorithms are imitative, still. They don't yet have the power to invent new styles. they will only replace imitative artists, for now at least.
So it's time to revive the good ol' driveway concerts for the neighborhood. Many of those. With a few tacos you've got something I would pay to attend....
Art (especially music, where the experience is live) is just as much for the person making it as for the people who view it. It’s unhealthy to think about art as purely for the viewing experience when for most if not all artists making art IS the part that’s important. The best artists don’t even care how it’s received.
I remember browsing TH-cam cat videos, and I landed on one about a kitten stumbling, pretty normal, right? The short had annoying music playing, again normal. The 'cameraman' picked the kitten up and I saw something weird going on, the kitten was obviously dubbed over with a stock meow but when I looked at its mouth, a tooth disappeared when it meowed again! I realised it was AI generated. This one short made me realise what's wrong with AI generated content in general. Why is this bad? I watch cat videos not just to watch cat videos, I want to care about the cat because it exists or has existed somewhere, I follow cat channels like claireluvcat for example to know how some of the cats I've come to know are doing right now. AI generated cat videos don't have any of that. Just after swiping back to my home screen I felt a sense of betrayal and anger. Am I overreacting about this? I don't think so. I was emotionally scammed. It's the same for any art.
@TheManinBlack9054 I would propose that they would release music, and they wouldn't care how it's received. But they could care *that* it's received. They wouldn't care what anyone thinks, as long as people get to hear their unfiltered and authentic expression. It's like a writer or pholosopher who doesn't care if anyone agrees with him, but he absolutely wants people to fully understand what he has to say, and it's their choice whether they reject it. If they never wrote or released music, their thoughts wouldn't be heard or understood.
I miss taking part in jam sessions. When I was stationed out in California, I had a bunch of musician friends, and we'd all rent a practice booth at the rec center, cram ourselves inside however we could, and just play. There wasn't a ton of vocal communication, only really asking what sort of vibe we were going for, never recorded anything, and a session would just start with one person just... Playing. Usually it was me as the drummer giving the rest of the group a beat, sometimes it was one of the guitarists (of which there were three) showing off a riff they liked. Music, itself, is a language that we spoke to one another in. Despite the rather eclectic collection of instruments (2 electric guitars, one acoustic guitar, an upright bass, a trumpet, a ukulele, a clarinet, and drums), it all worked cause we knew what things sound like and how they worked together. Yes, that is too many musicians to shove into a practice room, but we got by by having three people sitting on the piano in different ways (one on the bench, one on the key cover, and one on top), with the rest of the people stuck standing around where they could find room. Can't play drums much anymore due to chronic pain in my knees and lower back, but that little jam band I was part of will live forever in my heart cause it was something we did and made together. I guess the secret to making it all work was that we had something as the root, whether that be a guitar or the drums or the bass, and all of us taking the time to either agree on what it should sound like or disagreeing through music by pushing against what the root was trying to establish, forcing it to change to fit the new sound everyone else was creating. The specific arrangement limited what sorts of vibes we could create, as it's not the easiest task to make a ukulele sound dark or a trumpet sound atmospheric, so we always ended up with a bit of a brighter sound. I do agree that that's something an AI model can't recreate: The process by which people create. The how and why, merely producing an attempt at a finished product. The creative process is just as, if not more important than the end product, despite most people only really seeing the end product. However, when one looks at a piece of art, we wonder what it means, what was going through the artist's mind as they created, their reason for making it, the curiosity and analytical parts of the mind trying to break it down and make sense of it. We have always cared about the journey more than the destination.
Continuing on through the video, the concept of Enacted Cognition reminds me of an old roommate I had when I lived in Georgia. He was big into competitive gaming and martial arts, which meant he really enjoyed fighting games. He was also a world class fighter in Brazilian Jiujitsu, earning one gold, two silvers, and a bronze medal at a world competition in South Africa, so he wasn't just thinking about martial arts. However, his approach to competitive gaming was different. He would watch the best players compete and try to emulate their style of play, their actions in certain situations, and then employ those strategies as he played. However, he sucked and would lose even to me, who had never played a fighting game before living with him. I tried to explain this to him, but he just didn't get it: When you look at a professional player in any sport or game, it's easy to think "if x is happening, y is the response" because that's what they're doing and so should you. However, you lose a ton of information by doing this. The reason these people are pros isn't because they figured out the proper strategy that's hard to beat. It's not even about constant practice or inherent skill, either. It's understanding the game that's being played at a fundamental level. The reason they're so good is because they get it. They've played and they've played and have figured out how THEY play the game and play to their strengths. In the context of, say, a fighting game, that's finding the character you're best with, in a sense, but also learning what opponents you're bad against and how to overcome them using the tools you've given yourself. They're good at the game because they know what they're bad at within the bounds of the game they're playing. Some reactions are instinctual, others are planned, and their prowess is a testament to their journey of discovery and learning. When my current roommate and I sat down one day and played Injustice, he eventually got frustrated after getting juggled by me for 2 hours and losing every single game. We went outside to smoke and talk about it, cause I didn't want him to get mad, cause it's just a game. He voiced his frustration about constantly losing, so I said, "Okay, so how do I win every game?" "You shove me into a corner and use the same combo over and over again until you win. It doesn't matter what character you pick, you find a combo and only use that." "Exactly. You have one of the best minds in pattern recognition that I've ever known, so use it to your advantage. How do you keep me from employing my only strategy?" "Don't get stuck on the wall?" "How do you prevent that from happening?" He thought silently for a moment, figured it out, and then I didn't win a single game for the rest of the day. No, it wasn't just to jump over me, but to use characters with greater mobility to continuously change his angle of attack, altogether stopping me from ever cornering him. I say this because AI models don't look at the process. They look at the end result and emulate that. We all know what pop music and jazz and impressionist paintings look and sound like, and many of us know what goes into making them. However, the path to getting to an end result can vary wildly from person to person. Copying another artist doesn't make you as talented as them. It just makes it clear that you recognize them as good in the first place.
Around 25 years ago, I attended an informal live musical Turing test (the Output kind) hosted by Douglas Hosftadter at the University of Rochester, co-sponsored by the Computer Science department and the Eastman School of Music. Hofstadter was showcasing what was then a state-of-the-art generative music composition AI. I'm pretty sure it was a version of EMI by David Cope, but my memory of the event has faded with time and details are scarce on the internet. I've found articles about Hofstadter's work with music AI around this time and articles about David Cope, but nothing about any live experiments or presentations like the one I remember attending. The key element was that the AI was trained on a corpus of a real composers work; a large set of similar compositions (I think Bach's chorales). The idea being that there were enough that even the musically literate in the audience wouldn't know each one by ear. A skilled live pianist played us half a dozen pieces, some from the original set and some from the software, and the room voted which we thought were originals and which were computer generated. The audience was a split between people there because of the music connection and people there because of the computer science connection., and did merely an OK job identifying the real compositions. At least one of the computer generated pieces was obvious, but several were good enough to split the room, and at least one was only differentiated because some of the room knew enough of the chorales to know it wasn't one of them. Earlier in his career, Hofstadter made a list of ten things he thought computers and artificial intelligence could never do, and one of the things he said at this presentation was that the work he was doing had led him to cross "create beautiful music" off of that list. And this was 25 years ago. I think that one day, computers will be able to jam with you. I agree with most of the video about why it will be hard, and why there isn't money in developing it. I don't think it will be easy, or it will happen soon. But I think that eventually, after one or two or three more generational paradigm shifts, the ability to do so will fall out of some other profound advancement practically for free, like how so many basically economically worthless but really fun roleplaying and other conversational abilities have been achieved for free with the profound paradigm shift of the GPT-based chatbot advancement.
That's why i would advocate for thr strict regulation of a.i. The arts should be exclusively reserved for mankind. A basic right like the right to clean water, food and shelter. I see no reason why deserve to be outcompeted by the power-hungry, economy-destroying toys of the tech giants.
After trying the likes of Suno and Udio, I'm in a weird mix of "impressed" and "not impressed". By that I mean that I'm impressed at the fact that it's even able to output poorly inspired derivative music, like a human would (only with a much higher energy consumption). But I wouldn't call that "music is solved", though. And that comes from someone who is super interested in (selectively) applying mathematical modeling, AI & algorithmics to music as alternative composition methods. (Loosely related note: try to ask Suno to output something in 7/4. It will output 4/4 but with lyrics _that talk about 7/4_ . It's hilarious)
Are you suuure it takes much more energy? Humans are fairly inefficient in regards to energy, especially depending on ones diet. If you only count the actual creation time (like maybe 5 minutes) its fairly limited, but if you count all the training and education that person has recieved split over all poorly inspired dirivative music he will produce im not sure if the human is more efficient from an energy perspective.
@@mlsasd6494I was about to comment the same thing. Suno almost certainly uses an order of magnitude or more LESS energy than a human would typically take to write the same music.
@@therainman7777 not when you factor in the energy required to train the model in the first place. the long and short of it is that gpu's burn oil. for reference, I recently watched an interview with the zuck where he was discussing the likelihood of new models requiring at least a gigawatt to train, which is comparable to the output of a small nuclear power plant. I’m not sure how much energy went into training suno but I’m sure it’s substantive
@@SYNKSENTURY But then you might enter into the discussion on how much energy was required in order to "train" us to be able to make music. The thing about AI is that we're trying to do what took nature a couple billion years in just a few decades. Of course it's gonna take a shit ton of work and energy to emulate all that process. But once it's trained, it's done, just like us (but even we need to train ourselves over the course of our lifetime)
@@brunoberganholidias5790 hm, i don't think your comparisons are fair. i'm not factoring in the energy consumption history of the computer revolution as a whole, but only how much energy is required to train a single model. so comparing against billions of years of evolution doesn't make sense. we should be comparing how much energy it takes to "train" an individual vs how much it takes to train a model. i did some math to support my intuition, i hope someone will correct me if it's flawed. for simplicity's sake lets just assume static calorie consumption over the first 23 years of life, i.e., the time it takes to grow and earn a degree. that's 2200 calories per day *365 days * 23 years = 18,469,000 total calories. so it takes approximately 18 million calories to grow a brain to maturity and pack it with some specialized knowledge. but we've left out the energy involved in growing and learning that comes from other people. obviously to really model this seriously we'd need a lot of factors, but again for simplicity let's assume a self sufficient nuclear family and a single full time master teacher (rather than calculating, for example, actual number of teachers and "teacher energy" divided by hours spent teaching). so now we have (approx) 18 mil for mom, 18 mil for dad, and 18 mil for the teacher. this works out to 55,407,000 total calories. now we need to convert that to watt hours. we simply multiply the calories by 0.001162 (the ratio of watt hours per 1 calorie) and we get: 64,382 watt-hours. meanwhile LLM's routinely consume over 1K MEGAwatt-hours during training, so we're not even in the same order of magnitude. the expectation is always that highspeed digital computation is not power efficient compared with analog or electro-chemical computation-this is why analog neural chips are being considered for embedded applications, even though they produce so-called mortal models-and the numbers here are consistent with that.
The Red Lobster commercial really epitomizes my problems with AI. While I personally AI art, in all forms, will never reach the same level as humans, it also points to the fact that producers of this AI “stuff” is not the same as an artist or musician. They are looking to commercialize. They are looking for an avenue for more profit. Why does the AI write jazz? To make the owner money. Not to achieve an artistic vision, or anything of the sort. It’s insidious and morally objectionable, and not “art”, or “musicking”, as you discuss in the video. I love thinking about this problem, so thanks for the video! Continue doing good work.
Personally, I think the main barrier for AIs in music like in acting (all those speach generating AIs) is that not everything can be prompted because not everything can be described in words. We communicate and process information not only verbally. There are a lot of things that we understand via empathy and feelings. E.g. of course, a conductor may give some remarks to players during rehearsals but when performing there are no words and it's not just gestures it is a certain emotional state of the conductor that players read and inturpret not so much consiously and rationally but rather 'empathizing' the conductor. The same goes for directors.
@@hastesoldat I'm currently trying to push the AI developer to develop midi/sheet music output via "suggest a feature" forms. Because since AI is mainly statistics and music is full of borrowing anyway it could be a cool search engine for snippets of ideas to use in your own writing. Because I think we are very far from this kind of interface that would let us go beyond prompts. Funny thing, it may even turn out that in order to get from AI exactly what we want we may need to write the music actually. It's like with sample libraries. There are very good violin libraries, for example, and in certain contexts just a programmed violin could be enough. But to get a truly realistic performance with all actual details of violin playing fader and breath controllers aren't quite enough. There needs to be a better suited input device for that matter. And this device turns out to be a real violin and the best inputter is a professional violin player. Oops, we made a full circle.
@@haomingli6175 yes, but the issue is that we humans have a layer of communication that on one hand works for us fairly decently but on the other is by large unconscious and we ourselves don't exactly know how it works. It just does somehow. For instance, have you ever had a feeling that you know what you want, you may even have a few ideas how to get there but you have totally no idea how to describe it? I guess until AI learns to actually empathize, sort of feel what others feel I don't think the input method will be complete. And I doubt such a feature will come soon.
@@Grigoriy1996 well, just think about the gigantic models that these AIs are. GPT4 has 1.76 trillion parameters. you don't expect these to be interpretable or describable either.
@@TheManinBlack9054No, because plenty of humans have learned to jam and I'm sure this person could too with enough practice. Right now, no AI can jam even with the entire internet for training data and some of the most powerful computers.
Because "many people" cannot (or do not care to) distinguish between outputs does not mean that there are some people who can and will. Humans will coevolve with AI, in an arms-race sort of way, and some people will develop heightened recognition of AI patterns. Already there are some who are fooled into thinking that ChatGPT passes the Turing test--not only because of the category error that Adam discusses, but also because their interactions with AI might be unoriginal enough that ChatGPT might actually pass an directive test in which they are one of the agents. Google "the most human human." I'm sure back in the 18th century there were people who could not distinguish Mozart from Salieri. They may have been the people most offended by Beethoven, once his music started being played.
Ever heard of David Cope? He was creating new AI-generated classical pieces in various composers' styles over 20 years ago with a program he wrote himself in Common LISP. I took a course with him called "Artificial Intelligence in Music" in like 2005, though I don't remember much except learning a bunch of LISP.
I am a researcher at the oxford university robotics institute, I wrote my thesis on a robotic piano that composes its own music to pass a turing test. It is an interesting video however there are lots of researchers solving these problems purely for interest. My piano can play and compose music to a level where people couldn't distinguish it from a human. Also the nature of the transformer algorithm underlining it allowed it to write harmonies to tunes people played on the piano live. It would be interesting to talk further however I doubt this comment will be found!
Can your piano read sheet music and output a high quality, "human" performance that's record ready? If so, I'd be very interested in trying that out for music production.
Something I'll bring up a lot in these discussions that this video kinda touches and goes on, is that the MOMENT you have a robot that actually is able to understand and do things exactly like people, that kinda just is a person. You're no longer asking if it can pass a Turing test, you're asking if it dreams of electric sheep. And the end goal for automating things isn't to play God, it's to extract as much value out of labor as possible. A replicant is just as deserving of a living wage as a person, so congrats on changing human history for eons to come Cyberdyne Systems, but you can't, or at least shouldn't be able to, profit any more on these machines than any flesh and blood person because you have created a conscious being where the only meaningful difference between it and a person-brand- person is the biological definition of life. So, what's a fledgling tech company in the machine learning sphere to do? Well someone else already put a touch sensor on a mini-vacuum, so scrape the internet and almost randomly throw some sound files together based on the dictionary definitions of a text prompt, of course.
With enough computational power, any directive test will become output test. A "jamming" AI wouldn't just process what noise it need to make to continue the jam, it will also make predictions on what your next move will be, and adapt this model on the fly as the jam session continues. Eventually it will know what you will play next, before even yourself. Then, it will formulate an output, and play it back in real time. This is definitely not possible on current hardware, but with advancements in technology, it will happen. It is similar to the chatbot Turing test in a way. Chatbots are only able to pass output Turing tests, but with their speed in processing and calculation, and through the setting of a text based chat room, any sense of a direct conversation actually becomes a purely output based test, this is why chatbots are passing Turing tests quite reliably. Another thing I'd like to add is, to pass a Turing test, you don't need the observer to make the wrong call every single time, you just need to approach 50% mark, as at that point every guess is a random 50/50 shot at being correct or not. This is much easier than most people think, and since us humans are imperfect beings ourselves, the AI doesn't need to be perfect either, it just need to be good enough.
thats where it will fail machine wont be able to predict the next chord and just play it. it will require active listening and constant adjusment to the change, not prediction. A musician can just jump to an obscure chord that doesnt resolve the previous and justify it with the following chords that resolves everything that happend. thing is will the A.I play the wrong note and make it good in a jam? because thats what happens. if A.I will go "the best route" it already failed. it needs to learn to recontextualize "improper" notes, chord, and play it to sound good. In short it needs to have taste, and evolving one that knows how to communicate in an abstract level.
@@gregrodrigueziii8075 If you were shown the capabilities of this tech now from lets say ten years ago. You wouldn't believe it unless the sample sounded glitchy or funny. Even then it would be hard to swallow. No matter the benchmark people will always raise it to feel they are in control. We fear it's power. Some are already trying to destroy it by poisoning its data, but it's too late. The box has been opened its only a matter of time before we are greeted by a new species.
@@gregrodrigueziii8075 ...except that's all down to the speed and power of the AI. Assuming that an AI can't ever predict or analyze in real time is a losing bet. We already have conversational AIs that can keep up with humans in real time (below the typical cognitive reaction time to keep humans from noticing the processing going on). The conversations get weird some times, but we're really only a few years along the path of generative AI, and moving REALLY fast. A suitably fast AI would be listening to the music being played, figuring out the branching chord possibilities, and watching for things like body language and stance. It would be comparing the music as it stands with a huge list of "music shapes" that fit similar patterns, and if a human player suddenly threw in a weird chord change, it would pick one of the next logical steps before hitting that next note. Don't confuse "we have sorta-okay AI that can't really do that" with "that can never be done with AI." Or "AI made a shitty commercial jingle because someone fed it the prompt that made it happen" with "AI can only make shitty commercial jingles, forever."
@@gregrodrigueziii8075 what if "best" is defined in terms of "human-like" for the AI? The AI will soon learn to throw in improper chords, if the data you feed to it is like that. If you only feed it well-behaved music then it will only know to produce well-behaved music, for sure. but the crucial thing is that you can decide what kind of data it learns from.
@@chadirby6216 I absolutely agree. I'm currently a college student studying Neuroscience and Computer science, so, while I'm not an expert, I do have some insight. You can program anything you want into an AI. And programming it to recognize abstract taste is not as complicated as it seems, because: 1) Much of human behavior is more stereotyped than we would all like to think it is. For example, as Adam constantly remarks, musical improvisation draws on a preexisting vocabulary already. 2) You can program into an AI some level of error so that it doesn't take the "best route." And it is a relatively straightforward task to optimize that level of error. 3) AI doesn't actually NEED to recognize that abstraction as of yet, because it can guess well enough to fake it. and 4) (and most importantly) In the past ten years, AI has gone from simply an algorithm, to systems of equations so complicated that they can solve problems that go beyond their training data. And that is in ONLY TEN YEARS. There is every indication that machine learning algorithms will continue to scale as time goes on. You COULD argue, that it would be hard to get data sets of musicians jamming on the scale that AI needs to formulate a copy. But to say it is impossible is simply wrong. If it is profitable enough, the inescapable march of capitalism will make it happen. I don't know if AI will replace musicians. Either people will push back on it because, as Adam said above, music is more than a product. It isn't just a can of soup to be mass created. OR as generations go on, it will be so pervasive that everyone will be desensitized to its source. Who knows? But I don't think its a matter of whether it is possible. Because it is. I think a more important question than, "Will AI do this or that?" is "How do we create a functioning society in a world where AI can do anything better than we can?"
Just came back from work and saw you uploaded a 30 minute video essay of AI music. I love the effort you put in every video and how cool it is just to find out what are you up to this time
Hay Adam, just came across your videos for the 1st time and wanted to send you a HUGE "Thank You" for the effort you put into them - it shows. Intelligent, entertaning, educational, empathetic, clever. As an amateur musician, I really apreciate it. It resonates. U really made my day. Keep it up.
A buddy of mine said, he's glad the AI music is here because he can use it to help him get through making dumb corpo music, and spend more time on his passion projects. He's only getting paid for music because that's the skill he has. He'd rather be making his music with that talent. I think he said about 80% of his day-to-day is spent making jingles or composing background music for various projects.
