Like, will the tech ever get so good that it could personally write something for you? It could take all your Last FM data and start spitting out music you’d like?!
I’m not so sure as it would lack the humanity (maybe it could make sheet music for musicians to create covers of?!) and it will need to ingest all the music ever made to have a chance… and bafflingly last week Jeremy Hunt slipped into the budget that the UK government was going to make it easier for AI developers to access creative works
I was kinda angry about this announcement so spoke to an expert to find out if this is as fucked up as I presumed on this week’s DiS podcast
Probably already have between the Spotify vibe-playlists and times at friends’ houses where there’s a 12-hour YouTube playlist of a piano playing in key and not a lot else.
Holly Herndon has been doing stuff like this for while right? I haven’t listened to her though. What I will probably fall for one day is something like “Listen to this AI-generated version if what would happen if Syd Barrett was still in Pink Floyd in the 70’s” I lap shit like that up
All the poetry I’ve seen written by AI has been… not good. It gets people excited because it’s superficially impressive (ie it rhymes) but it doesn’t really have ideas, make connections, produce startling imagery etc etc. I saw one poor sap saying he loved all the AI poetry he’d read, and was actually now reading poetry for the first time, and when asked why he didn’t read actual poetry before he said he found it was too difficult, which is a bit sad because there are all sorts of poetry out there, and also, sometimes the difficulty is the point.
Anyway it will probably get though, and the same with music. You won’t make a choice to listen to AI music, one day you’ll realise you have been.
I’m sure there is space for people like Holly Herndon to use the technology creatively but yeah I suspect it will be churning out hundreds of hours of ambient moods or whatever to fill up Spotify playlists.