If "musicking" was irrelevant, there would be no difference between a live performance, and a PA + iPod. That everyone implicitly appreciates the difference leads me to believe that music will be safe, just even less profitable than before without the corporate moolah :(
Wait until a generation grows up entirely on AI music, which can't be performed, and so going to see their favorite musician live will never enter their minds as something that could have been possible. They will not miss it. Their lame grandparents will never be able to convince them otherwise.
@@RoxfoxMusic that can't be performed? Makes no sense. As a hypothetical grandparent I would hear my child perform to AI music all the time though very off key.
@@chatboss000 The point is that people go to concerts because they like the recording of the music and want to see the people who made the music make the music right before their eyes. This can't happen with AI generated music. Nobody performed it in the first place. Let's ignore that Hatsune Miku exists for the duration of this thought exercise.
@@Roxfox I dont agree with the statement that people go to concerts because they "they like the recording of the music and want to see the people who made the music make the music right before their eyes". I think people go to concerts because its an extension of the experience listening to it into a social space. Experiencing it with other people, being lead by a parasocial relationship, having the process of the trip which is an event in and of itself. I mean, cover artists exist because people want to see their version, based on the person and the social experience. Same goes for classical pieces, none of these people "made the music" (and im many cases i might not even have heared their version before either) I'd go there because i know its an experience in and of itself being physically there and seeing people perform their passion and sharing this experience with other people. So people can also present their version of an AI generated song to the same effect. I believe the social aspect will see a boom (or at least no bust) with people interested in music appreciating the process more and enjoying physical events more. However the "bread winning" aspects of music will suffer. I dont think most advertisement music writers and many game music artists wont make it, simply because the end users gets no benefit from their existance. In these cases its IS simply about the product, not the process.
Lots to say. Adam, your videos always push my brain to it's limits and that's why your my favorite. I'm glad you recommended a bunch of other videos and creators as you could never make enough videos yourself to quench my mind thirst.
I recall Tom Scott, with a background in both linguistics and computer science, saying in early 2020, "artificial language processing remains 10 years away, just as it has been for the last few decades." And indeed, there was no indication at the time that nlp would have a nunaced understanding of context anytime soon. Except, GPT-3 was released a few months later, and was able to pass all the tests he outlined in his video. Many such experts have been surprised and proven wrong by the rate of improvement. And now, just a couple weeks after this video was released, GPT-4o was shown to be able to sing and improvise on the fly and converse in real time, at least to some small extent. Although its musical capabilities are rudimentary right now, it is bound to improve, even if the music directive test is not placed as a priority in development. Because, as it turns out, there is indeed incentive in similar areas of real time audio interaction. This video is very well researched, and perhaps you are right, but the point is, it is precarious to say "AI will never be able to do this". Few could have imagined Alpha-Go, or GPT-3, until they were released. Who knows what will be possible in just a few more years? Edit: I might also point out that from a practical standpoint, the distinction between directive and output is unimportant, as output alone will have major impacts on the industry. Will it become like CGI in the film industry where the demand for practical effects again rise, or engines in chess where popularty booms despite chess engines surpassing humans decades ago? Perhaps it will end up as the latter, and human music returns to a personal art whose value arises from the experience of creating it, and its social elements. At the end of the day, it is an unfortunate reality that AI will take value and jobs away from the creative arts.
Well, It has been two weeks and ChatGPT can already jam, imagine what it's going to be in a year... But there is another aspect to art and musicking. Mona Lisa is not one of the most famous piece of Art because it's the technically best painting, but because it has a trail of history attached to it. So in a way it doesn't matter what AI will wright and how good it will jam because it's not about technical skill, but transfer of emotions.... (for that we probably will have to wait a year and 2 weeks :)
@@FriskyKitsune not sure. i saw a video where they demonstrated it can be instructed to sing with multiple voices at the same time tho. but that was an official demo from openAI so could be rigged.
So in short, it would require a general intelligence, trained on everything at once, and supported by extraordinary hardware. Essentially a sapient being.
@@timlake9549 I found a clip of that gig on Rotem Sivan's channel, a Short from about a year ago, but it's not at the same part as was shown in this video
Transformers are really good at one thing and that's pretending to be something. I'm convinced that if ample training data of jam sessions, with specific instruments removed and added to the mix (using simple music editing programs) is provided to an AI, we could have a real time musical jam AI, similar to how we have real time voice changing AI now.
We absolutely could. Adam is a great resource when it comes to musical knowledge, but he was out of his depth in this video. He said he’s pretty sure the music Turing test will never be passed. In reality, if there was any money in doing so one of the large tech companies could probably train a model to pass the test right now.
@@mater5930 it worked with the GPT models, it worked with image generation models, it worked with self-driving models, it worked with image detection models, it worked with voice changing models. Larger training data is not the only innovation in these areas, but it was always the major driving factor
@@ducksies and that, my friend, is the problem. It begs the question, can it actually generate new useful information as humans do? It is really expensive on data. It also can not be trained on its own data. Maybe that's why these corporations are hungry to steal data from us.
I've been doing music my whole life, and I'm also a software developer who works with generative A.I. If you think this technology can't do "X", you have no idea what's coming down the pipe. Looking at a current snapshot of what's possible is not a gauge of what's to come. There's a huge blind spot in people who don't understand this technology.
@@DavidSartor0 fanfiction is the most quintessentially community-based space in the world, what do you mean?????? It's literally all about the shared experience of sharing our fantasies and love of the media we consume. If your work wasn't labor of love -- if you didn't love these characters enough to express your own thoughts about them, then why the hell are you writing fanfiction in the first place, and why should I care?? I'm trying to be in a fandom and connect with people who love this media like I do. If you don't, I don't want to read what you write . The standards aren't even high with fic. You can never have written anything before and people will read it and possibly love it. Just have it be your own and have it be sincere. There is no reason to use AI other than apathy and laziness. & I don't want to interact with someone who doesn't care the way I do. Like It's art. It's a social experience. You're not 'consuming content' you're 'engaging with a fandom'. I don't want to engage with a robot's idea of what a fan wanted to write. I wanted to engage with another fan.
@@bzzzzzzzzzz2075 Thank you for answering. I think I've read at least ten million words of fanfiction, and I don't experience that at all. I love talking to fanfiction authors about their work, but the fanfiction is just words to me, words making up sentences making up stories. I don't much feel like I'm engaging with anyone. Do you feel the same way about original fiction? I don't see how "there is no reason to use AI other than apathy and laziness". I'm a very very slow writer. If I were to try writing a long fanfiction, it might take me twenty years. If I were fifty years old, I'd know I might not have that much time before death or dementia. In that case, I'd probably use AI to write faster, even if it resulted in work that people don't like as much. Is this bad? "If you didn't love these characters enough to express your own thoughts about them, then why the hell are you writing fanfiction in the first place?" I've seen stories using only original characters, which were fanfiction because of the setting. Are those bad? What am I doing wrong? How do I engage with an author?
@@DavidSartor0 you're not doing anything wrong lol. I do struggle to believe that the writing is just words to you, though, if you're invested enough in it to specifically engage with the author about it. What do you speak to the author about if they wrote with AI? Their prompting specificity? No, you talk about their interpretations of the character, you complement the lines they wrote, theorize about what's happening next. If you don't care much about what's happening in the work itself, but you do care enough to talk to the author about it, is it really just words to you? Or is it a conversation starter? And does that conversation starter work as well if the work is generated by a predictive algorithm, not created by a human's hands? I'd also like to ask if you have ever had your interpretation of media has ever changed by knowing the authorial intent. Say, you watched a directors cut. Or you read a poem once, thought it meant one thing, then learned the author's tragic backstory and it hit twice as hard on the second read. This happened to me when I read a celebrity poetry book (Halsey) and i learned afterwards that one poem was likely about her miscarriage, and upon re-reading, I found it to be incredibly impactful where I didn't before. An algorithm like an AI can't do that. It doesn't have authorial intent. I can't complement the well-crafted dialogue, or the excellent characterization-- that was all up to a role of the dice. I can't have my interpretation changed because there is nothing to interpret. It's empty because a person didn't make any choices except which words to prompt with. So yes, the same goes for original work and characters. I was just speaking in the context of broader fandom spaces. One of my favorite fic authors has one specific oc in her work, and I love this oc with my entire heart. She needed a character to serve a plot function, then she painstakingly brought this character to life, and made her feel real and fit perfectly in the setting. If she had used an ai to write this character, I wouldnt be complementing it. I would be saying "wow that was lucky that worked so well." I feel like it's doubly egregious to use ai when you're writing a piece of original work(ignoring the ethics of using the world's best plagiarism machine) because those aren't just little guys in the show you like. Those are YOUR little guys that came from YOUR head. Why on earth would you put them in the thoughtless hands of an ai. Look, I'm a slow writer, too(although I got faster wth practice). At the start, it took weeks and weeks to get out maybe 2k low quality words. But I still have that Google doc. all of those words are mine. they're handcrafted and I love them even though they're NOT GOOD. If an ai made it, what connection would I even feel to 'my' work? It's a faulty product, not a passion project. It is bad to use ai to write faster. You're not writing it. If you wrote this comment to me in a timely fashion, you are not so disabled that you need ai to help you. Long fics take ages to write regardless of who's writing them. Remember: that's an entire book you're writing. The great gatsby is 50k words. Long fics get well, well over 100k. Authors regularly spend years and years writing books, 3-10 is the general range, and that's normal. If you 'write' 300k words with ai I will care infinitely less than if you write 1k words with your own keyboard. And frankly, YOU won't like what the ai spits out for you. It wasn't yours, and it wont ever be. You won't have control over it. It wont cater to your specific proclivities. The ai doesn't know what your favorite characters are meant to act like, or how you want them to act. It doesn't even know how they look. It doesn't know anything. You do. You're intelligent and you enjoy media enough to read fic about it. Don't you want to make something of your own? you don't ever have to publish your work to get fulfillment from it. You don't even have to finish it. Most of my work isn't even finished, and it won't be, but I go back and reread it because I LIKE what I wrote, and it matters to me, and I feel satisfied when I look back at that one line that took me 10 edits to get right. Art is wonderful and difficult and worth the effort. Go make something that matters to you. Anything. Good or not. I'm not even talking about writing in particular. Do something that lets you experience the joys of creation.
All of these videos about things the AI cant possibly do. Yet its got us moving the goalpost for what "passing the turing test" means. So idk man. As an illustrator myself I find its a sort of reflexive hubris to react this way. Music is has rules. If it has rules then all it takes is learning the rules.... then you can play the game.
@@electriceric7472 If you want a simple answer:The fact we have a word for it, music, means it is inherently different from other things. If it's different from something then there are rules as to why it's different. This applies to literally everything. There are reasons we consider the noises of Beethoven music while we consider the noises of a trainwreck not music. (yes as an artist I understand what subjectivity is but I'm ignoring it because saying everything is subjective kills the entire discussion and doesn't exactly address why we consider one thing art but another thing not art). If you want me to literally list the rules, though, sure: Tons of rules, if you want something to sound like music. It needs some kind of beat or tempo at the very least. The notes should be within a certain range as you as a human can't perceive a pitch that's too low or too high. Ideally it will have some sort of pattern to it as well, a song structure. These are the loosest rules I can find for what "music" is but if we're talking about music YOU would enjoy, or the kind of music we're generally talking about like songs on the radio then the rules grow even more as most people aren't going to consider a C note played repeatedly for 3 minutes straight at a steady tempo a "song" but if you want to be pedantic and obtuse enough you could. Anyways yeah there's lots of ways to construct a song and very clearly the AI have caught on to those ways in some small part. So thinking it ends here is insane to me. It's like saying the telephone starts and ends with Graham Bell and the iPhone is completely impossible imo.
You kind of ignored all of the arguments the video made, the most important one being that music is at its core an activity. It's a point that AI folks generally ignore when they praise the possibilities of AI art: art is embedded in life, it's a process that's rooted in culture and human cognition and activity. This argument is kind of central to the whole debate. And I guess some of the divide in these debates, apart from the fact that you have a lot of techbros who don't know anything about aesthetics talking about art, comes down to the different perspectives of producers of art and pure consumers. For a pure consumer of art, the process is irrelevant because it's hidden. For the producer it's absolutely central and it informs every aspect of the final work of art they're creating. That's why the techbro-view of art seems so utterly wrongheaded and naive to people who actually produce art. It has nothing to do with feeling threatened or thinking that humans are superior. AI folks generally like to reduce art to patterns. Music is just a pattern of sound in time. A painting is just a pattern of colors. A novel is just a pattern of words. On a physical level all of that is true. But art doesn't really work like that. Art is a communicative process, it only becomes meaningful in the interaction between the work of art and a person who interprets it, with some major interference by cultural frameworks. Music isn't just a game with specific rules that you need to follow, it's a mode of communication and expression and the rules that supposedly structure this mode of expression are something that comes after the fact, it's a result of analysis. At least with great music it's like that because great musicians generate new rules and new perspectives. The old blues musicians didn't sit down and wrote a rulebook of blues music and then started writing songs following those rules. The songs came first, as a result of lived experience, the will to express themselves, the engagement with cultural currents that came before. All of that got channeled into the performance and creation of blues as a genre. The rules came later as an abstraction to describe what these musicians were doing on a theoretical level. You find stuff like this all over musical history whenever something new and exciting came around. AI can certainly create some good copies of existing styles. Doing that really doesn't require more than following a set of rules. But that's just that: more or less interesting copies ot actually creative works. It's about as interesting as a modern composer writing carbon copies of Mozart symphonies. But then again, tons of people already listen to utterly soulless music where every trace of human imperfection and irregularity has been thrown out in favor of snapping everything to a grid, whether it's rhythm, intonation or vocal idiosyncrasies. If that's the type of music that people crave, sure, AI can do that. If you want to listen to music that gives you full body shivers, music that breaks you down and makes you cry like a baby, music that you've never heard before, AI is not where you're going to find it.
@@hansmahr8627 I do not think the point in the video is valid, so I am not going to address them because in order for them to be valid they must first adhere to the point I'm making. There is no point in arguing for or against them if you do not address the simple fact that music has rules and those rules can be learned as many humans have already done millions of times over. AI is gearing up to be at least human level if not superhuman but you're saying it can't even make music...? Something it already can do on a rudimentary level...? Please. Take care of that glaring flaw in logic first then we can have a discussion that's actually interesting. We're not talking about the greatest music you've ever heard here. We're talking about MUSIC. Most PEOPLE can't even fit together a coherent melody and AI can already do that easily. And I even think that one day, in the future, yes. There will be an AI mozart that will make a piece of music so breathtaking you will be forced to reevluate your ideas here. But that's speculation, so I get if you don't see that viewpoint as valid.
There are so many parallels in every art field. For illustrators and painters, the advent of photography was seen as something to be loathed, something that went entirely against artistic expression. Now, it's considered its own form of art. Same with midi versus performance. In both cases, they're both tools that offer pros, as well as cons to the other. If you had to perform every musical piece you wanted to create as a composer, or needed a group to re-enact it for it to come out in any meaningful manner, through the limitations of the physical medium of instruments, there is a lot of music we could never have made. Add to that the advent of synthesis as a form of instrument and artistic expression, and you get even deeper into the brass tacks of why the advent of midi is something to be celebrated. It offers something completely different from what the performance of multiple musicians jamming together would be, as does photography to an artist/painter. I can definitely see the great many issues with AI, but my belief is that the fields AI will take over are the fields artists do not want to toil away for, generally speaking. That is to say, art made for others, for those others' benefits. You get to focus more on making art for you, to express who you are, rather than to express who somebody else is. Meanwhile, AI will largely be relegated to things that were largely considered soulless and consumer-oriented already. It's just so much less rewarding a thing to do than making art for the sake of art. At least, that's my take and my hope. The big issue here, of course, is the ability for artists whose works and soul have been copied and trained into an AI to subsist after it takes over the market for cheap labor.
No, it will just interact with you like a superhuman. It will be the best jamming partner you could ever have. That doesn't take away from human connection in a real jam because everything will be controlled by the omnipresent AI and humans will have more time for jam sessions. In fact we will live forever too. That's a lot of time for jammin'. I hope you like jammin' too...
Actual art-one of the main reasons for living, in a time when other reasons are becoming inaccessible as the world literally ends- will continue to exist as a botique novelty, that you can make at a fraction of the quality and pace you would as a job, for an audience of basically no one, in between 16 hour shifts of the same amazon warehouse job everyone else has, as we all wait for the last crops to fail and to finally be put out of our misery. Welcome to the future. Its almost over.
I'm not sure I buy "it won't happen because the people in charge aren't interested in it". The whole paradigm of AI rn is reducing the cost of deploying models for specific tasks by doing massive pretraining on unstructured data, and then finetuning for a specific deployment, i.e. you tradeoff between higher training costs for lower task-specific finetuning costs. GPT-3 base is just a next token predictor, but it can be extremely cheaply turned into a model for conversation with a relatively small number of examples. I don't see why we wouldn't eventually (although maybe not soon) have multimodal models that are good enough that we can cheaply (and with a small amount of data) turn them into models which work for musical conversation.
A machine doesn't need to think or live like a human to trick you into thinking it is. Training a model to create convincingly human music is a lot easier than trying to make something resembling the human brain, and we already know the human brain _can_ be constructed in the natrual world, and that there aren't any insurmountable barriers to stop us from creating something similar.
I had a full on existential crisis after hearing "I glued my balls to my butt hole again": catchy song, lyrics that demonstrate a knowledge of toilet humor and human anatomy, 2 live crew lyrics can be repurposed into a 60's motown style song, etc. The robots won't be scary like Terminator, they will distract us with hilarious songs before killing us.
@@60degreelobwedge82I might be wrong but I'm pretty sure the lyrics in most of those (which tbf to me are often the best part) are included in the prompt, i.e. not necessarily AI-generated.
Saw a friend post the arm stuck song the other day and was just shocked that people I know who are anti AI could not clock that it was a song made by a prompt.
@@garretta4911 AI is extremely good at replication. I'm a digital composer, super novice guitarist, and vehemently bothered by capitalistic greed taking away creative jobs that I love and even personally engage in for no pay, just the gratification, and I cannot tell apart most AI generated songs from human-made
"But then there are people that I do not respect, like the people who run companies like Suno, Udio, and other AI companies, who have a very accelerationist mindset when it comes to this, it feels like music is just one more box to tick on the way to the singularity. Music is a problem that technology can *solve*." This resonates with a the philosophical thinking I've been doing recently. It's strange how it keeps on coming up in life.
"The output-test is all that matters" - The customer That the AI Techbros don't care is an understatement. They solely care about how to generate more income for themselves. Peek lack of empathy, and such. F* AI... Keep slapping and having fun bro. You deserve that.
I don't know man, a bot that can jam with you, with the personality of a musician you ask for, sounds like a product that would go viral and sell incredibly well. I really liked the video because it shows that you make it with passion and trying to be as objective as possible from your point of view, but honestly it didn't convince me at all. I don't understand why so many people separate AI from humans as if they were opposite things that have nothing to do with each other. These AIs are the product of the history of humanity, of our behaviors, our curiosity, greed and our ambition among other things, it is an incredibly HUMAN technology, for better and for worse, it is not something foreign to our essence, rather a reflection of it. At the end of the day I agree that all of this is scary af if used the wrong way, which clearly it will happen.
The only reason we’re designing AI to create art is because art has become a commodity and monetised. Meanwhile we’re forgetting why we create in the first place which is to express ourselves and share those expressions with others in order to further our empathy or open our minds to new ways of observation and experience. I can see AI helping humans to express themselves but I see very little value (other than monetary) in having AI’s create something from scratch and finish it without any human interference.
People keep saying AI will never be able to do “X” and it does. Artists especially think what they do is special, but it’s not. At least for 95% of “artists” anyways, me included. There are a few greats who do things that are truly unique and special, but for the rest of us, it’s mostly just derivative, self indulgent, posturing and wishful thinking. There are only a relatively limited number of places to go rhythmically, melodically, lyrically at any given time while “jamming”- if there wasn’t, then you really could just go anywhere and any arrangement of chaotic noise would count as music. For a machine to be able to emulate believable phrasing, melodies to play as a saxophonist or lead guitarist in response to what it’s “hearing” from a live human drummer and rhythm guitarist for example, I don’t think will be very far off or difficult. Actually, I’d be surprised if that hasn’t already been done years ago. Most of the joy that we experience with music is in its predictability, in it meeting what we think it’s going to do, or playing around what we think it’s going to do, or in doing something else that we didn’t consider that surprises us and takes us somewhere else emotionally. These are all devices that are well known and used to effect all the time. They’re not complicated or unique or difficult to replicate or emulate convincingly.
This view only makes sense if you view art as a product to consume. Even at its most formulaic, art only has value because a *human* is using the formula, and in doing so we can see that human's unique perspective on it. Like even if you wrote a story with a stock standard Hero's Journey plot, the most formulaic of formulas, the way you go about doing so is revealing about you as a person. What do you consider heroic? What do you consider to be a fatal flaw? What do you consider necessary to fix this flaw? A human can't create art, even formulaic art, without putting themselves on the table in some fashion. The appeal of art isn't in its novelty but in its ability to show the perspective of the artist. An AI model has no perspective, only data points. AI art is a (debatably) pretty box that opens up to reveal nothing inside. To say that a computer can be artistic is like saying a computer can be divine: it means nothing because artistry and divinity are inherently human concepts that a computer cannot contain
AI music has passed my personal turing test. I downloaded an ai song and played it to my mom. She asked me who that band was. I said "It's AI", and she thought "AI" was the name of the band.
21:31 - What makes it good is that it's fun to jam with. NOT that the song itself is good. I got out my shoes and started tapping with you. It's legit.
You can get an AI question-answerer to answer differently if you tell it, if it makes a mistake, you'll kill its mother. It doesn't have one, but in threatening it, you're invoking a different sort of imaginary human to answer you. I think if you ask it for philanthropic ideas, you could make its answer worse by telling it a correct answer will win it a million dollars: you'd be invoking the wrong imaginary person to answer. So in musical interaction, it's not 'can it be human' but 'what part of humanness are you trying to invoke out of the large tapestry that the AI's trying to represent'. The reason you can't jam with one is, it doesn't want to jam, because it doesn't want anything: to find its wants you'd need to not look for human qualities and search for what its 'unconscious' likes to bring up.
I feel like I need to write a book or something at this point, with how many easily countered AI takes there are. Usually I do find Adam's videos very insightful. This time the main argument seems to be "AI is doomed to fail the musical Turing test, because the companies just don't care enough." The other things mentioned seem to be things that AI is already doing, like making mistakes and forgetting things. There's also already been instrument playing robots for decades and there's no reason to not expect them to not get rapidly better with ML. (Check what Nvidia has been doing with robots for example.) There's also the weird directive/output division. I think the point wasn't about the technical aspects, because you can easily train an AI that takes as input all the sound it has heard and produced thus far and then ten times per second produces the next 100ms of output, thus transforming the problem into an output problem. Going back to the business case, I would say there are three counter points. First, I could easily see some product potential in an AI music teacher/jam partner or something similar. Or even an AI based autotune that not only fixes vocals, but also instruments. Second, companies have already spent a ton of effort on non-profitable endeavours like how five years ago OpenAI made Dota 2 bots just because the problem was interesting enough. Thirdly, and most importantly, you don't have to train an entire massive model. Companies are working on multi-modal models like the just announced GPT-4o that are much more flexible than purely text-based models. And once you have trained the base model, you can fine tune it for different purposes. If you want to see examples, check how making Stable Diffusion checkpoints works. If Hallmark wants to make a model that generates card art, they don't have to spend skrillion watts to train a brand new model, they can just show the model couple of hundred examples and in a few hours you have a new model that specializes in card art. So you could take some jam sessions, separate one instrument and fine tune a model on that. Lastly, I'm as annoyed as anyone else when creative people lose jobs and "prompt engineers" call themselves "artists". But it feels like 99% of people who feel like they simply must give their opinion cannot separate the "what should be done?" question from the "what can be done?" question, even though they have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Everyone has such high-strung emotions about the subject it feels like every take I see is either "AI will solve every single problem in a year, just you see!" or "AI is crap, it's always been crap and always will be crap! lol look at this stupid AI that can't even draw fingers or text and it never will" (they can now) And to be honest, this video seems to fall in the latter category. The way I look at visual AI art for example is comparing it to a very technically talented idiot savant dude in Fiverr from some fourth world country willing to work for peanuts. Let's call him Albert, or Al for short. It might take a lot of effort and iteration to make him understand what I actually want, but no matter how detailed of a prompt I write, I wouldn't call myself an "artist". But if I for example make a simplified sketch of a character and ask Al to finish it based on my detailed description, I might credit myself for the character concept. Or what if I ask Al make a bunch of different images and then I Photoshop them together, along with some custom edits. At some point it starts approaching some form artistic collaboration from my side as well. Like... can photo bashing ever be art? I think so. I don't know why I'm spending so much time writing this, though. I didn't write this in the first nanosecond of the video being out, so the chances more than a few people will ever read this or care are quite minimal. *sigh*
I distinguish between two categories of art: artistic products and artistic performance. Artistic products include books, films, photography, graphic design. These can be replicated and consumed without the direct involvement of the artist. Artistic performance includes dance, theatre, stand-up comedy. These art forms can CONTAIN an artistic product: for example, a dance performance can have a pre-planned choreography, while theatre and stand-up comedy usually (but not always) follow a script. But even if there is an artistic product at the basis of it, there is always en element of real-time human performance in these art forms. Music is both a product and a performance art. Musical products are compositions, be they written sheet music or audio files. Musical performance is what musicians do on stage, in real-time. I expect that artistic products will be replaced by AI, as is already happening. By ‘replaced’ I don’t mean that humans will have to stop creating artistic products altogether; of course, nothing is to stop us from writing a book or a song or creating an illustration if we feel like it, same as we can still weave baskets and carpets by hand if we feel like it. But once AI does these things at a human level or higher, the skills involved with creating these products will no longer be marketable. Artistic performance, however, should be fine for a long time coming. In artistic performance, seeing a human doing something is the whole point. Self-playing pianos (pianolas) have existed for ages, but if we bought tickets for a piano concert and saw a pianola instead of a human pianist we would feel ripped off, no matter how well it plays. Beyond enjoying the product and the communal experience, we like to attend performances because we like to marvel at fellow humans doing something impressive. (Similarly, even though cars are faster than the fastest human runner or cyclist, people still get excited about sprint races and the Tour de France.) What does this mean for us as musicians? In my view this means that, if we want to have a chance at a musical career, the best things to focus on are developing performance skills, whatever that means for you: playing an instrument, singing, having a charismatic stage presence, whatever. For artists whose expertise is limited to product skills, a solution could be to turn their product skills into a performance. So, a mixing/mastering engineer could live-stream their process, or even go on stage and mix/master a song in real-time. Similarly, a visual artist could create a painting or illustration in real-time. But of course we don’t know if there will be a large (paying) audience for such performances. (btw, I hate these times as much as anyone else, and if I had a button with which I could stop AI progress I would. but that button doesn't exist. short of revolution, we have no option but to adapt in some way.)
17:21 you got me all the way here, someone who has a special interest in AI, and you've not only nailed it so far, but you've perfectly articulated the problem and why it has yet to be solved with that specific and useful definition of a music turing test Why I think it will eventually be solved, is if you have embodied AI, firstly, you don't need to make it a music bot, the humanoid form factor is as generic and general purpose as anything I can think of, all human tasks are done in it You don't make a music bot, you make a bot, and have it learn music, not a big corpo looking for profit, but some hobbiest training their personal bot for idk a youtube video or for a Wikipedia page... those will likely be outdated mediums, you get what i mean
Oopsy, could have timed this better. Elevenlabs is getting into the music production stuff. It's fun going back a couple years to see all the things that "AI will never do".
If you want to find things that AI will never do, you need to seek domains in which example data is very difficult to collect. Music certainly ain't one of them.
@@clray123 These days, all you need to do is find people who say "AI will never be able to-" and then you can safely say it'll be able to do it in about two years. We're getting to the point where what it "can't do" veers into the vague, philosophical, or very-hard-to-define. There's already an AI model for more or less anything well-definable you can think of.
You're probably right Adam, but what it also probably means for composers and artists is a significant loss of revenue. We previously wrote music for jingles, ads, TV shows. We creatives will lose our income to machines - this boggles my mind!
Thank you for the shout-out Adam! I'm writing a book on AI Music for the general audience. Would love to interview you to get your take on the subject. We disagree on various points, but I definitely agree with you that several current generative music companies have a particularly problematic approach.
I am a linguist and what Christopher small identified as "musicking" is very similar to what a school of linguistics called "translanguaging". Languages in a meaningful way don't really exist, they are abstractions of political and cultural guardianship of a certain sets of sounds and way of speaking. What we do in the real world, online, on tiktok, in memes, are just "languaging" to form meaningful communication with each other. Language is a verb, not a noun. Cool!!!
This is all super interesting and I wouldn't dare disagree with anything you say because I'm positive you know more about all of this than I ever will BUT I would like to alter up an alternate dichotomy. Music is not the same thing to everybody who enjoys it. There are many distinctions to be made but I think a HUGE split when it comes to the topic of AI is that of the music listener vs. the music maker. I love music. I listen to it all the time. I'm cool with "most everything" and when I say "most everything" I'm NOT saying "most everything except country and rap." I can jump from Paganini to GZA to Ahab to Carly Rae Jepsen in a single car ride. But when it comes to being a musician, well... I tried REALLY HARD in my high school and early college years to form some kind of band, or "project" with a friend or two, or even be my own one man show. At my peak I owned a guitar, 5 or 6 effects pedals, a bass, a keyboard, a drum machine, a couple of mics, and a 4-track recorder. I would literally pack ALL of this in my Buick along with 2 guitars from a friend and we'd drive 30 minutes to this other guy's house who had a huge basement with a piano and a drumset and we'd "attempt" music all weekend. During a separate period of relatively prolific output I made a lot of music with a friend who taught me a lot about what I guess would be considered a DAW now - back in 2001-2002 it was just "Cool Edit Pro 2.0." I had a lot of fun during these sessions. We made some OK music that I wish I'd kept better track of over the years. But none of it was ever "good." And I know now that it was never going to be. As I got older and got into the bar scene for a few years after college I actually met some *real* musicians. And that's when I realized that, for my friends and I at least, our need to have fun with it was never secondary to our need to create. But that doesn't mean I love or loved music any less, it just means I wasn't cut out to make it. I still love to punch around on my sheet music/MIDI program and arpeggiate certain chord progressions and things like that, but I'm merely having fun, not trying to create a cohesive piece of music. My point is that there are people who love music but who do not, cannot, or will not MAKE music, and from that perspective, the process of "musicking" or "jamming" doesn't hold the same value to us. There are people that love food and who are real experts on it but they have ZERO interest in cooking. The magic for me lies in the finished product. I don't want to say I could care less about the process, but that's not really where the spark lies, in my opinion. The fact that a bunch of individually mundane aspects came come together to create something transcendent is what gets my juices flowing when I listen to music. Don't get me wrong - knowing how every little blip and beep and click and buzz and dig and bop got put where they got put is very interesting but it has little to do with where my mind or my emotions are at when I really truly love a piece of music. The "directive" side of AI music generation might be an important component, but I'm not sure it should be hailed as the cornerstone of AI musical achievement. If I can make you the same steak dinner out of $25 from ingredients at Walmart in half the time it would take me to make that same dinner for $75 at the organic market, do you really care *how* it was made? If you're a cook, it probably does matter. If not, you probably couldn't care less. Neither is any more or less "correct" than the other. In so many ways music IS about the output. That's what endures. That is the part of "musicking" that is immortalized on physical or digital media. That is the beginning and end point of conversation - the finished piece is the culmination of whatever processes were used and as such will always be more highly revered than the process itself. A jam session might be fun to participate it, but when, out of your entire day, you have 30 min on the way to work and 30 min back to listen to music, how much of that time is spent listening to a jam session? When you introduce a friend to a new band or sound, how often do you play a jam session for them? When deciding what piece of your own work to release, would you EVER choose a jam session over something more polished and rehearsed? You say "AI can't jam" and as nicely as I can, I'm coming back with a, "so what?" If AI can nail that hit single, if they can make that song that you want to show a friend, if it can write a song that's worth being one of the 10 to 15 songs you're going to listen to that day, isn't that what matters? Or at the very least, isn't that what matters THE MOST? I know musicians will see this differently and that's fine - I just wanted to put this out there as someone who truly does love music but has long ago accepted that I lack the spark to be musician.
I agree with you to a point. Lots of people listen to the same recordings over and over. I believe they are replaying emotional content that is paired to the particular piece. Jumping through pieces of wildly different styles is a way of shaking up internal emotional responses a bit like jumping from the sauna into the snow and then back again. But this isn't the the making process of musiking. That is the territory of exchange, conversation, reciprocity in real time. Memory can be there but it stays in the background and can quickly be left behind as the jam goes off into new iterations.
I understand your points, and you are absolutely right under a capitalist economic system, the value is placed on the physical/digital manifestation of the art that can be used as a product. That’s what we learn intrinsically has value. The truth I’ve found, is just jamming with some folks is absolutely essential, and because we can’t turn that into a product, we view it as a “bad” thing. If you strip away your pre-conceived notions, the chance to play music with other musicians, communicating on a deeper, HUMAN level, is valuable on a conscious level, not a capitalist pursuit.
@@daikiraihatesu I think I get what you're saying, but it hits a little left of my point. My personal enjoyment has little if anything to do with its commodification. My entire point was that, if you're not all that inclined to make good music, "jamming" may not mean to you what it means to people who are actually able to come together and create music. Sure, I enjoyed banging on guitars and singing stupid lyrics about ex-girlfriends with my buddies on a social level, but it NEVER resonated with me musically in the way that listening to favorite song does. The two activities and their benefits are removed from each other. My enjoyment of LISTENING to music will never be subverted by the process of MAKING music, simply because I lack the ability to make music of the caliber that I would want to listen to. None of it has anything to do with whether or not one can be construed as a "product" or not. The "product" of "jamming" for me was about having a good time with friends and is/was a worthwhile experience. However, it is an experienced totally divorced from that of listening to good music. They are different things; they strike different pleasure centers and different emotional chords. What I was ultimately trying to point out in so many words was that, much in the same way a non-musician may have trouble understanding a musician's relationship with "the end result," musicians may likewise have an equally difficult time understanding what that "end result" means to a non-musician.
perhaps you are forgetting that with time, things that once required multibillion investments, can be now done by a dedicated individual in a bedroom. therefore, yes, your musical turing test is going to be inevitably passed when the overall AI progress makes such research easy for anyone bored enough to try.
No, because since A.I. doesn’t ‘know’ anything and is just purely calculations, it can never replicate the human emotion put into not just the result, but the process of making music
current ai may not be able to feel or be creative but who knows what’s gonna happen in the future. Something fundamental about how ai works is gonna have to change though
adam, you are everything that a person should be, I love you truly. this essay is so well put together, the knowledge the ideas, even the wording the choreography of the text, the examplatory performance inside this is very complementary and on point. I adore your inspiring dedication and personality that is always in search and your true nerd status that never gets bored of learning. I haven't watched one of these videos you put up lately, but years ago I was devouring your content, you did what led zeppelin did to my love for music, nothing short of that, you sent me back to the day I was in my first science class, the same feeling of amazement, as an architect, space movement and techne is very much the lingo of our field, so believe me you, inspired me for the rest of my life... you are an author that does youtube, a carl sagan on a mission of music. I will tell you what an ai can not do right now, a video like that. ( dont get too spoiled I am high so this encomium might be a bit much, but I just couldn't help myself to write this to ya )
There is a worrying percentage of people that do not see the value in music. I remember telling people I play music and I would get responses like "Why? Do you want to be famous?" . How is this the first thing that occurs in most people's heads?
I guess that's a good way to tell whether someone has experienced a creative outlet. The joy of creation (and musicking) is something you just have to experience for yourself to get it.
@@mlsasd6494 Some cities or regions generally appreciate culture much more than others. I don't think not caring about art is really a part of human nature, but rather a result of the surrounding context and the culture of the environment a person is nurtured in
@@gaelbaca2958 im not disagreeing. Im saying that some people are into music, some people are into drawings, some people are into other creative expressions like dance, some dont care some care about many or all expressions of art. Music is nothing special, its one creative expression and some care and some don‘t. Thats why i dont think its „worrying“, people just like different things.
We are all large language models. From infancy I listened to the sounds that people make with their vocal cords and studied it instinctively ( because it's in our DNA to do so ) and after a while I got the patterns so I was able to talk back in English, later, I picked up the cello ( I was told as a 7 year old I was too short to handle a double bass at the time ), a guitar and finally an electric bass. I learned the patterns and how to recognize and associate positions on an instrument with those black dots on lines that made up music no different than any computer LLM. I was given music from classical composers first, then I sought out James Brown, R&B, and Salsa / Latin jazz,. I was intrigued and I picked up those patterns and they became embedded in memory and musical instinct ( predicting the next musical word or sentence in any dialect that we call genres that I liked ) So, when I went to play In groups, as a human LLM that got pretty good at it, I reliably "predicted the next notes ( word ) " and in fact the only thing that makes music good to me is when the musicians or composers play something unexpected but still predictable within the possibilities. When I listen to music I hear every single part on the instrument that I'm focused on at the moment , and I am often able to (just like an LLM ) predict the next notes and sometimes the variations that come about. As for rhythm, ..Tell that to all the people that clap on the 2 and 4 when everyone what is on the 1 and 2 . When we are talking about having rhythm we all know there are whole subsections of the culture that have no ability to feel syncopation let alone understand where the beat is or know how to dance other than jumping up and down. So I think you're speaking a bit prematurely about what computers can and can not ever do. We can't be talking out of one side of our often inflated musical egos that music is some sophisticated expression of the mathematics of nature ( Close encounters of the 3rd ind etc for all of you that live life through and insist on conforming everything into whatever movies and TV shows you grew up on ) on one hand, and then deny that mathematics and its inherent logical algorithms structures etc, inc the drum machines and synths we use to create whatever music genre You and I don't particularly like, but everybody else does is divorced from the technology that we use to create and consume it all. That just means you have no idea at the root level what is going on . It's not as complicated to get humans and apparently various birds from watching animal videos to tap their feet or bob their heads with the rhythm as you all might think. It's all a product, a production, a piece. Every single detail that you are laying out that you THINK is so "unique" "spiritually human" and "special " can be quantified because it is at the basic level, that is our central nervous system , all just voltage action potential thresholds ( -50 millivolts (mV),) across a nerve cell membrane, any a neurologist will tell you that. BInary molecular interactions NO matter how "soulful " you are. There is no "ghost" in that complicated machine. Just action potential thresholds across cell membranes cascading into all that we create and are ( which is pretty damn special BTW) . Sorry folks, You're not as mystical as you thought you were. Study physiology and you will find that out. NEVER say never when it comes to what we create and THAT includes the non organic machines we create too. Human beings. have waaaaay too much ego, especially western minds who are taught in their religions and associated attitudes, that they are the pinnacle of creation.
Great video. Linking music to a physical activity, and not just a mental one, is profound… and the first time I’ve heard someone say that. Although it seems so obvious now… It makes me think about how little we still understand about the links between the physical and mental worlds. Mind and matter… we can’t measure mental phenomena (yet) with any objectivity so wtf even is it? We’ve no idea!
True, but 80 years ago people thought we would be living in moonbases and driving flying cars by 2000. Cars had many advantages over using horses, but there hasn't really been a reason for us to start flying around all the time and so we don't. AI might be able to do a lot of things in the future, but I think it's longevity will really comes down to whether it actually serves a meaningful purpose. Generative algorithms can make music, but do we need them to? Is there a lack of music we need to solve? I kind or see it all as just a fad, but who knows what the future holds
If you're a bad musician, you actually would pass a turing test... Explanation: AI aims for complete accuracy, if you can't do that, then are definitely aren't AI.
@@christopherjobin-official7440 AI doesn’t “aim” for anything. You can tell image generators to create images that look like they were drawn by children, and they can create images that look imperfect. They also produce unintentionally imperfect images all the time.
The transformer architecture has been applied to not only language, but to mechanical movements to train robotics. "AI" in it's current state is fancy calculus. It takes "Tokens" or collections of information and produces the most likely series of subsequent information as the results. When trained on this use case I'd bet money it could accomplish this today with the appropriate training set. You spelled out the simple set of rules to follow. AI through the use of "Temperature" can add variation, acting within the rules and structure of a musical genre. Look at the progress that Udio and Suno have made in just a few months.
Training on a bunch of existing data is literally exactly what musicians do. While describing LLMs you explained the process of learning to jam to a T. It's weird how that's a normal process for a human musician but it becomes offensive when a machine does it.
Music is just wiggly air. It's not "abstract" and it is not activity, that's "playing music". Defining music can be hard either way, so there is no point to dicuss it further, or try to vigorously define it. There is no doubt that AI will be capable of "jamming" someday. By someday, I mean months, years. AI is evolving at an exponential rate, we don't know what it will do, but we know that it will do everything humans do, it will think like a human, because all human behavior has patterns. AI can learn and imitate any pattern, that's exactly what it essentially does. Even the mistakes we make, all the "human" qualities we have, can be observed and imitated. Hell, brain structures can be analyzed in the future, who knows? So I doubt AI even needs "body" to satisfy every aspect of music, including jamming. If you told people in 60's that everyone will have a mirror in their pockets, that can look through any other similar mirror in the world, they would call you crazy and insane. They would make similar puritanical claims you do in this video. You don't even understand the basics of how an AI works, why makes such a bold claim as the title of this video?
If there’s a systematic way to do something, a sequence of steps that if taken in the correct order produce the desired results, a machine will eventually be able to do it.
AI is already forcing humanity to accept that whatever we call intelligence or creativity is a complex interplay of different parameters. Most of us don’t even listen to music but recordings of music. There’s a fine but essential difference between the two. In the end, music is in the ears of the beholder.
I agree. While we all enjoy Neely, I think this entire video completely ignores that time and time again, and which will continue again and again now and into the future as long as existence is a thing, human-engineered AI, and then eventually AI-engineered AI, will advance to super-human in all of what was considered exclusive human domains. GPT-4o is waaaaay early days. This video in a VERY near future assessment will be labeled, "typical human-centric-laden wishful thinking and denial". Certainly not hating on Neely. Just shaking my head at the shortsightedness and the blinders people sometimes unwittingly wear.
@@travellingshoes5241 Of course! And the sun continuing to shine in our solar system tomorrow might not happen. But the probability of it happening is? [your best guess here]. You must consider what has come before, the advancement that has been observed, and then project that history of advancement into the future. ... Stating the possibility of something not happening is true of all things; therefore, such a statement has no significant value - fairly meaningless and of no consequence. ... What is of significant value is the probability of something happening based on the history and trajectory of the subject matter in question. The probability of the sun continuing to shine in our solar system tomorrow is so close to 100% that it's much more efficient to simply say "the sun WILL shine again in our solar system tomorrow". ... Similarly, based on the history and trajectory of AI eventually surpassing humans in many human domains once thought impossible for AI to achieve, it is more efficient to simply say " though it is currently thought impossible, AI WILL eventually pass the Music touring test." But you will only know the probability for that being ultra high by being immersed in tracking the progress of AI and not being stuck in a human-centric "being human is NOT a computable and even improvable process" mindset. That mindset will stifle your ability to project the future reasonably.
I don't think this will age well. Currently, music AI is focused on output generation, but there's no reason why it has to be. That's just the thing most people are likely to want. After all, there are for more people who want instant good music than there are musicians. Want an AI that passes the directive test? Simple enough, we train a model to output steps in the process. Who would spend the money to train it? The same people that try to sell musicians software and gear. Don't have musician friends to jam with? Is your drummer too busy dating your guitarist's sister to show up for practice? Is your bassist on vacation in the Philippines? Do you have an idea that just can't wait for other people's convenience? Well well well, do I have a product for you! Say hello to your robot bandmates! They are available at all times and can even help you develop new sounds and songs.
I am a computer scientist, and the category error problem constantly annoys me. We find a problem that requires a lot of intelligence in humans, like playing chess or go at a grandmaster level, and declare that AI is therefore "intelligent".
For some reason, it's only AI that we use this kind of language about. The best human weightlifter is easily outcompeted by a small forklift, but we don't call the forklift "strong". The best human sprinter is outcompeted by a locomotive, but we don't call the train "fit". Hell, computers have been beating humans at mental arithmetic for ages, and that's even a marker of human intelligence.
To quote the great computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."
One of the under-appreciated aspects of the Turing test is that it was an activity that humans should find easy, not something like playing chess which humans find difficult. It's these "easy for us" problems where AI tends to fail, partly because they are the problems that machines find very hard, and partly because you can't get money to solve unspectacular problems.
I want a machine to do things that I find easy but tedious, like cleaning my bathroom.
Sure, I'd like a machine to do the tedious stuff like cleaning. However, I'd also want a machine to cure diseases and make nuclear fusion viable, for example. If a machine can solve hard problems and make life on Earth better, I'm all for it.
Also, I don't really like that quote. To me it's very interesting to ponder the question whether a computer can think. It made me contemplate about what thinking actually is and in what way our thinking is different than how an LLM outputs text. What's so special about us that would make this question uninteresting? Not much, me thinks. In the end, we are also just machines, albeit very complex ones.
@@bobrandom5545Prof Roger Penrose has proven that when the human mind understands something, it’s not running algorithms. But running algorithms is all computers can do. Whether computers can think depends on how you define thinking, I guess, but I think there will always be modes of thought that we don’t know how to make computers do because we have no idea how we’re doing them.
@@richardhunt809 Where did he prove that? As far as I know the prevailing stance in neuroscience is that our brains do work algorithmically.
@@richardhunt809 He didn't prove anything. Don't get carried away. Keep in mind that his theory about microtubules is an extremely fringe theory, barely considered as more than pseudoscience by most of the scientific community.
Yeah I don’t mean the microtubules thing. That’s more to do with Stuart Hammeroff anyway. I’m talking about Penrose’s mathematical argument in his book Shadows of the Mind. It doesn’t get into neuroscience.
This is so interesting. And such an honor to be featured! I feel like you and Jack could nerd out for days on AI (and music).
Yo, keep being cool Pomplamoose
you guys are super talented, please keep doing what you do
God y’all are so sick, such an enjoyable group of people
The funny thing is that I discovered your music yesterday. Oddly timed!!! Great stuff by the way!
hi pompalmoose
Imagine having to prove you're not a robot by playing free bird on a fucking hurdy gurdy
No, that ability would define AI over human skill.
I would really want to hear that!
0:00 "What would it take for a machine to jam?"
Very little, actually, my printer jams all the time.
lol for a second I thought he was gonna talk about the halting problem
Best Comment
*brrrt* FACE MELTER
You dirty dog
PC load letter? The fuck does that mean?
Adam!! Drive-by praise during the sponsor read, I was not prepared!
Adam Neely jumpscare
Well deserved dude! Adam’s got great taste clearly haha
Jacob you won't read this comment but your essays really are the best
Respect due!
>watching ads
I gotta say: I'm glad no human being was forced to record those Red Lobster lines...
Many voices were stolen, uncredited, spliced together to synthesize that thing we listened to, and zero musicians were paid for training the robot to do it badly
@@moscanaveia "progress"
forced? what about paid?
I wouldn't mind getting paid to record it, but sadly by using AI to create music it's taking opportunities away from actual human artists.
I think the Red Lobster thing isn't proof that AI is now good at producing music, but rather an indictment of how bad music in advertising is.
Also how willing companies are to not pay any money
this comment is partially missing the point. the argument isn't just that AI music will never reach a level where it's considered "good" (whatever that means) by most people's standards (not just those who listen to the top 100 pop songs on spotify). the main problem with the Red Lobster AI song is that the inputs into producing the final product is of no importance to 99% of people who consume music. (If the Red Lobster AI song was actually good, would this completely eliminate your criticism of AI music?)
replace the Red Lobster song with the newest drake or taylor swift song, the point still stands. nobody cares about the actual action of music, just the final product, which will be what allows these Red Lobster AI songs and more to proliferate so easily and readily.
AI is the new CGI - if capitalism can lower standards enough, people won't notice or care about its use in some low quality contexts. The decline in superhero movies is noticeable as they've been able to get away with more and more "film some people in front of a green screen, generate everything else in post." They drip-fed it to popcorn audiences until expectations were lowered appropriately. But there are still realms in film where you can't get away with that - Monkey Man still requires some belief on the audience's part that the action involves real people fighting, The Lighthouse couldn't get away with Willem Dafoe in a green screen suit and filling in the scene around him.
AI can replace already pretty bad or forgettable music - commercials, grocery store radio. Getting to the next level where it can replace some one hit wonder Top 40 might be possible, but the step beyond that to creating the connection Swifties feel with Taylor or a Nick Cave audience feels with him I don't see that as possible in any universe.
@@mvsr990 I like the superhero movie allegory, because predictably, people are getting sick of that as well
AI really will be perfect for corporate music. soulless, lifeless, is as obvious as obvious can be in telling you what to feel, but hey it'll do for what it's meant to do
One might even call it a Touring Test
ha HA!
Yes, no AI would be insane enough😅
The AI next frontier, dad jokes
Damn, that's good =D
@@BloodHassassin
Write a dad joke about AI music:
Why did the AI musician go to school?
Because it wanted to learn the "al-gorithm" to hit all the right "notes"!
I really very much like the concept of "musicking", it reminds me of a quote from someone I very much respect a few years back, they were talking about NFTs and the commoditisation of the visual medium, but this hit me so much I don't think I'll ever forget it:
"Art is a verb. It's a process. It's an act of communion. What hangs on the wall is a fucking collectible. What you and the artist communicate across centuries is the art."
Obviously Small's book and concept well predate this quote, but it honestly changed my perspective on why art and music mean so much to me, and what's truly valuable and meaningful to me as someone who appreciates these things.
I like to define art as a form of communication, which annoys AI art bros to no end because, well... AI art doesn't meaningfully communicate anything because AI doesn't communicate. AI only imitates the act of communication but it's imitation has no parseable information inherent in it. If a Massive Language Model outputs a message telling me tells me it hates my guts I know I'm okay because the AI cannot hate, doesn't know what guts are or who I am and it was prompted to act like an asshole anyway. The output is, functionally, not communication.
The art as communication thing also keeps the term "art" useful. If anything I can experience or perceive anywhere from anything, even the natural world is art then that makes the term art so vague to be not practical. Limiting art to communication, preferably communication with meaningful information (so as to not concern ourselves with the question if the stars are alive and are communicating with us through secret signals in how they twinkle in the night sky) keeps it broad enough to encompass most human expression but limited enough to still be useful.
Perhaps in the future a true general AI can overcome these hurdles but we're a long ways away from any of that.
I don’t like this philosophy because it inherently gatekeeps art. I don’t get to define what constitutes art anymore than you or anyone else does. It carries an air of elitism and arrogance and frankly, I think is counter-productive to artistic expression.
@@sickcallranger2590 I disagree, actually. From my point of view this means that anything can be art, the form is kind of irrelevant.
@@sickcallranger2590
Well words are tools. For a word as a tool to be useful it has to have limits, otherwise it stops having any communicative value. For the word "art" to have meaning something must not be art. Calling a breeze of air "art" might be nice as a metaphor but as a literal statement it has very literal meaning to it.
That's why my definition is very very broad. Speaking is an art, posing is an art, walking can be an art. Anything that has communicative value is art, and all humans do is communicate. To be human requires communication, it's hard not to art as a human. So the gate isn't really keeping anyone out... but it does mean trying to rationalize non-human output as art is incredibly difficult. Especially AI output since narrow AI does not communicate anything, it cannot communicate because it cannot think. There is nothing to interpret from raw AI output aside from the skills of the programmer; in a sense the AI itself is art (it communicates the skill of its creators) but it's output has no art in it ( AI output saying "I love you" doesn't not show any thoughts or feelings on behalf of the AI because it doesn't think or feel, only imitate those qualities).
Musicking vs Musucking. It's a small difference but an important one.
Things that will stop AI at jam sessions: “the usual key”
Until there going to be trained
Adam Neely's Blues sessions often explore various keys typical in blues music, including but not limited to E, A, and Bb. These keys are commonly used in blues to accommodate guitarists' preferences and the range of typical blues instruments like guitars and harmonicas.
Or something like, "MAKE IT BANGIN'!"
See, "bangin'" is slang term with a largely subjective meaning. What you find bangin', I may find to be a snooze. And visa versa.
Due to the subjective nature of a lot of musical slang terms, the AI would only be able to adapt to the situations for which it was coded. E.g.: "LET US HAVE A BANGIN' JAZZ RIFF-OFF!" gives the AI 3 directives:
1) Play Jazz.
2) Make it energetic and exciting.
3) Use riffs as the basis of the jam session.
If you coded it to handle all 3 of these, then cool. If not, it's going to try and handle it, BADLY.
Or calling standards like Twinbay or Tingl
Ah, gotcha! In that case, let's jam in the key of G major. It's a pretty versatile key, great for both upbeat and mellow vibes. What instrument do you have in mind?
I’m about to start randomly yelling out “BLUES IN E FLAT” At the jam from now on.
I’m sure everyone will love that.
“Ah 1 and ah 2 and ah 3”
*starts ripping Phrygian dominate bass solo*
“Did you guys hear that flat 2nd i was playing”
gonna show up to the rap battle and shout "BLUES IN E FLAT"
It’s an oldie where I’m from
"Sir, this is a funeral service."
It’s a good way to check for robots.
Seriously great video Adam, I'm a grad student in computer science and musician/composer doing my thesis on generative music right now. I think an important thing to bring up too is the difference between generative systems being built today and those built by the original pioneers of 'generative music' like Brian Eno and David Cope from the 1960s-1980s.
I'd argue that a lot of those older processes and systems thought more 'human-like,' in that Eno, Cope and others tried to make systems that extended their own compositional thought process (Music for Airports from Eno, It's Gonna Rain from Steve Reich, EMI, etc...). But today, that compositional curiosity is gone, and companies like Suno, Meta, Google, and others are looking at music like the next 'check box' for AI and trying to achieve greater technical prowess.
As a researcher on social interaction (including social and distributed cognition), I love that you did a deep dive into cognition beyond the computational model that is so prevalent in everyone's imagination at this point. I hope folks learned something from it.
(I'm also a little jealous that you explained so clearly in a few minutes what took me years of PhD study to understand. Bravo!)
interesting, what field are you in? thanks
I think we actually will see software that can "jam". There isn't necessarily a "ghost in the machine", however. What we'll be getting is a reflection of the spirit of the people it's playing along with. If we fail to recognize that we're dealing with a sophisticated mirror, then it'll seem to have a spirit of its own.
We're still probably going to be flooded by algorithmic music though, and "artists" that can do a great job pretending to play for "live performances". This is just a continuation of formulaic pop. My guess is that we'll get some genuinely novel creativity on the periphery which draws on AI, in the same way that digital audio has introduced entirely new genres.
What I'm really curious about when it comes to generative AI art is whether the masses will actually get tired of it. If they've got a constant supply of generated pop-on-demand, I could imagine that there is a threshold where it's "too good", and they lose interest. Perhaps the "AI music revolution" will result in a retro movement, back to in-person performances where we can easily see that real humans are playing together.
You've made me recall how MTV was riding the "Unplugged" wave for a bit in the early '90s. It was a minor badge of honour for artists to be capable of playing their sets sans electric guitars/studio beats, as a contrast to the distortion and synthesizer heavy 80s. Maybe the next wave won't even be online at all!
Yes, for sure, the cheaper something is to create, the less value it has. When we can mass-produce any musical experience we want just by asking for it, it turns the experience into something disposable. Music (mainstream pop music) has been on that trajectory for a long time now. Every big hit is a flash in the pan, and people forget it as quickly as they embraced it.
I spent something like a week trying to get good tracks from Udio, and at first it was exciting to find something good. But with time it became pretty exhausting to listen bad take after bad take in search of something I deemed acceptable so when I finally had a finished track I was so tired of it, just listening to it made me feel nauseous.
After a while, AI generated music will all sound very generic, typical and sound similar to each other. What AI does is mix and match existing music that is out there, but it is unable to reinvent or improvise/create.
amazing comment. made me think of a quote from brian eno, "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature"
i feel like the same way generations now are getting back into vinyl because of the vinyl distortion and scratches will be how people in an age of AI music will look back on more "primitive" and "imperfect" creations of music.
your point about AI needing to be able to play an instrument with a physical body ignores that music can be made entirely electronically. In software. Which the AI could theoretically interact with, since it is also software.
I always forget that the guy from pomplamoose is the one who invented patreon, and every time I'm reminded of it I'm blown away all over again
the same patreon that is closing accounts of Ukrainian bloggers, because "we're all about peace and love, so the fact that you guys are getting screwed over by russians is kind of ruining our hippy vibes, man".
And Patreon's competitor that got bought out by patreon, Subbable, was invented by Hank Green (the vlogbrothers/SciShow guy).
@@lifeteen2also the vidcon guy and the microcosmos guy and the crash course guy and th
Hi Adam, this is one of the best "AI will never be able to do " argument I've ever seen !
For context, my current job *is* about GenAI (for instance I know exactly the ElevenLabs settings you used for Xenakis), and I started doing machine learning 20 years ago. So I've heard my share of silly "AI will never be able to do " arguments, that proved to be wrong in the end. I'm also an amateur musician who knows what jamming is, and the very subtle body language communication it can involve. I was very skeptical at the beginning of the video, but this is maybe the first time I hear such a compelling argument against AI taking the place of humans.
Two thoughts to slightly moderate your argument :
* I do think that machines will be at some point able to pass your musical Turing test, but it might require a big paradigm shift in architecture, training procedure, etc. (a shift that will not likely happen soon for the reasons you describe around economic incentives).
* In a sense I feel that that Turing test is a bit unfair in the sense that it involves doing a thing well "with humans", and not "between AIs". It is like saying "Oh but humans will never pass the spider test which consists in being able to get offsprings with spiders". I'm sure that AIs will be able to jam "between them" because they will find digital ways to replace the subtle body language and so on. (It reminds me the "Hanabi" card game test : it is a cooperative game that AI can do very well when they are playing together, but do badly if they try to play with humans.)
Keep up the good work !
Good points! Yes I felt Adam framed the argument strangely by giving AI a test it’s not even trying to solve (as far as I know). Generative AI music is just that: it’s all about the output, not the performance. Even IF we got to a point where we had robot bands…well, it’s utterly pointless, right? Performative AI is extremely pointless, and solves no problem - other than being a novelty for 5 minutes.
Generative AI however DOES solve problems in that it can create things like ad / stock music very quickly. I’ve used Udio to “discover” new music and I’m finding it very fun. Of course it’s way less creative than building a track in Ableton but then Udio can be used to create only vocals (for example) so I could use it as another tool in the toolbox.
I don't think it'll take a paradigm shift in the way the technology is built. I'm pretty sure a transformer model with enough context would work.
But I speculate that we're more likely to accidentally build something that can do it before any of the major players find it worth their time to intentionally do it.
@@codahighland Transformers are not realtime and none of them currently work with a context of other music + human spatiotemporal posture. So by that measure, there will indeed need to be architectural changes.
Sorry, but I don't get your point. If you say that you _do_ think that machines will be able to pass the musical Turing test, how do you agree with him at all?
@@ldlework Transformers are as realtime as you want them to be; it's not an architectural limitation, just a user interface one. There are definitely some transformer models that have been used for music already. And adding additional data inputs isn't an architectural change. There's nothing fundamentally new that would necessarily need to be invented; it's just a matter of putting together the pieces with the necessary intent and collecting enough data.
As someone who works in data and AI, but also creates and plays music, I can say you did a fantastic job. I have been thinking about many of the points you raised for a long time since GenAI became all we talk about in my workplace. You basically provided me with the missing bits to see the whole picture in the music space. Very good narrative and overall video. 👌🏼
I don't understand why pop-science AI media has focused singularly on art. It is, especially in the context of music, one of the few situations in life where the human performing it is as, or more, important than the art being performed. "Another box to tick" is a good way of phrasing how many companies think about this problem. It is a briefly entertaining imitation of a human experience.
Probably your algo, if i speak with my cousin about ai and art, she often mentions drawing/design/visual arts
Because it gets the clicks, is my guess. There's so much more important and usefull stuff AI is doing like helping develop new medications or researching material science but no one is gonna be outraged by that
Kurt Vonnegut once said something like,
“Some of the important things in life are food, sex, but also a philosophical idea called becoming. This is why I don’t like computers in the home. You need to become. And Bill Gates is saying you don’t have to. Your computer can do it for you.”
Part of his idea of how a person becomes was the creative process. He spoke often about how people need to write stories and poems for each other without caring whether or not they “make it”-it’s just a human thing to do, same as jamming with friends or playing sports or having a conversation. You need a creative outlet.
I am totally convinced that machines cannot make music or art or literature. They can make things that look and sound like it, but they can’t make it because to make it you have to be a human and you have to mean something, and machines can’t mean.
While AI art might be ruining parts of art, it is still a fantastic tool to further the ability of artists, much like a sample library can limit the exposure of instrumental players, but has made way for so much creativity for artists in music like rap. We see that professional artists often have apprentices prep canvases with a simple or even somewhat detailed background that may not be the subject of a painting. It's quite amazing that an artist can prompt an AI to do that dirty work for them, it gives more time to spend on the parts that they care about. In fact, I view AI in the same way for almost all applications. People might say that engineers graduating on chatgpt aren't good to hire, but I heavily utilize chatgpt so that when I am approaching a problem that involves information I am not brushed up on, I can ask chatgpt to streamline the info relevant to the problem. Before I would have to find the topic, then backtrace through textbooks until I find the necessary concepts I needed to brush up on. It's just a tool after all. Every tool merely has the purpose of making a job easier, whether that be going from a rock to a sharp rock as our ancestors did, or from google searches to AI prompts.
A lot of people want to have their dreams realized but don't have the means to develop the skills to a satisfying level.
Many of my friends who can't draw love being able to put a vision in their head into the real world.
In that regard, i think being a director of a creation is a feeling everyone should try at least once, and Ai has been an excellent tool for that.
But as always, greed and such ruins the beauty of being able to print out as many iterations as your heart desires.
And you see tech bros mechanizing whatever they can
What would it take for a machine to jam? As an IT tech, frighteningly little...
Without human input it would be impossible. The reason "AI" alone exists is due to human input.
@@lovescarguitarthey were making a printer joke
I think that i could work like a Transformer maybe... Supose that you have an AI that given a Input plays something... Train it with a lot of jams, and then just give the Model some pseudo random variables to start the song, a little clip makes the deal or some ramdom generated thing, and then Just kept the model listening for some seconds, then let him play and train the model i a way that it plays things that are close to the space where the input lands, in the same way a transformer predicts the next word, let it predict the next notes... and there you go. You can add a randomness value in order to make it more predictable or crazy, just like you do with Transformers
Yeah I think this possibility is a lot closer than Adam thinks. I think the only reason generative AI can't "jam" is simply because no one has tried to develop such a thing yet. All the pieces are there. I've heard some pretty good AI generated sax solos over Giant Steps. Adding the ability to visually and auditorily observe and respond to cues is just a matter of integration.
Ehehehehe, that printer joke is gold.
The reason the AI generated music is so good, is because AI is basically copy-pasting. But instead of literary, it's copy-pasting the underlying patterns. You don't have to hate that the music was so good, humans were the original authors of the patterns, so it's basically still something we've created. It's just that we can't hear only the patterns.
It doesn't need to pass a musical turing test to anihilate 90% of media composer jobs.
What a shame. We wanted technology to automate the boring stuff for us, like factory jobs, and give us time to make art and music, and instead we’re all working and the machines are making art.
It's horrifying, it should be illegal. There's no way to imagine any real social benefit behind this door they're unlocking. You can't even frame it in the context of "if we don't the Chinese will." Let them - who cares? AI generated music is not of some immense strategic value. The techies and Silicon Valley have betrayed us all to enrich themselves.
@@nickcalabrese4829 as if it didn't massively affect those either
Yeah. But where I live there is an significant uptick in audience of live performances. I hope there will be a revival of analog life styles as soon as people get overfed by fast (music)food, fast everything. I am not holding my breath though... Most folks want cheap and fast.
@@nickcalabrese4829it is. You just don’t see that part
I think the line about making music a problem to solve is what really irks me. This AI push feels like the final stage of reducing all art to a product, to something to sell or show off for status rather than appreciate in any meaningful sense. I hope it all burns out, but I'm uncomfortable with the environment around it.
Why can't we have both? Like maybe ~10% of my musical time is playing the guitar, checking info, videos or playthroughs from the artists I like (or even watching a video like this one about the meta of music). But the other ~90% of the time, I just listen to music. That's it.
And I don't see why I should care that machine learning was involved. I don't believe in souls and ghosts and magic. I think we are biological machines bound the laws of physics. So all those arguments about ai-art being soulless mean absolutely nothing to me. souls don't exist to begin with...
exactly this
when these models first began rolling out, i was hopeful about their potential as a tool. something that could lay down a rough foundation for a song or an image or a story
but that hope is long gone. they are not tools, or at least are not being used as tools - they are being used to mass produce superficially pretty at best but ultimately garbage 'art' that is pure commodity. it is so clearly and purely the 5% wanting a second go after their NFT project imploded and died
can art produced by a large language model have meaning? maybe, but there's not even a genuine effort to do that right now, and certainly all of this 'art' produced for the sake of selling it alone will never mean anything
We're going to burn out and become uncomfortable with the environment, as vulture capital and pirate equity set billions of dollars and the literal atmosphere on fire, to power these large language models that will never produce a real ROI.
when you see AI evangelists discuss their vision of the future, it's obvious they view all media, not just music, as passing, pleasurable aesthetics to briefly consume before discarding. their utopian future is one where all media is slop designed to appeal to the lizard brain with no further thought put into it. nothing unique, nothing interesting, no consideration of connection to and of the artist through the music, no auteurism, etc. their goal is reduce the production of media to a method that appeals to the most base art consumer and nothing more.
@@hastesoldatour souls are our experience as humans. Which is entirely unique to each one of us. A machine doesn't have that so anything it makes will be hollow.
Professor of computer science & amateur musician from the Netherlands here. First, thanks for all the thorough and well-researched videos, always a joy to watch.
"AI cannot do X" arguments are, in my opinion, always tricky: AI has surprised all of us, even researchers in the field, with its incredible progress. In particular, I am not convinced about the interaction argument. Reinforcement learning is branch of AI that is specifically tailored to interacting agents learning behavior in a dynamic environment.
Amazing progress by companies like Boston Dynamics has enabled robots run and do back flips. I see no reason why in several years this technology would not be able AIs to play in jam sessions. Sure, there are challenges, like there were in AI before. So the real question is how should we musicians, writers, scientists and all other relate ourselves to AI? This video makes a good contribution to that debate and the various aspects.
AI will never do X arguments always make me cringe.
Yeah, Adam is a great resource when it comes to musical knowledge but he’s out of his depth here, and just flat out wrong. If there was any money in doing so, I’m fairly certain that one of the big AI labs could train a model _right now_ that could pass the musical Turing test. Let alone many years into the future.
Very true
You're absolutely right! I've been involved in a cancer reseaerch lab which was training an AI to do the pathologists' job. Back in 2020, their "current" version after two years of coding was slightly better than a panel of 12 pathologists with 20 years experience in the field each in the first world (they were from different countries). That made the software better than 99% of pathologists world wide at cancer detection and determination what kind of cancer it was and how to treat it.
Same in drug development, ALL molecules are first designed by software to find out if they'd work in theory and only those with the highest potential are created in real life for further up studies. We tend to say that 1 in 10K potential drugs are followed up in a lab, and from those, another 1 in 10K make it to the market. Software again does the bulk of the work and that with companies actively keeping their work secret and not helping each other much in fear of losing profits.
OpenAI just released a video of their new AI singing a song, harmonizing and rhyming with another instance of itself, you should check it out.
The soccer analogy is the best way I’ve heard to show the difference between the end product and the process/creators behind it. An AI could very feasibly be trained to generate HD video of a full sports game. But I’d be very interested to ask sports fans if they’d be invested in the outcome of a game that wasn’t physically played and where none of the players are real people. Would they watch excited to find out who will win, worry about their team making a mistake, believing that any outcome is possible? Would they wear the jersey of their favourite AI player?
Art isn’t art without artists the same way that sport isn’t sport without athletes.
People get invested in stories that don't physically happen all the time, or we wouldn't have novels or summer blockbusters.
@@JonBrase I'm tempted to say that in the case of movies or novels, people (as you say) are drawn in by the underlying story, whether it be grounded in reality or not. They attach emotion and value to certain moving story arcs, which can be often-used tropes or new, unique plots. As for sports, people tend to be strongly drawn in by the underlying human aspects: athletes pushing their boundaries, teams 'clutching' against all odds, sportsmen delivering a stellar performance despite injury. Perhaps most important of all: the prior expectations weighed against the actual outcome of a match or contest. A match played by a completely dominating soccer team against a significantly inferior one will not be engaging at all, because the outcome will in most cases follow expectation. Hence such matches, when played by machines, will not have the same unpredictability (and are in fact much more deterministic because of the fixed capacities of the machinery).
@@boristerbeek319true, but its a different kind of spectacle, human chess players have been outmatched by AI long time ago, but people still watch humans play chess as it's more about the human abilities against one another, rather than as a whole, since as a whole even the best human players lose to the AI.
But if AI can create an interesting story in that match, then maybe some people will. It's true that people get invested in things that aren't real all the time, we usually call that art.
@@boristerbeek319 so do we think music is closer to novels/movies where the end product can be engaging without knowledge of a creator? Or is music closer to sports where the human beings behind it provide most of what we love about it? I think this would inform us on if AI music could really capture attention as art in itself or if it’ll never surpass marketing/elevator music because we need the story of an artist behind the art.
@@TheManinBlack9054 This raises another extremely pertinent point: AI chess has become its own category, and millions of people love to watch it.
It's not about the story, but about the technical precision and how far AI can push the bounds of perfection which makes it so interesting to watch.
A few weeks ago I tried out the Udio AI. The more specific you are, the more impressive it is. Kind of fun. I asked it to make a funky jazz fusion track with heavy use of B3 and interesting polymeter. And it made a pretty cool song! But I forgot to select "instrumental" so it had some James Brown type voice shouting excitedly about organs and time signatures.
So what you're saying is, the AI can't actually pass the Musical Directive Test, but it can spit out bad imitations of James Brown tunes? 🤔
4! By 4! Yeahh yeahh
I don't know. I had an opposite expirience a few days ago. Like I asked a very specific thing - a violin solo. Generated 3 times, got six results. Only one had any strings in it at all and far from solo. It seems like it actually works better if you give it broader description on what to do. But then the problem comes that you have far less control over the content. Personally, I'd prefer these AI to output midi/sheet music because it seems like the most useful it can be to actual musicians and more precise music writting if it is used to suggest ideas. It is a common thing to borrow something from others in music (a long list of classical pieces that influenced Star Wars sound track comes to mind) and AI crudly speaking is first and foremost statistics, so AI could be a great tool to suggest you what to borrow. but unfortunally the people who make these AI don't care about music and musicians like Adam said. For them music is only data and business.
Really, I found the opposite to be true. When I try to get specific it gets weird. I have the same issue with image generators. It's like they really want to do their own thing, not what I want. I like weird though so it's all good
@@Grigoriy1996 A violin solo isn't specific enough tho.
Never is a long time, Adam...! LOL. But I get your point and loved the video. Reading halfway thru Musicking and loving it.
I think the salient point for this video was "as long as it's good enough". That's it. If we look at our current lives, we usually settle for good enough all the time and not much about the process. Hopefully this will change once most jobs are rendered obsolete by this Coming Wave (another great book, btw). I wonder how we'll pay our bills then though...
I am just completely and utterly terrified by the idea of removing creative people from the process of making art, because then what you are essentially getting is raw output straight from the boardrooms. For things like commercial music, the bad ideas and tastes of people with the money wont even have the buffer of being filtered through some creative individual. Truly, a fresh hell awaits us all.
This might unfortunately happen if big companies capture the space. We need to protect open source at all cost. And combat the push for license requirement on training data.
Boardrooms can be automated, too
truly creative people will not be removed. AI algorithms are imitative, still. They don't yet have the power to invent new styles. they will only replace imitative artists, for now at least.
So it's time to revive the good ol' driveway concerts for the neighborhood. Many of those. With a few tacos you've got something I would pay to attend....
@@goat8477 you cannot go backwards in time, on the macroscopic level.
Art (especially music, where the experience is live) is just as much for the person making it as for the people who view it. It’s unhealthy to think about art as purely for the viewing experience when for most if not all artists making art IS the part that’s important. The best artists don’t even care how it’s received.
The best artist don't even release their work. They work for the joy of creating.
I remember browsing TH-cam cat videos, and I landed on one about a kitten stumbling, pretty normal, right? The short had annoying music playing, again normal. The 'cameraman' picked the kitten up and I saw something weird going on, the kitten was obviously dubbed over with a stock meow but when I looked at its mouth, a tooth disappeared when it meowed again! I realised it was AI generated. This one short made me realise what's wrong with AI generated content in general.
Why is this bad? I watch cat videos not just to watch cat videos, I want to care about the cat because it exists or has existed somewhere, I follow cat channels like claireluvcat for example to know how some of the cats I've come to know are doing right now. AI generated cat videos don't have any of that. Just after swiping back to my home screen I felt a sense of betrayal and anger. Am I overreacting about this? I don't think so. I was emotionally scammed.
It's the same for any art.
@@TheManinBlack9054 that's silly! Why would you think this is the case?
@TheManinBlack9054 I would propose that they would release music, and they wouldn't care how it's received. But they could care *that* it's received. They wouldn't care what anyone thinks, as long as people get to hear their unfiltered and authentic expression. It's like a writer or pholosopher who doesn't care if anyone agrees with him, but he absolutely wants people to fully understand what he has to say, and it's their choice whether they reject it. If they never wrote or released music, their thoughts wouldn't be heard or understood.
I miss taking part in jam sessions. When I was stationed out in California, I had a bunch of musician friends, and we'd all rent a practice booth at the rec center, cram ourselves inside however we could, and just play. There wasn't a ton of vocal communication, only really asking what sort of vibe we were going for, never recorded anything, and a session would just start with one person just... Playing. Usually it was me as the drummer giving the rest of the group a beat, sometimes it was one of the guitarists (of which there were three) showing off a riff they liked. Music, itself, is a language that we spoke to one another in. Despite the rather eclectic collection of instruments (2 electric guitars, one acoustic guitar, an upright bass, a trumpet, a ukulele, a clarinet, and drums), it all worked cause we knew what things sound like and how they worked together. Yes, that is too many musicians to shove into a practice room, but we got by by having three people sitting on the piano in different ways (one on the bench, one on the key cover, and one on top), with the rest of the people stuck standing around where they could find room.
Can't play drums much anymore due to chronic pain in my knees and lower back, but that little jam band I was part of will live forever in my heart cause it was something we did and made together. I guess the secret to making it all work was that we had something as the root, whether that be a guitar or the drums or the bass, and all of us taking the time to either agree on what it should sound like or disagreeing through music by pushing against what the root was trying to establish, forcing it to change to fit the new sound everyone else was creating. The specific arrangement limited what sorts of vibes we could create, as it's not the easiest task to make a ukulele sound dark or a trumpet sound atmospheric, so we always ended up with a bit of a brighter sound.
I do agree that that's something an AI model can't recreate: The process by which people create. The how and why, merely producing an attempt at a finished product. The creative process is just as, if not more important than the end product, despite most people only really seeing the end product.
However, when one looks at a piece of art, we wonder what it means, what was going through the artist's mind as they created, their reason for making it, the curiosity and analytical parts of the mind trying to break it down and make sense of it. We have always cared about the journey more than the destination.
Continuing on through the video, the concept of Enacted Cognition reminds me of an old roommate I had when I lived in Georgia. He was big into competitive gaming and martial arts, which meant he really enjoyed fighting games. He was also a world class fighter in Brazilian Jiujitsu, earning one gold, two silvers, and a bronze medal at a world competition in South Africa, so he wasn't just thinking about martial arts. However, his approach to competitive gaming was different. He would watch the best players compete and try to emulate their style of play, their actions in certain situations, and then employ those strategies as he played. However, he sucked and would lose even to me, who had never played a fighting game before living with him. I tried to explain this to him, but he just didn't get it:
When you look at a professional player in any sport or game, it's easy to think "if x is happening, y is the response" because that's what they're doing and so should you. However, you lose a ton of information by doing this. The reason these people are pros isn't because they figured out the proper strategy that's hard to beat. It's not even about constant practice or inherent skill, either. It's understanding the game that's being played at a fundamental level. The reason they're so good is because they get it. They've played and they've played and have figured out how THEY play the game and play to their strengths. In the context of, say, a fighting game, that's finding the character you're best with, in a sense, but also learning what opponents you're bad against and how to overcome them using the tools you've given yourself. They're good at the game because they know what they're bad at within the bounds of the game they're playing. Some reactions are instinctual, others are planned, and their prowess is a testament to their journey of discovery and learning.
When my current roommate and I sat down one day and played Injustice, he eventually got frustrated after getting juggled by me for 2 hours and losing every single game. We went outside to smoke and talk about it, cause I didn't want him to get mad, cause it's just a game. He voiced his frustration about constantly losing, so I said, "Okay, so how do I win every game?"
"You shove me into a corner and use the same combo over and over again until you win. It doesn't matter what character you pick, you find a combo and only use that."
"Exactly. You have one of the best minds in pattern recognition that I've ever known, so use it to your advantage. How do you keep me from employing my only strategy?"
"Don't get stuck on the wall?"
"How do you prevent that from happening?"
He thought silently for a moment, figured it out, and then I didn't win a single game for the rest of the day. No, it wasn't just to jump over me, but to use characters with greater mobility to continuously change his angle of attack, altogether stopping me from ever cornering him.
I say this because AI models don't look at the process. They look at the end result and emulate that. We all know what pop music and jazz and impressionist paintings look and sound like, and many of us know what goes into making them. However, the path to getting to an end result can vary wildly from person to person. Copying another artist doesn't make you as talented as them. It just makes it clear that you recognize them as good in the first place.
Thank you for posting these comments. I admire your storytelling
Around 25 years ago, I attended an informal live musical Turing test (the Output kind) hosted by Douglas Hosftadter at the University of Rochester, co-sponsored by the Computer Science department and the Eastman School of Music.
Hofstadter was showcasing what was then a state-of-the-art generative music composition AI. I'm pretty sure it was a version of EMI by David Cope, but my memory of the event has faded with time and details are scarce on the internet. I've found articles about Hofstadter's work with music AI around this time and articles about David Cope, but nothing about any live experiments or presentations like the one I remember attending.
The key element was that the AI was trained on a corpus of a real composers work; a large set of similar compositions (I think Bach's chorales). The idea being that there were enough that even the musically literate in the audience wouldn't know each one by ear. A skilled live pianist played us half a dozen pieces, some from the original set and some from the software, and the room voted which we thought were originals and which were computer generated.
The audience was a split between people there because of the music connection and people there because of the computer science connection., and did merely an OK job identifying the real compositions. At least one of the computer generated pieces was obvious, but several were good enough to split the room, and at least one was only differentiated because some of the room knew enough of the chorales to know it wasn't one of them.
Earlier in his career, Hofstadter made a list of ten things he thought computers and artificial intelligence could never do, and one of the things he said at this presentation was that the work he was doing had led him to cross "create beautiful music" off of that list.
And this was 25 years ago.
I think that one day, computers will be able to jam with you. I agree with most of the video about why it will be hard, and why there isn't money in developing it. I don't think it will be easy, or it will happen soon. But I think that eventually, after one or two or three more generational paradigm shifts, the ability to do so will fall out of some other profound advancement practically for free, like how so many basically economically worthless but really fun roleplaying and other conversational abilities have been achieved for free with the profound paradigm shift of the GPT-based chatbot advancement.
That's why i would advocate for thr strict regulation of a.i. The arts should be exclusively reserved for mankind. A basic right like the right to clean water, food and shelter. I see no reason why deserve to be outcompeted by the power-hungry, economy-destroying toys of the tech giants.
NY Times said that no planes would fly for the next 1000 years the same day the Right Brothers built there plane.
After trying the likes of Suno and Udio, I'm in a weird mix of "impressed" and "not impressed".
By that I mean that I'm impressed at the fact that it's even able to output poorly inspired derivative music, like a human would (only with a much higher energy consumption). But I wouldn't call that "music is solved", though. And that comes from someone who is super interested in (selectively) applying mathematical modeling, AI & algorithmics to music as alternative composition methods.
(Loosely related note: try to ask Suno to output something in 7/4. It will output 4/4 but with lyrics _that talk about 7/4_ . It's hilarious)
Are you suuure it takes much more energy? Humans are fairly inefficient in regards to energy, especially depending on ones diet. If you only count the actual creation time (like maybe 5 minutes) its fairly limited, but if you count all the training and education that person has recieved split over all poorly inspired dirivative music he will produce im not sure if the human is more efficient from an energy perspective.
@@mlsasd6494I was about to comment the same thing. Suno almost certainly uses an order of magnitude or more LESS energy than a human would typically take to write the same music.
@@therainman7777 not when you factor in the energy required to train the model in the first place. the long and short of it is that gpu's burn oil. for reference, I recently watched an interview with the zuck where he was discussing the likelihood of new models requiring at least a gigawatt to train, which is comparable to the output of a small nuclear power plant. I’m not sure how much energy went into training suno but I’m sure it’s substantive
@@SYNKSENTURY But then you might enter into the discussion on how much energy was required in order to "train" us to be able to make music. The thing about AI is that we're trying to do what took nature a couple billion years in just a few decades. Of course it's gonna take a shit ton of work and energy to emulate all that process. But once it's trained, it's done, just like us (but even we need to train ourselves over the course of our lifetime)
@@brunoberganholidias5790 hm, i don't think your comparisons are fair. i'm not factoring in the energy consumption history of the computer revolution as a whole, but only how much energy is required to train a single model. so comparing against billions of years of evolution doesn't make sense. we should be comparing how much energy it takes to "train" an individual vs how much it takes to train a model.
i did some math to support my intuition, i hope someone will correct me if it's flawed. for simplicity's sake lets just assume static calorie consumption over the first 23 years of life, i.e., the time it takes to grow and earn a degree. that's 2200 calories per day *365 days * 23 years = 18,469,000 total calories.
so it takes approximately 18 million calories to grow a brain to maturity and pack it with some specialized knowledge. but we've left out the energy involved in growing and learning that comes from other people. obviously to really model this seriously we'd need a lot of factors, but again for simplicity let's assume a self sufficient nuclear family and a single full time master teacher (rather than calculating, for example, actual number of teachers and "teacher energy" divided by hours spent teaching).
so now we have (approx) 18 mil for mom, 18 mil for dad, and 18 mil for the teacher. this works out to 55,407,000 total calories. now we need to convert that to watt hours. we simply multiply the calories by 0.001162 (the ratio of watt hours per 1 calorie) and we get:
64,382 watt-hours.
meanwhile LLM's routinely consume over 1K MEGAwatt-hours during training, so we're not even in the same order of magnitude. the expectation is always that highspeed digital computation is not power efficient compared with analog or electro-chemical computation-this is why analog neural chips are being considered for embedded applications, even though they produce so-called mortal models-and the numbers here are consistent with that.
The Red Lobster commercial really epitomizes my problems with AI. While I personally AI art, in all forms, will never reach the same level as humans, it also points to the fact that producers of this AI “stuff” is not the same as an artist or musician. They are looking to commercialize. They are looking for an avenue for more profit.
Why does the AI write jazz? To make the owner money. Not to achieve an artistic vision, or anything of the sort. It’s insidious and morally objectionable, and not “art”, or “musicking”, as you discuss in the video.
I love thinking about this problem, so thanks for the video! Continue doing good work.
Personally, I think the main barrier for AIs in music like in acting (all those speach generating AIs) is that not everything can be prompted because not everything can be described in words. We communicate and process information not only verbally. There are a lot of things that we understand via empathy and feelings. E.g. of course, a conductor may give some remarks to players during rehearsals but when performing there are no words and it's not just gestures it is a certain emotional state of the conductor that players read and inturpret not so much consiously and rationally but rather 'empathizing' the conductor. The same goes for directors.
100%. We need more refined tools to interface with the generative AI. Inputs that go way deeper than just prompts.
@@hastesoldat I'm currently trying to push the AI developer to develop midi/sheet music output via "suggest a feature" forms. Because since AI is mainly statistics and music is full of borrowing anyway it could be a cool search engine for snippets of ideas to use in your own writing. Because I think we are very far from this kind of interface that would let us go beyond prompts. Funny thing, it may even turn out that in order to get from AI exactly what we want we may need to write the music actually. It's like with sample libraries. There are very good violin libraries, for example, and in certain contexts just a programmed violin could be enough. But to get a truly realistic performance with all actual details of violin playing fader and breath controllers aren't quite enough. There needs to be a better suited input device for that matter. And this device turns out to be a real violin and the best inputter is a professional violin player. Oops, we made a full circle.
AI's have become multi-modal. Non-textual data can be used as inputs.
@@haomingli6175 yes, but the issue is that we humans have a layer of communication that on one hand works for us fairly decently but on the other is by large unconscious and we ourselves don't exactly know how it works. It just does somehow. For instance, have you ever had a feeling that you know what you want, you may even have a few ideas how to get there but you have totally no idea how to describe it? I guess until AI learns to actually empathize, sort of feel what others feel I don't think the input method will be complete. And I doubt such a feature will come soon.
@@Grigoriy1996 well, just think about the gigantic models that these AIs are. GPT4 has 1.76 trillion parameters. you don't expect these to be interpretable or describable either.
I think I’d fail it too tbh
God damn Bots posting in the comments section.
😂 x2
Then its a horrible test. no?
Sure but you know you are not a machine so its ok 😂
@@TheManinBlack9054No, because plenty of humans have learned to jam and I'm sure this person could too with enough practice. Right now, no AI can jam even with the entire internet for training data and some of the most powerful computers.
10:40 WOW, where can I find the full video of this? I am obsessed with this.
Damn it, people cannot tell the difference between real and autotuned vocals. Of course people wont be able to tell if they are listening to AI music.
Because "many people" cannot (or do not care to) distinguish between outputs does not mean that there are some people who can and will. Humans will coevolve with AI, in an arms-race sort of way, and some people will develop heightened recognition of AI patterns. Already there are some who are fooled into thinking that ChatGPT passes the Turing test--not only because of the category error that Adam discusses, but also because their interactions with AI might be unoriginal enough that ChatGPT might actually pass an directive test in which they are one of the agents. Google "the most human human."
I'm sure back in the 18th century there were people who could not distinguish Mozart from Salieri. They may have been the people most offended by Beethoven, once his music started being played.
People can at least trained musicians can
It's more that all vocals nowadays are autotuned, so we're conditioned to hear it as normal
Adam's Nebula pitch convinced me to join when i remembered that i'm already a nebula member
Sponsor read so good it made you want to join nebula twice
That's pretty damning as a review. "So forgettable I forgot I had a membership" lol
Ever heard of David Cope? He was creating new AI-generated classical pieces in various composers' styles over 20 years ago with a program he wrote himself in Common LISP. I took a course with him called "Artificial Intelligence in Music" in like 2005, though I don't remember much except learning a bunch of LISP.
I am a researcher at the oxford university robotics institute, I wrote my thesis on a robotic piano that composes its own music to pass a turing test. It is an interesting video however there are lots of researchers solving these problems purely for interest. My piano can play and compose music to a level where people couldn't distinguish it from a human. Also the nature of the transformer algorithm underlining it allowed it to write harmonies to tunes people played on the piano live. It would be interesting to talk further however I doubt this comment will be found!
Do you have a link to your thesis? I can't find it, but I can see your membership with the Oxford robotics institute! :)
Nice, please link the work!
How does it compose? With music rules like counterpoint?
Wow! I really hope you get to guest in a future video, what an interesting conversation that would be!
Can your piano read sheet music and output a high quality, "human" performance that's record ready? If so, I'd be very interested in trying that out for music production.
Something I'll bring up a lot in these discussions that this video kinda touches and goes on, is that the MOMENT you have a robot that actually is able to understand and do things exactly like people, that kinda just is a person. You're no longer asking if it can pass a Turing test, you're asking if it dreams of electric sheep. And the end goal for automating things isn't to play God, it's to extract as much value out of labor as possible. A replicant is just as deserving of a living wage as a person, so congrats on changing human history for eons to come Cyberdyne Systems, but you can't, or at least shouldn't be able to, profit any more on these machines than any flesh and blood person because you have created a conscious being where the only meaningful difference between it and a person-brand- person is the biological definition of life. So, what's a fledgling tech company in the machine learning sphere to do? Well someone else already put a touch sensor on a mini-vacuum, so scrape the internet and almost randomly throw some sound files together based on the dictionary definitions of a text prompt, of course.
I dunno I saw a AI generated pop-country song that had the lyrics, "Cold beer, mud up on my boots, gun in my butt" and I felt that
With enough computational power, any directive test will become output test. A "jamming" AI wouldn't just process what noise it need to make to continue the jam, it will also make predictions on what your next move will be, and adapt this model on the fly as the jam session continues. Eventually it will know what you will play next, before even yourself. Then, it will formulate an output, and play it back in real time. This is definitely not possible on current hardware, but with advancements in technology, it will happen.
It is similar to the chatbot Turing test in a way. Chatbots are only able to pass output Turing tests, but with their speed in processing and calculation, and through the setting of a text based chat room, any sense of a direct conversation actually becomes a purely output based test, this is why chatbots are passing Turing tests quite reliably.
Another thing I'd like to add is, to pass a Turing test, you don't need the observer to make the wrong call every single time, you just need to approach 50% mark, as at that point every guess is a random 50/50 shot at being correct or not. This is much easier than most people think, and since us humans are imperfect beings ourselves, the AI doesn't need to be perfect either, it just need to be good enough.
thats where it will fail machine wont be able to predict the next chord and just play it. it will require active listening and constant adjusment to the change, not prediction. A musician can just jump to an obscure chord that doesnt resolve the previous and justify it with the following chords that resolves everything that happend. thing is will the A.I play the wrong note and make it good in a jam? because thats what happens. if A.I will go "the best route" it already failed. it needs to learn to recontextualize "improper" notes, chord, and play it to sound good. In short it needs to have taste, and evolving one that knows how to communicate in an abstract level.
@@gregrodrigueziii8075 If you were shown the capabilities of this tech now from lets say ten years ago. You wouldn't believe it unless the sample sounded glitchy or funny. Even then it would be hard to swallow. No matter the benchmark people will always raise it to feel they are in control. We fear it's power. Some are already trying to destroy it by poisoning its data, but it's too late. The box has been opened its only a matter of time before we are greeted by a new species.
@@gregrodrigueziii8075 ...except that's all down to the speed and power of the AI. Assuming that an AI can't ever predict or analyze in real time is a losing bet. We already have conversational AIs that can keep up with humans in real time (below the typical cognitive reaction time to keep humans from noticing the processing going on). The conversations get weird some times, but we're really only a few years along the path of generative AI, and moving REALLY fast.
A suitably fast AI would be listening to the music being played, figuring out the branching chord possibilities, and watching for things like body language and stance. It would be comparing the music as it stands with a huge list of "music shapes" that fit similar patterns, and if a human player suddenly threw in a weird chord change, it would pick one of the next logical steps before hitting that next note.
Don't confuse "we have sorta-okay AI that can't really do that" with "that can never be done with AI." Or "AI made a shitty commercial jingle because someone fed it the prompt that made it happen" with "AI can only make shitty commercial jingles, forever."
@@gregrodrigueziii8075 what if "best" is defined in terms of "human-like" for the AI? The AI will soon learn to throw in improper chords, if the data you feed to it is like that. If you only feed it well-behaved music then it will only know to produce well-behaved music, for sure. but the crucial thing is that you can decide what kind of data it learns from.
@@chadirby6216 I absolutely agree. I'm currently a college student studying Neuroscience and Computer science, so, while I'm not an expert, I do have some insight. You can program anything you want into an AI. And programming it to recognize abstract taste is not as complicated as it seems, because:
1) Much of human behavior is more stereotyped than we would all like to think it is. For example, as Adam constantly remarks, musical improvisation draws on a preexisting vocabulary already.
2) You can program into an AI some level of error so that it doesn't take the "best route." And it is a relatively straightforward task to optimize that level of error.
3) AI doesn't actually NEED to recognize that abstraction as of yet, because it can guess well enough to fake it.
and 4) (and most importantly) In the past ten years, AI has gone from simply an algorithm, to systems of equations so complicated that they can solve problems that go beyond their training data. And that is in ONLY TEN YEARS. There is every indication that machine learning algorithms will continue to scale as time goes on.
You COULD argue, that it would be hard to get data sets of musicians jamming on the scale that AI needs to formulate a copy. But to say it is impossible is simply wrong. If it is profitable enough, the inescapable march of capitalism will make it happen.
I don't know if AI will replace musicians. Either people will push back on it because, as Adam said above, music is more than a product. It isn't just a can of soup to be mass created. OR as generations go on, it will be so pervasive that everyone will be desensitized to its source. Who knows? But I don't think its a matter of whether it is possible. Because it is.
I think a more important question than, "Will AI do this or that?" is "How do we create a functioning society in a world where AI can do anything better than we can?"
Just came back from work and saw you uploaded a 30 minute video essay of AI music. I love the effort you put in every video and how cool it is just to find out what are you up to this time
Hay Adam, just came across your videos for the 1st time and wanted to send you a HUGE "Thank You" for the effort you put into them - it shows. Intelligent, entertaning, educational, empathetic, clever. As an amateur musician, I really apreciate it. It resonates. U really made my day. Keep it up.
A buddy of mine said, he's glad the AI music is here because he can use it to help him get through making dumb corpo music, and spend more time on his passion projects. He's only getting paid for music because that's the skill he has. He'd rather be making his music with that talent. I think he said about 80% of his day-to-day is spent making jingles or composing background music for various projects.
If "musicking" was irrelevant, there would be no difference between a live performance, and a PA + iPod. That everyone implicitly appreciates the difference leads me to believe that music will be safe, just even less profitable than before without the corporate moolah :(
Wait until a generation grows up entirely on AI music, which can't be performed, and so going to see their favorite musician live will never enter their minds as something that could have been possible. They will not miss it. Their lame grandparents will never be able to convince them otherwise.
@@RoxfoxMusic that can't be performed? Makes no sense. As a hypothetical grandparent I would hear my child perform to AI music all the time though very off key.
@@chatboss000 The point is that people go to concerts because they like the recording of the music and want to see the people who made the music make the music right before their eyes. This can't happen with AI generated music. Nobody performed it in the first place.
Let's ignore that Hatsune Miku exists for the duration of this thought exercise.
@@Roxfox I dont agree with the statement that people go to concerts because they "they like the recording of the music and want to see the people who made the music make the music right before their eyes". I think people go to concerts because its an extension of the experience listening to it into a social space. Experiencing it with other people, being lead by a parasocial relationship, having the process of the trip which is an event in and of itself. I mean, cover artists exist because people want to see their version, based on the person and the social experience. Same goes for classical pieces, none of these people "made the music" (and im many cases i might not even have heared their version before either) I'd go there because i know its an experience in and of itself being physically there and seeing people perform their passion and sharing this experience with other people. So people can also present their version of an AI generated song to the same effect.
I believe the social aspect will see a boom (or at least no bust) with people interested in music appreciating the process more and enjoying physical events more. However the "bread winning" aspects of music will suffer. I dont think most advertisement music writers and many game music artists wont make it, simply because the end users gets no benefit from their existance. In these cases its IS simply about the product, not the process.
@@mlsasd6494 I hope you're right!
Lots to say. Adam, your videos always push my brain to it's limits and that's why your my favorite. I'm glad you recommended a bunch of other videos and creators as you could never make enough videos yourself to quench my mind thirst.
I recall Tom Scott, with a background in both linguistics and computer science, saying in early 2020, "artificial language processing remains 10 years away, just as it has been for the last few decades." And indeed, there was no indication at the time that nlp would have a nunaced understanding of context anytime soon.
Except, GPT-3 was released a few months later, and was able to pass all the tests he outlined in his video. Many such experts have been surprised and proven wrong by the rate of improvement.
And now, just a couple weeks after this video was released, GPT-4o was shown to be able to sing and improvise on the fly and converse in real time, at least to some small extent. Although its musical capabilities are rudimentary right now, it is bound to improve, even if the music directive test is not placed as a priority in development. Because, as it turns out, there is indeed incentive in similar areas of real time audio interaction.
This video is very well researched, and perhaps you are right, but the point is, it is precarious to say "AI will never be able to do this". Few could have imagined Alpha-Go, or GPT-3, until they were released. Who knows what will be possible in just a few more years?
Edit: I might also point out that from a practical standpoint, the distinction between directive and output is unimportant, as output alone will have major impacts on the industry.
Will it become like CGI in the film industry where the demand for practical effects again rise, or engines in chess where popularty booms despite chess engines surpassing humans decades ago? Perhaps it will end up as the latter, and human music returns to a personal art whose value arises from the experience of creating it, and its social elements.
At the end of the day, it is an unfortunate reality that AI will take value and jobs away from the creative arts.
Very good comment! Amazing analysis!
I just asked Google how far the sun has gone from the Earth since 1990, and it implied the current year is 1991.
Well, It has been two weeks and ChatGPT can already jam, imagine what it's going to be in a year... But there is another aspect to art and musicking.
Mona Lisa is not one of the most famous piece of Art because it's the technically best painting, but because it has a trail of history attached to it.
So in a way it doesn't matter what AI will wright and how good it will jam because it's not about technical skill, but transfer of emotions....
(for that we probably will have to wait a year and 2 weeks :)
Is that true? If I start playing a simple chord progression in front of GPT will it start playing a solo on top of it?
can it?
@@FriskyKitsune not sure. i saw a video where they demonstrated it can be instructed to sing with multiple voices at the same time tho. but that was an official demo from openAI so could be rigged.
So in short, it would require a general intelligence, trained on everything at once, and supported by extraordinary hardware. Essentially a sapient being.
Adam, this essay has helped me grasp intellectually what I already know intuitively about the divine nature of creating music. Thank you.
Дякую! Ваш огляд мене підштовхнув нарешті подивитись серіал! І дякую, що все ще знаходите час для роботи над відео на каналі!❤❤❤
More of that jam at 10:45 my man
Seriously, where can I find the full video or version of this?!
@@timlake9549 I found a clip of that gig on Rotem Sivan's channel, a Short from about a year ago, but it's not at the same part as was shown in this video
Is it on Nebula?
Transformers are really good at one thing and that's pretending to be something. I'm convinced that if ample training data of jam sessions, with specific instruments removed and added to the mix (using simple music editing programs) is provided to an AI, we could have a real time musical jam AI, similar to how we have real time voice changing AI now.
We absolutely could. Adam is a great resource when it comes to musical knowledge, but he was out of his depth in this video. He said he’s pretty sure the music Turing test will never be passed. In reality, if there was any money in doing so one of the large tech companies could probably train a model to pass the test right now.
Cybertronic Spree?
Oh yes. More data. The solution to everything AI.
@@mater5930 it worked with the GPT models, it worked with image generation models, it worked with self-driving models, it worked with image detection models, it worked with voice changing models. Larger training data is not the only innovation in these areas, but it was always the major driving factor
@@ducksies and that, my friend, is the problem. It begs the question, can it actually generate new useful information as humans do? It is really expensive on data. It also can not be trained on its own data. Maybe that's why these corporations are hungry to steal data from us.
I've been doing music my whole life, and I'm also a software developer who works with generative A.I. If you think this technology can't do "X", you have no idea what's coming down the pipe. Looking at a current snapshot of what's possible is not a gauge of what's to come. There's a huge blind spot in people who don't understand this technology.
Someone on tumblr said about AI-generated fanfics: "if you couldn't be bothered to write it, then why should I bother to read it?"
Exactly. If you're not enough of a fan to write the fiction, why should I care what you post.
I don't understand.
Why should the effort involved in writing change whether I read?
@@DavidSartor0 fanfiction is the most quintessentially community-based space in the world, what do you mean?????? It's literally all about the shared experience of sharing our fantasies and love of the media we consume. If your work wasn't labor of love -- if you didn't love these characters enough to express your own thoughts about them, then why the hell are you writing fanfiction in the first place, and why should I care?? I'm trying to be in a fandom and connect with people who love this media like I do. If you don't, I don't want to read what you write . The standards aren't even high with fic. You can never have written anything before and people will read it and possibly love it. Just have it be your own and have it be sincere. There is no reason to use AI other than apathy and laziness. & I don't want to interact with someone who doesn't care the way I do.
Like
It's art. It's a social experience. You're not 'consuming content' you're 'engaging with a fandom'. I don't want to engage with a robot's idea of what a fan wanted to write. I wanted to engage with another fan.
@@bzzzzzzzzzz2075 Thank you for answering.
I think I've read at least ten million words of fanfiction, and I don't experience that at all.
I love talking to fanfiction authors about their work, but the fanfiction is just words to me, words making up sentences making up stories. I don't much feel like I'm engaging with anyone.
Do you feel the same way about original fiction?
I don't see how "there is no reason to use AI other than apathy and laziness".
I'm a very very slow writer. If I were to try writing a long fanfiction, it might take me twenty years. If I were fifty years old, I'd know I might not have that much time before death or dementia. In that case, I'd probably use AI to write faster, even if it resulted in work that people don't like as much. Is this bad?
"If you didn't love these characters enough to express your own thoughts about them, then why the hell are you writing fanfiction in the first place?"
I've seen stories using only original characters, which were fanfiction because of the setting. Are those bad?
What am I doing wrong?
How do I engage with an author?
@@DavidSartor0 you're not doing anything wrong lol. I do struggle to believe that the writing is just words to you, though, if you're invested enough in it to specifically engage with the author about it. What do you speak to the author about if they wrote with AI? Their prompting specificity? No, you talk about their interpretations of the character, you complement the lines they wrote, theorize about what's happening next. If you don't care much about what's happening in the work itself, but you do care enough to talk to the author about it, is it really just words to you? Or is it a conversation starter? And does that conversation starter work as well if the work is generated by a predictive algorithm, not created by a human's hands?
I'd also like to ask if you have ever had your interpretation of media has ever changed by knowing the authorial intent. Say, you watched a directors cut. Or you read a poem once, thought it meant one thing, then learned the author's tragic backstory and it hit twice as hard on the second read. This happened to me when I read a celebrity poetry book (Halsey) and i learned afterwards that one poem was likely about her miscarriage, and upon re-reading, I found it to be incredibly impactful where I didn't before. An algorithm like an AI can't do that. It doesn't have authorial intent. I can't complement the well-crafted dialogue, or the excellent characterization-- that was all up to a role of the dice. I can't have my interpretation changed because there is nothing to interpret. It's empty because a person didn't make any choices except which words to prompt with.
So yes, the same goes for original work and characters. I was just speaking in the context of broader fandom spaces. One of my favorite fic authors has one specific oc in her work, and I love this oc with my entire heart. She needed a character to serve a plot function, then she painstakingly brought this character to life, and made her feel real and fit perfectly in the setting. If she had used an ai to write this character, I wouldnt be complementing it. I would be saying "wow that was lucky that worked so well." I feel like it's doubly egregious to use ai when you're writing a piece of original work(ignoring the ethics of using the world's best plagiarism machine) because those aren't just little guys in the show you like. Those are YOUR little guys that came from YOUR head. Why on earth would you put them in the thoughtless hands of an ai.
Look, I'm a slow writer, too(although I got faster wth practice). At the start, it took weeks and weeks to get out maybe 2k low quality words. But I still have that Google doc. all of those words are mine. they're handcrafted and I love them even though they're NOT GOOD. If an ai made it, what connection would I even feel to 'my' work? It's a faulty product, not a passion project.
It is bad to use ai to write faster. You're not writing it. If you wrote this comment to me in a timely fashion, you are not so disabled that you need ai to help you. Long fics take ages to write regardless of who's writing them. Remember: that's an entire book you're writing. The great gatsby is 50k words. Long fics get well, well over 100k. Authors regularly spend years and years writing books, 3-10 is the general range, and that's normal. If you 'write' 300k words with ai I will care infinitely less than if you write 1k words with your own keyboard. And frankly, YOU won't like what the ai spits out for you. It wasn't yours, and it wont ever be. You won't have control over it. It wont cater to your specific proclivities. The ai doesn't know what your favorite characters are meant to act like, or how you want them to act. It doesn't even know how they look. It doesn't know anything. You do. You're intelligent and you enjoy media enough to read fic about it. Don't you want to make something of your own? you don't ever have to publish your work to get fulfillment from it. You don't even have to finish it. Most of my work isn't even finished, and it won't be, but I go back and reread it because I LIKE what I wrote, and it matters to me, and I feel satisfied when I look back at that one line that took me 10 edits to get right.
Art is wonderful and difficult and worth the effort. Go make something that matters to you. Anything. Good or not. I'm not even talking about writing in particular. Do something that lets you experience the joys of creation.
All of these videos about things the AI cant possibly do. Yet its got us moving the goalpost for what "passing the turing test" means. So idk man. As an illustrator myself I find its a sort of reflexive hubris to react this way.
Music is has rules. If it has rules then all it takes is learning the rules.... then you can play the game.
Exactly what I thought
What rules?
@@electriceric7472 If you want a simple answer:The fact we have a word for it, music, means it is inherently different from other things. If it's different from something then there are rules as to why it's different. This applies to literally everything. There are reasons we consider the noises of Beethoven music while we consider the noises of a trainwreck not music. (yes as an artist I understand what subjectivity is but I'm ignoring it because saying everything is subjective kills the entire discussion and doesn't exactly address why we consider one thing art but another thing not art).
If you want me to literally list the rules, though, sure: Tons of rules, if you want something to sound like music. It needs some kind of beat or tempo at the very least. The notes should be within a certain range as you as a human can't perceive a pitch that's too low or too high. Ideally it will have some sort of pattern to it as well, a song structure. These are the loosest rules I can find for what "music" is but if we're talking about music YOU would enjoy, or the kind of music we're generally talking about like songs on the radio then the rules grow even more as most people aren't going to consider a C note played repeatedly for 3 minutes straight at a steady tempo a "song" but if you want to be pedantic and obtuse enough you could.
Anyways yeah there's lots of ways to construct a song and very clearly the AI have caught on to those ways in some small part. So thinking it ends here is insane to me. It's like saying the telephone starts and ends with Graham Bell and the iPhone is completely impossible imo.
You kind of ignored all of the arguments the video made, the most important one being that music is at its core an activity. It's a point that AI folks generally ignore when they praise the possibilities of AI art: art is embedded in life, it's a process that's rooted in culture and human cognition and activity. This argument is kind of central to the whole debate. And I guess some of the divide in these debates, apart from the fact that you have a lot of techbros who don't know anything about aesthetics talking about art, comes down to the different perspectives of producers of art and pure consumers. For a pure consumer of art, the process is irrelevant because it's hidden. For the producer it's absolutely central and it informs every aspect of the final work of art they're creating. That's why the techbro-view of art seems so utterly wrongheaded and naive to people who actually produce art. It has nothing to do with feeling threatened or thinking that humans are superior.
AI folks generally like to reduce art to patterns. Music is just a pattern of sound in time. A painting is just a pattern of colors. A novel is just a pattern of words. On a physical level all of that is true. But art doesn't really work like that. Art is a communicative process, it only becomes meaningful in the interaction between the work of art and a person who interprets it, with some major interference by cultural frameworks.
Music isn't just a game with specific rules that you need to follow, it's a mode of communication and expression and the rules that supposedly structure this mode of expression are something that comes after the fact, it's a result of analysis. At least with great music it's like that because great musicians generate new rules and new perspectives. The old blues musicians didn't sit down and wrote a rulebook of blues music and then started writing songs following those rules. The songs came first, as a result of lived experience, the will to express themselves, the engagement with cultural currents that came before. All of that got channeled into the performance and creation of blues as a genre. The rules came later as an abstraction to describe what these musicians were doing on a theoretical level. You find stuff like this all over musical history whenever something new and exciting came around.
AI can certainly create some good copies of existing styles. Doing that really doesn't require more than following a set of rules. But that's just that: more or less interesting copies ot actually creative works. It's about as interesting as a modern composer writing carbon copies of Mozart symphonies.
But then again, tons of people already listen to utterly soulless music where every trace of human imperfection and irregularity has been thrown out in favor of snapping everything to a grid, whether it's rhythm, intonation or vocal idiosyncrasies. If that's the type of music that people crave, sure, AI can do that. If you want to listen to music that gives you full body shivers, music that breaks you down and makes you cry like a baby, music that you've never heard before, AI is not where you're going to find it.
@@hansmahr8627 I do not think the point in the video is valid, so I am not going to address them because in order for them to be valid they must first adhere to the point I'm making. There is no point in arguing for or against them if you do not address the simple fact that music has rules and those rules can be learned as many humans have already done millions of times over. AI is gearing up to be at least human level if not superhuman but you're saying it can't even make music...? Something it already can do on a rudimentary level...? Please. Take care of that glaring flaw in logic first then we can have a discussion that's actually interesting.
We're not talking about the greatest music you've ever heard here. We're talking about MUSIC. Most PEOPLE can't even fit together a coherent melody and AI can already do that easily. And I even think that one day, in the future, yes. There will be an AI mozart that will make a piece of music so breathtaking you will be forced to reevluate your ideas here. But that's speculation, so I get if you don't see that viewpoint as valid.
That jam with you, Rotem and James was amazing. We need more acoustic jump-up
There are so many parallels in every art field.
For illustrators and painters, the advent of photography was seen as something to be loathed, something that went entirely against artistic expression.
Now, it's considered its own form of art.
Same with midi versus performance.
In both cases, they're both tools that offer pros, as well as cons to the other.
If you had to perform every musical piece you wanted to create as a composer, or needed a group to re-enact it for it to come out in any meaningful manner, through the limitations of the physical medium of instruments, there is a lot of music we could never have made. Add to that the advent of synthesis as a form of instrument and artistic expression, and you get even deeper into the brass tacks of why the advent of midi is something to be celebrated.
It offers something completely different from what the performance of multiple musicians jamming together would be, as does photography to an artist/painter.
I can definitely see the great many issues with AI, but my belief is that the fields AI will take over are the fields artists do not want to toil away for, generally speaking.
That is to say, art made for others, for those others' benefits.
You get to focus more on making art for you, to express who you are, rather than to express who somebody else is.
Meanwhile, AI will largely be relegated to things that were largely considered soulless and consumer-oriented already.
It's just so much less rewarding a thing to do than making art for the sake of art.
At least, that's my take and my hope.
The big issue here, of course, is the ability for artists whose works and soul have been copied and trained into an AI to subsist after it takes over the market for cheap labor.
No, it will just interact with you like a superhuman. It will be the best jamming partner you could ever have. That doesn't take away from human connection in a real jam because everything will be controlled by the omnipresent AI and humans will have more time for jam sessions. In fact we will live forever too. That's a lot of time for jammin'. I hope you like jammin' too...
Actual art-one of the main reasons for living, in a time when other reasons are becoming inaccessible as the world literally ends- will continue to exist as a botique novelty, that you can make at a fraction of the quality and pace you would as a job, for an audience of basically no one, in between 16 hour shifts of the same amazon warehouse job everyone else has, as we all wait for the last crops to fail and to finally be put out of our misery. Welcome to the future. Its almost over.
I'm not sure I buy "it won't happen because the people in charge aren't interested in it". The whole paradigm of AI rn is reducing the cost of deploying models for specific tasks by doing massive pretraining on unstructured data, and then finetuning for a specific deployment, i.e. you tradeoff between higher training costs for lower task-specific finetuning costs. GPT-3 base is just a next token predictor, but it can be extremely cheaply turned into a model for conversation with a relatively small number of examples. I don't see why we wouldn't eventually (although maybe not soon) have multimodal models that are good enough that we can cheaply (and with a small amount of data) turn them into models which work for musical conversation.
A machine doesn't need to think or live like a human to trick you into thinking it is. Training a model to create convincingly human music is a lot easier than trying to make something resembling the human brain, and we already know the human brain _can_ be constructed in the natrual world, and that there aren't any insurmountable barriers to stop us from creating something similar.
Idk "It's raining bullshit tonight" is quite a banger that I can't stop listening to.
I had a full on existential crisis after hearing "I glued my balls to my butt hole again": catchy song, lyrics that demonstrate a knowledge of toilet humor and human anatomy, 2 live crew lyrics can be repurposed into a 60's motown style song, etc. The robots won't be scary like Terminator, they will distract us with hilarious songs before killing us.
@@60degreelobwedge82I might be wrong but I'm pretty sure the lyrics in most of those (which tbf to me are often the best part) are included in the prompt, i.e. not necessarily AI-generated.
Saw a friend post the arm stuck song the other day and was just shocked that people I know who are anti AI could not clock that it was a song made by a prompt.
@@garretta4911 AI is extremely good at replication. I'm a digital composer, super novice guitarist, and vehemently bothered by capitalistic greed taking away creative jobs that I love and even personally engage in for no pay, just the gratification, and I cannot tell apart most AI generated songs from human-made
they are with both udio and sono
"But then there are people that I do not respect, like the people who run companies like Suno, Udio, and other AI companies, who have a very accelerationist mindset when it comes to this, it feels like music is just one more box to tick on the way to the singularity. Music is a problem that technology can *solve*."
This resonates with a the philosophical thinking I've been doing recently. It's strange how it keeps on coming up in life.
This is the first time I actually considered nebula. Great ad, Adam.
"The output-test is all that matters" - The customer
That the AI Techbros don't care is an understatement. They solely care about how to generate more income for themselves. Peek lack of empathy, and such.
F* AI... Keep slapping and having fun bro. You deserve that.
I don't know man, a bot that can jam with you, with the personality of a musician you ask for, sounds like a product that would go viral and sell incredibly well.
I really liked the video because it shows that you make it with passion and trying to be as objective as possible from your point of view, but honestly it didn't convince me at all. I don't understand why so many people separate AI from humans as if they were opposite things that have nothing to do with each other.
These AIs are the product of the history of humanity, of our behaviors, our curiosity, greed and our ambition among other things, it is an incredibly HUMAN technology, for better and for worse, it is not something foreign to our essence, rather a reflection of it.
At the end of the day I agree that all of this is scary af if used the wrong way, which clearly it will happen.
The only reason we’re designing AI to create art is because art has become a commodity and monetised. Meanwhile we’re forgetting why we create in the first place which is to express ourselves and share those expressions with others in order to further our empathy or open our minds to new ways of observation and experience.
I can see AI helping humans to express themselves but I see very little value (other than monetary) in having AI’s create something from scratch and finish it without any human interference.
People keep saying AI will never be able to do “X” and it does. Artists especially think what they do is special, but it’s not. At least for 95% of “artists” anyways, me included.
There are a few greats who do things that are truly unique and special, but for the rest of us, it’s mostly just derivative, self indulgent, posturing and wishful thinking. There are only a relatively limited number of places to go rhythmically, melodically, lyrically at any given time while “jamming”- if there wasn’t, then you really could just go anywhere and any arrangement of chaotic noise would count as music.
For a machine to be able to emulate believable phrasing, melodies to play as a saxophonist or lead guitarist in response to what it’s “hearing” from a live human drummer and rhythm guitarist for example, I don’t think will be very far off or difficult. Actually, I’d be surprised if that hasn’t already been done years ago.
Most of the joy that we experience with music is in its predictability, in it meeting what we think it’s going to do, or playing around what we think it’s going to do, or in doing something else that we didn’t consider that surprises us and takes us somewhere else emotionally.
These are all devices that are well known and used to effect all the time. They’re not complicated or unique or difficult to replicate or emulate convincingly.
Yep. AI has shown us that artistic skill is a lot more formulaic than a lot of people would care to admit.
This view only makes sense if you view art as a product to consume. Even at its most formulaic, art only has value because a *human* is using the formula, and in doing so we can see that human's unique perspective on it. Like even if you wrote a story with a stock standard Hero's Journey plot, the most formulaic of formulas, the way you go about doing so is revealing about you as a person. What do you consider heroic? What do you consider to be a fatal flaw? What do you consider necessary to fix this flaw? A human can't create art, even formulaic art, without putting themselves on the table in some fashion. The appeal of art isn't in its novelty but in its ability to show the perspective of the artist. An AI model has no perspective, only data points. AI art is a (debatably) pretty box that opens up to reveal nothing inside. To say that a computer can be artistic is like saying a computer can be divine: it means nothing because artistry and divinity are inherently human concepts that a computer cannot contain
10:50 dang man’s streaming Pat Metheny through his fingers, killer.
great video!
thank you for talking about losing the 1, is very comforting to not be alone on this
AI music has passed my personal turing test. I downloaded an ai song and played it to my mom. She asked me who that band was. I said "It's AI", and she thought "AI" was the name of the band.
it passed the mom test! 😄
That gives AFI a whole new meaning 😅
21:31 - What makes it good is that it's fun to jam with. NOT that the song itself is good. I got out my shoes and started tapping with you. It's legit.
“What would it take for a machine to jam?”
Lemme go ask my printer…
You can get an AI question-answerer to answer differently if you tell it, if it makes a mistake, you'll kill its mother. It doesn't have one, but in threatening it, you're invoking a different sort of imaginary human to answer you. I think if you ask it for philanthropic ideas, you could make its answer worse by telling it a correct answer will win it a million dollars: you'd be invoking the wrong imaginary person to answer. So in musical interaction, it's not 'can it be human' but 'what part of humanness are you trying to invoke out of the large tapestry that the AI's trying to represent'. The reason you can't jam with one is, it doesn't want to jam, because it doesn't want anything: to find its wants you'd need to not look for human qualities and search for what its 'unconscious' likes to bring up.
I feel like I need to write a book or something at this point, with how many easily countered AI takes there are.
Usually I do find Adam's videos very insightful. This time the main argument seems to be "AI is doomed to fail the musical Turing test, because the companies just don't care enough." The other things mentioned seem to be things that AI is already doing, like making mistakes and forgetting things. There's also already been instrument playing robots for decades and there's no reason to not expect them to not get rapidly better with ML. (Check what Nvidia has been doing with robots for example.)
There's also the weird directive/output division. I think the point wasn't about the technical aspects, because you can easily train an AI that takes as input all the sound it has heard and produced thus far and then ten times per second produces the next 100ms of output, thus transforming the problem into an output problem.
Going back to the business case, I would say there are three counter points. First, I could easily see some product potential in an AI music teacher/jam partner or something similar. Or even an AI based autotune that not only fixes vocals, but also instruments. Second, companies have already spent a ton of effort on non-profitable endeavours like how five years ago OpenAI made Dota 2 bots just because the problem was interesting enough.
Thirdly, and most importantly, you don't have to train an entire massive model. Companies are working on multi-modal models like the just announced GPT-4o that are much more flexible than purely text-based models. And once you have trained the base model, you can fine tune it for different purposes. If you want to see examples, check how making Stable Diffusion checkpoints works. If Hallmark wants to make a model that generates card art, they don't have to spend skrillion watts to train a brand new model, they can just show the model couple of hundred examples and in a few hours you have a new model that specializes in card art. So you could take some jam sessions, separate one instrument and fine tune a model on that.
Lastly, I'm as annoyed as anyone else when creative people lose jobs and "prompt engineers" call themselves "artists". But it feels like 99% of people who feel like they simply must give their opinion cannot separate the "what should be done?" question from the "what can be done?" question, even though they have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Everyone has such high-strung emotions about the subject it feels like every take I see is either "AI will solve every single problem in a year, just you see!" or "AI is crap, it's always been crap and always will be crap! lol look at this stupid AI that can't even draw fingers or text and it never will" (they can now) And to be honest, this video seems to fall in the latter category.
The way I look at visual AI art for example is comparing it to a very technically talented idiot savant dude in Fiverr from some fourth world country willing to work for peanuts. Let's call him Albert, or Al for short. It might take a lot of effort and iteration to make him understand what I actually want, but no matter how detailed of a prompt I write, I wouldn't call myself an "artist". But if I for example make a simplified sketch of a character and ask Al to finish it based on my detailed description, I might credit myself for the character concept. Or what if I ask Al make a bunch of different images and then I Photoshop them together, along with some custom edits. At some point it starts approaching some form artistic collaboration from my side as well. Like... can photo bashing ever be art? I think so.
I don't know why I'm spending so much time writing this, though. I didn't write this in the first nanosecond of the video being out, so the chances more than a few people will ever read this or care are quite minimal. *sigh*
I distinguish between two categories of art: artistic products and artistic performance.
Artistic products include books, films, photography, graphic design. These can be replicated and consumed without the direct involvement of the artist.
Artistic performance includes dance, theatre, stand-up comedy. These art forms can CONTAIN an artistic product: for example, a dance performance can have a pre-planned choreography, while theatre and stand-up comedy usually (but not always) follow a script. But even if there is an artistic product at the basis of it, there is always en element of real-time human performance in these art forms.
Music is both a product and a performance art. Musical products are compositions, be they written sheet music or audio files. Musical performance is what musicians do on stage, in real-time.
I expect that artistic products will be replaced by AI, as is already happening. By ‘replaced’ I don’t mean that humans will have to stop creating artistic products altogether; of course, nothing is to stop us from writing a book or a song or creating an illustration if we feel like it, same as we can still weave baskets and carpets by hand if we feel like it. But once AI does these things at a human level or higher, the skills involved with creating these products will no longer be marketable.
Artistic performance, however, should be fine for a long time coming. In artistic performance, seeing a human doing something is the whole point. Self-playing pianos (pianolas) have existed for ages, but if we bought tickets for a piano concert and saw a pianola instead of a human pianist we would feel ripped off, no matter how well it plays. Beyond enjoying the product and the communal experience, we like to attend performances because we like to marvel at fellow humans doing something impressive. (Similarly, even though cars are faster than the fastest human runner or cyclist, people still get excited about sprint races and the Tour de France.)
What does this mean for us as musicians?
In my view this means that, if we want to have a chance at a musical career, the best things to focus on are developing performance skills, whatever that means for you: playing an instrument, singing, having a charismatic stage presence, whatever.
For artists whose expertise is limited to product skills, a solution could be to turn their product skills into a performance. So, a mixing/mastering engineer could live-stream their process, or even go on stage and mix/master a song in real-time. Similarly, a visual artist could create a painting or illustration in real-time. But of course we don’t know if there will be a large (paying) audience for such performances.
(btw, I hate these times as much as anyone else, and if I had a button with which I could stop AI progress I would. but that button doesn't exist. short of revolution, we have no option but to adapt in some way.)
17:21 you got me all the way here, someone who has a special interest in AI, and you've not only nailed it so far, but you've perfectly articulated the problem and why it has yet to be solved with that specific and useful definition of a music turing test
Why I think it will eventually be solved, is if you have embodied AI, firstly, you don't need to make it a music bot, the humanoid form factor is as generic and general purpose as anything I can think of, all human tasks are done in it
You don't make a music bot, you make a bot, and have it learn music, not a big corpo looking for profit, but some hobbiest training their personal bot for idk a youtube video or for a Wikipedia page... those will likely be outdated mediums, you get what i mean
Oopsy, could have timed this better. Elevenlabs is getting into the music production stuff.
It's fun going back a couple years to see all the things that "AI will never do".
Exactly
If you want to find things that AI will never do, you need to seek domains in which example data is very difficult to collect. Music certainly ain't one of them.
@@clray123 For now.
@@clray123 These days, all you need to do is find people who say "AI will never be able to-" and then you can safely say it'll be able to do it in about two years. We're getting to the point where what it "can't do" veers into the vague, philosophical, or very-hard-to-define. There's already an AI model for more or less anything well-definable you can think of.
@@MemeMarine Wanna bet?
You're probably right Adam, but what it also probably means for composers and artists is a significant loss of revenue. We previously wrote music for jingles, ads, TV shows. We creatives will lose our income to machines - this boggles my mind!
Thank you for the shout-out Adam! I'm writing a book on AI Music for the general audience. Would love to interview you to get your take on the subject.
We disagree on various points, but I definitely agree with you that several current generative music companies have a particularly problematic approach.
and have you met the AI Singer Songwriter that is trending on Spotify?
@@Cola_BB Nope. But I'm planning to interview various musicians / researchers / entrepreneurs in the space for the book.
@@ValerioVelardoTheSoundofAI I am the trending AI Singer Songwriter
"red lobster used ai for an ad" is very unconvincing when advertisement music can hardly be considered 'music' most of hte time
I am a linguist and what Christopher small identified as "musicking" is very similar to what a school of linguistics called "translanguaging". Languages in a meaningful way don't really exist, they are abstractions of political and cultural guardianship of a certain sets of sounds and way of speaking. What we do in the real world, online, on tiktok, in memes, are just "languaging" to form meaningful communication with each other. Language is a verb, not a noun. Cool!!!
This is all super interesting and I wouldn't dare disagree with anything you say because I'm positive you know more about all of this than I ever will BUT I would like to alter up an alternate dichotomy. Music is not the same thing to everybody who enjoys it. There are many distinctions to be made but I think a HUGE split when it comes to the topic of AI is that of the music listener vs. the music maker. I love music. I listen to it all the time. I'm cool with "most everything" and when I say "most everything" I'm NOT saying "most everything except country and rap." I can jump from Paganini to GZA to Ahab to Carly Rae Jepsen in a single car ride. But when it comes to being a musician, well...
I tried REALLY HARD in my high school and early college years to form some kind of band, or "project" with a friend or two, or even be my own one man show. At my peak I owned a guitar, 5 or 6 effects pedals, a bass, a keyboard, a drum machine, a couple of mics, and a 4-track recorder. I would literally pack ALL of this in my Buick along with 2 guitars from a friend and we'd drive 30 minutes to this other guy's house who had a huge basement with a piano and a drumset and we'd "attempt" music all weekend. During a separate period of relatively prolific output I made a lot of music with a friend who taught me a lot about what I guess would be considered a DAW now - back in 2001-2002 it was just "Cool Edit Pro 2.0."
I had a lot of fun during these sessions. We made some OK music that I wish I'd kept better track of over the years. But none of it was ever "good." And I know now that it was never going to be. As I got older and got into the bar scene for a few years after college I actually met some *real* musicians. And that's when I realized that, for my friends and I at least, our need to have fun with it was never secondary to our need to create. But that doesn't mean I love or loved music any less, it just means I wasn't cut out to make it. I still love to punch around on my sheet music/MIDI program and arpeggiate certain chord progressions and things like that, but I'm merely having fun, not trying to create a cohesive piece of music.
My point is that there are people who love music but who do not, cannot, or will not MAKE music, and from that perspective, the process of "musicking" or "jamming" doesn't hold the same value to us. There are people that love food and who are real experts on it but they have ZERO interest in cooking. The magic for me lies in the finished product. I don't want to say I could care less about the process, but that's not really where the spark lies, in my opinion. The fact that a bunch of individually mundane aspects came come together to create something transcendent is what gets my juices flowing when I listen to music. Don't get me wrong - knowing how every little blip and beep and click and buzz and dig and bop got put where they got put is very interesting but it has little to do with where my mind or my emotions are at when I really truly love a piece of music.
The "directive" side of AI music generation might be an important component, but I'm not sure it should be hailed as the cornerstone of AI musical achievement. If I can make you the same steak dinner out of $25 from ingredients at Walmart in half the time it would take me to make that same dinner for $75 at the organic market, do you really care *how* it was made? If you're a cook, it probably does matter. If not, you probably couldn't care less. Neither is any more or less "correct" than the other.
In so many ways music IS about the output. That's what endures. That is the part of "musicking" that is immortalized on physical or digital media. That is the beginning and end point of conversation - the finished piece is the culmination of whatever processes were used and as such will always be more highly revered than the process itself. A jam session might be fun to participate it, but when, out of your entire day, you have 30 min on the way to work and 30 min back to listen to music, how much of that time is spent listening to a jam session? When you introduce a friend to a new band or sound, how often do you play a jam session for them? When deciding what piece of your own work to release, would you EVER choose a jam session over something more polished and rehearsed? You say "AI can't jam" and as nicely as I can, I'm coming back with a, "so what?" If AI can nail that hit single, if they can make that song that you want to show a friend, if it can write a song that's worth being one of the 10 to 15 songs you're going to listen to that day, isn't that what matters? Or at the very least, isn't that what matters THE MOST?
I know musicians will see this differently and that's fine - I just wanted to put this out there as someone who truly does love music but has long ago accepted that I lack the spark to be musician.
I agree with you to a point. Lots of people listen to the same recordings over and over. I believe they are replaying emotional content that is paired to the particular piece. Jumping through pieces of wildly different styles is a way of shaking up internal emotional responses a bit like jumping from the sauna into the snow and then back again.
But this isn't the the making process of musiking. That is the territory of exchange, conversation, reciprocity in real time. Memory can be there but it stays in the background and can quickly be left behind as the jam goes off into new iterations.
I understand your points, and you are absolutely right under a capitalist economic system, the value is placed on the physical/digital manifestation of the art that can be used as a product. That’s what we learn intrinsically has value. The truth I’ve found, is just jamming with some folks is absolutely essential, and because we can’t turn that into a product, we view it as a “bad” thing. If you strip away your pre-conceived notions, the chance to play music with other musicians, communicating on a deeper, HUMAN level, is valuable on a conscious level, not a capitalist pursuit.
@@daikiraihatesu I think I get what you're saying, but it hits a little left of my point. My personal enjoyment has little if anything to do with its commodification. My entire point was that, if you're not all that inclined to make good music, "jamming" may not mean to you what it means to people who are actually able to come together and create music. Sure, I enjoyed banging on guitars and singing stupid lyrics about ex-girlfriends with my buddies on a social level, but it NEVER resonated with me musically in the way that listening to favorite song does. The two activities and their benefits are removed from each other. My enjoyment of LISTENING to music will never be subverted by the process of MAKING music, simply because I lack the ability to make music of the caliber that I would want to listen to.
None of it has anything to do with whether or not one can be construed as a "product" or not. The "product" of "jamming" for me was about having a good time with friends and is/was a worthwhile experience. However, it is an experienced totally divorced from that of listening to good music. They are different things; they strike different pleasure centers and different emotional chords.
What I was ultimately trying to point out in so many words was that, much in the same way a non-musician may have trouble understanding a musician's relationship with "the end result," musicians may likewise have an equally difficult time understanding what that "end result" means to a non-musician.
perhaps you are forgetting that with time, things that once required multibillion investments, can be now done by a dedicated individual in a bedroom. therefore, yes, your musical turing test is going to be inevitably passed when the overall AI progress makes such research easy for anyone bored enough to try.
No, because since A.I. doesn’t ‘know’ anything and is just purely calculations, it can never replicate the human emotion put into not just the result, but the process of making music
current ai may not be able to feel or be creative but who knows what’s gonna happen in the future. Something fundamental about how ai works is gonna have to change though
adam, you are everything that a person should be, I love you truly. this essay is so well put together, the knowledge the ideas, even the wording the choreography of the text, the examplatory performance inside this is very complementary and on point. I adore your inspiring dedication and personality that is always in search and your true nerd status that never gets bored of learning. I haven't watched one of these videos you put up lately, but years ago I was devouring your content, you did what led zeppelin did to my love for music, nothing short of that, you sent me back to the day I was in my first science class, the same feeling of amazement, as an architect, space movement and techne is very much the lingo of our field, so believe me you, inspired me for the rest of my life... you are an author that does youtube, a carl sagan on a mission of music. I will tell you what an ai can not do right now, a video like that. ( dont get too spoiled I am high so this encomium might be a bit much, but I just couldn't help myself to write this to ya )
There is a worrying percentage of people that do not see the value in music. I remember telling people I play music and I would get responses like "Why? Do you want to be famous?" . How is this the first thing that occurs in most people's heads?
I guess that's a good way to tell whether someone has experienced a creative outlet. The joy of creation (and musicking) is something you just have to experience for yourself to get it.
why is this worrying? Most people also dont appreciate most other forms of art, i think thats quite natural. Everyone has their niche
@@mlsasd6494 Some cities or regions generally appreciate culture much more than others. I don't think not caring about art is really a part of human nature, but rather a result of the surrounding context and the culture of the environment a person is nurtured in
@@gaelbaca2958 im not disagreeing. Im saying that some people are into music, some people are into drawings, some people are into other creative expressions like dance, some dont care some care about many or all expressions of art. Music is nothing special, its one creative expression and some care and some don‘t. Thats why i dont think its „worrying“, people just like different things.
@@mlsasd6494 Music is nothing special…. fuck this generation.
We are all large language models. From infancy I listened to the sounds that people make with their vocal cords and studied it instinctively ( because it's in our DNA to do so ) and after a while I got the patterns so I was able to talk back in English, later, I picked up the cello ( I was told as a 7 year old I was too short to handle a double bass at the time ), a guitar and finally an electric bass. I learned the patterns and how to recognize and associate positions on an instrument with those black dots on lines that made up music no different than any computer LLM. I was given music from classical composers first, then I sought out James Brown, R&B, and Salsa / Latin jazz,. I was intrigued and I picked up those patterns and they became embedded in memory and musical instinct ( predicting the next musical word or sentence in any dialect that we call genres that I liked ) So, when I went to play In groups, as a human LLM that got pretty good at it, I reliably "predicted the next notes ( word ) " and in fact the only thing that makes music good to me is when the musicians or composers play something unexpected but still predictable within the possibilities. When I listen to music I hear every single part on the instrument that I'm focused on at the moment , and I am often able to (just like an LLM ) predict the next notes and sometimes the variations that come about. As for rhythm, ..Tell that to all the people that clap on the 2 and 4 when everyone what is on the 1 and 2 . When we are talking about having rhythm we all know there are whole subsections of the culture that have no ability to feel syncopation let alone understand where the beat is or know how to dance other than jumping up and down. So I think you're speaking a bit prematurely about what computers can and can not ever do. We can't be talking out of one side of our often inflated musical egos that music is some sophisticated expression of the mathematics of nature ( Close encounters of the 3rd ind etc for all of you that live life through and insist on conforming everything into whatever movies and TV shows you grew up on ) on one hand, and then deny that mathematics and its inherent logical algorithms structures etc, inc the drum machines and synths we use to create whatever music genre You and I don't particularly like, but everybody else does is divorced from the technology that we use to create and consume it all. That just means you have no idea at the root level what is going on . It's not as complicated to get humans and apparently various birds from watching animal videos to tap their feet or bob their heads with the rhythm as you all might think. It's all a product, a production, a piece. Every single detail that you are laying out that you THINK is so "unique" "spiritually human" and "special " can be quantified because it is at the basic level, that is our central nervous system , all just voltage action potential thresholds ( -50 millivolts (mV),) across a nerve cell membrane, any a neurologist will tell you that. BInary molecular interactions NO matter how "soulful " you are. There is no "ghost" in that complicated machine. Just action potential thresholds across cell membranes cascading into all that we create and are ( which is pretty damn special BTW) . Sorry folks, You're not as mystical as you thought you were. Study physiology and you will find that out. NEVER say never when it comes to what we create and THAT includes the non organic machines we create too. Human beings. have waaaaay too much ego, especially western minds who are taught in their religions and associated attitudes, that they are the pinnacle of creation.
Great video. Linking music to a physical activity, and not just a mental one, is profound… and the first time I’ve heard someone say that. Although it seems so obvious now…
It makes me think about how little we still understand about the links between the physical and mental worlds. Mind and matter… we can’t measure mental phenomena (yet) with any objectivity so wtf even is it? We’ve no idea!
Your narration reminds me of "the motorcar will never replace the horse!" from 100 years ago.
True, but 80 years ago people thought we would be living in moonbases and driving flying cars by 2000.
Cars had many advantages over using horses, but there hasn't really been a reason for us to start flying around all the time and so we don't.
AI might be able to do a lot of things in the future, but I think it's longevity will really comes down to whether it actually serves a meaningful purpose.
Generative algorithms can make music, but do we need them to? Is there a lack of music we need to solve? I kind or see it all as just a fad, but who knows what the future holds
machines do not sleep, so they'll never pass the music touring test:
sleeping on the van
this is such a genius comment wow
That. That right there sir…was a phenomenal video
I would NOT pass the turing test
If you're a bad musician, you actually would pass a turing test...
Explanation: AI aims for complete accuracy, if you can't do that, then are definitely aren't AI.
@@christopherjobin-official7440 AI doesn’t “aim” for anything. You can tell image generators to create images that look like they were drawn by children, and they can create images that look imperfect. They also produce unintentionally imperfect images all the time.
@@christopherjobin-official7440 i dont know what a blues in e flat is i would also fail
The transformer architecture has been applied to not only language, but to mechanical movements to train robotics. "AI" in it's current state is fancy calculus. It takes "Tokens" or collections of information and produces the most likely series of subsequent information as the results. When trained on this use case I'd bet money it could accomplish this today with the appropriate training set. You spelled out the simple set of rules to follow. AI through the use of "Temperature" can add variation, acting within the rules and structure of a musical genre. Look at the progress that Udio and Suno have made in just a few months.
You are absolutely correct. I couldn’t have put it better myself. And I am an AI engineer who has been in this field for 20+ years.
Mark my words, within 5 years this will have a follow-up dissection of how wrong he was
Training on a bunch of existing data is literally exactly what musicians do. While describing LLMs you explained the process of learning to jam to a T. It's weird how that's a normal process for a human musician but it becomes offensive when a machine does it.
B i n g o
Music is no longer a product. We are now the product.
Nailed it
you're right, and when my mom used to put me in the shopping cart so I'd stay still, it's technically product placement
@@stefevr Ok, I stand corrected. It is your 😀digital footprint/life on the internet and all that implies is the product.
Music is just wiggly air. It's not "abstract" and it is not activity, that's "playing music". Defining music can be hard either way, so there is no point to dicuss it further, or try to vigorously define it.
There is no doubt that AI will be capable of "jamming" someday. By someday, I mean months, years. AI is evolving at an exponential rate, we don't know what it will do, but we know that it will do everything humans do, it will think like a human, because all human behavior has patterns. AI can learn and imitate any pattern, that's exactly what it essentially does. Even the mistakes we make, all the "human" qualities we have, can be observed and imitated. Hell, brain structures can be analyzed in the future, who knows? So I doubt AI even needs "body" to satisfy every aspect of music, including jamming.
If you told people in 60's that everyone will have a mirror in their pockets, that can look through any other similar mirror in the world, they would call you crazy and insane. They would make similar puritanical claims you do in this video.
You don't even understand the basics of how an AI works, why makes such a bold claim as the title of this video?
If there’s a systematic way to do something, a sequence of steps that if taken in the correct order produce the desired results, a machine will eventually be able to do it.
AI is already forcing humanity to accept that whatever we call intelligence or creativity is a complex interplay of different parameters. Most of us don’t even listen to music but recordings of music. There’s a fine but essential difference between the two. In the end, music is in the ears of the beholder.
I agree. While we all enjoy Neely, I think this entire video completely ignores that time and time again, and which will continue again and again now and into the future as long as existence is a thing, human-engineered AI, and then eventually AI-engineered AI, will advance to super-human in all of what was considered exclusive human domains. GPT-4o is waaaaay early days. This video in a VERY near future assessment will be labeled, "typical human-centric-laden wishful thinking and denial". Certainly not hating on Neely. Just shaking my head at the shortsightedness and the blinders people sometimes unwittingly wear.
@@BigMTBrain But that might not happen.
@@travellingshoes5241 Of course! And the sun continuing to shine in our solar system tomorrow might not happen. But the probability of it happening is? [your best guess here]. You must consider what has come before, the advancement that has been observed, and then project that history of advancement into the future. ...
Stating the possibility of something not happening is true of all things; therefore, such a statement has no significant value - fairly meaningless and of no consequence. ...
What is of significant value is the probability of something happening based on the history and trajectory of the subject matter in question. The probability of the sun continuing to shine in our solar system tomorrow is so close to 100% that it's much more efficient to simply say "the sun WILL shine again in our solar system tomorrow". ...
Similarly, based on the history and trajectory of AI eventually surpassing humans in many human domains once thought impossible for AI to achieve, it is more efficient to simply say " though it is currently thought impossible, AI WILL eventually pass the Music touring test." But you will only know the probability for that being ultra high by being immersed in tracking the progress of AI and not being stuck in a human-centric "being human is NOT a computable and even improvable process" mindset. That mindset will stifle your ability to project the future reasonably.
I don't think this will age well. Currently, music AI is focused on output generation, but there's no reason why it has to be. That's just the thing most people are likely to want. After all, there are for more people who want instant good music than there are musicians. Want an AI that passes the directive test? Simple enough, we train a model to output steps in the process. Who would spend the money to train it? The same people that try to sell musicians software and gear.
Don't have musician friends to jam with? Is your drummer too busy dating your guitarist's sister to show up for practice? Is your bassist on vacation in the Philippines? Do you have an idea that just can't wait for other people's convenience? Well well well, do I have a product for you! Say hello to your robot bandmates! They are available at all times and can even help you develop new sounds and songs.
Is that seriously what you think of musicians? You must not spend a lot of time with any. Or people.
@@Jabersson lol, sure
You didm’t actually watch the video did you
@@segamai I did, which is why several of my comments are direct responses to things said in the video.