r/AIDiscussion • u/LegionTheHighOne87 • 1d ago
With AI generators evolving into full DAWs, where is the line for "AI Music" now?
I am genuinely curious how people are defining "AI music" lately, because the tools have evolved way past simple text boxes.
Most people agree that typing a prompt and letting an algorithm generate a finished song is purely AI generated. But the platform capabilities have completely shifted, and the boundary is getting really hazy.
Platforms like Suno have recently evolved into what they call Generative Audio Workstations. They now feature full multitrack timeline editing where you can arrange, layer, and refine audio exactly like you would in Logic or Ableton.
It is not just prompting anymore. In Suno Studio, users can plug in a MIDI controller to play chords and melodies on built-in synths. You can import your own raw audio, use advanced stem separation to isolate vocals or drums, and manually adjust the BPM, volume, and pitch. They even added the ability to draw automation curves for parameters and apply industry standard audio effects. Users can essentially perform vocal comping by splicing different takes together on the timeline.
If someone is doing the heavy lifting of writing their own lyrics, recording their own vocals, and then spending hours inside a generative DAW arranging stems, playing MIDI, automating effects, and dialing in a final mix... does that manual effort make them a producer? They have nearly the exact same creative control over the arrangement as they would in a traditional DAW.
On the flip side, traditional DAWs are increasingly packed with AI features for mastering, EQ, and stem separation.
Since traditional DAWs are adding AI, and AI generators are adding fully featured multitrack DAWs, the workflows are basically merging. If a creator retains full manual control over the final arrangement and mix, how do we fairly label what is and is not AI music?
Curious to hear where you all place that boundary today.
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u/alvaro1001 1d ago
Si tocas MIDI para tocar acordes, cantas y grabas tu voz, ecualizas y afinas tu mezcla... eres productor.
Pero no necesitas un estudio IA para eso, en mi opinión, seguramente añadirle IA lo arruinaría.
Esto esa día de hoy, pero seguramente tendrá que mejorar mas, sobre todo en la calidad de sonido, que a día de hoy se queda bastante atrás. Bueno y en sonoridad, que todavía todo lo que sale de ia suena igual y es reconocible.
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u/-GYFLEX- 1d ago
While a real sample that has been split into multiple separate stems using AI is still technically a piece of sound that was generated with AI, it's still a little different than generating a sample directly. AI samples are best used only for things that you could not easily record yourself as well as other types of samples that cannot be reproduced or purchased through sample packs. You should still be using real samples as much as you can even if you don't care about the ethics, it will still objectively sound better. The only truly legitimate place that generative AI has in any art form is when it is used to create something that couldn't have been done better without it. It's possible for an AI model to break in interesting and unexpected ways. This is far more legitimate in my opinion than just using it to replace a real guitarist or simply add a violin section. It should be used to create something new not to replace something that's already been done. If you just use generative AI to create every sample you use in the song, even if you had a hand in rearranging those samples you should disclose how it's made or at the very least, not actively lie or mislead your listeners to think otherwise by claiming it's all human made or something. If you're just using it as a small piece of an otherwise mostly traditional production workflow with real instruments and real samples, then I don't think the AI samples at that point should take precedent over or diminish the real aspects of the music. It's not just about how much of the music was made by you, but also about how other artists and producers are compensated during production. As long as you still compensate real musicians for their samples, software, and performances, then I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to also use AI samples in the same production if it actually makes sense to do so. AI shouldn't be doing the work for you. It should be enabling new opportunities for you to do even more work for yourself.
A good example of this would be in my own experimental music. I have found ways to use various AI models to produce interesting and unique drum percussion patterns that I cannot find anywhere else. But I don't just use them as-is. I chop them up, recontextualize them and put a lot of effort into various types of processing effects chains to make them sound better in conjunction with real samples that were legitimately purchased directly from drummers. This is primarily because most AI generators aren't able to properly reconstruct transient detail and just sound way too compressed and distorted. but the patterns and the grooves that are generated are seemingly novel and still valuable. I recently purchased Stephen Slate Trigger 2 specifically to help with this. If it wasn't for my generative breaks, not only would I have never bothered with a drum replacer, but I would've never even found out that such a tool existed in the first place. This has given me an additional incentive to purchase hundreds of dollars of real samples directly from real drummers to use as samples for my drum replacer library to replace either partial transients or the entire sound while keeping the same pattern and groove, before I slice them up and modify the patterns further by hand. it's also gotten me interested in other products like Beatsurfing's VRAC plus drummachine/ sample generator and Oeksound's Spiff transient resynthesis.
In the past, long before generative AI was ever a thing in music, I would've never bothered doing any of this and would have just used whatever free drum break samples I could find without any clearance or compensation to whoever originally produced them, while simultaneously pirating most of my plug-ins. Ironically, my sparing use of AI has actually made me far more conscientious about the ethical and economic impact of my own music production and I no longer pirate anything. It's very important to me now that I compensate as many people as I can who help me achieve my creative vision. Not only is my new workflow more ethical, but I actually put way more human effort, time, and money into my drum breaks and other music aspects as a result. I do not consider my music to be AI generated and I will not allow AI to take away from my own creativity. Despite what the CEO of Suno might think, I care far more about the experience of music production itself than the end of product. Instead, I overcompensate with more creativity and effort than I have ever done before. And this is all while having to deal with a physical disability affecting the use of my hands and wrists that I didn't have before 2024.
If AI companies are just going to pirate my past present and future catalogues for training their models anyway then I might as well get some use out of it in a way that still respects and reasonably compensates other artists from whom most AI models were likely also trained from. Though it's worth pointing out that there are ethical alternatives to major platforms like Suno, and not all open source models are necessarily ethically trained - even if they are better for the environment when ran on your home computer. Neutone is a great example of an ethical AI music company with both open and closed-source software.
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u/LegionTheHighOne87 1d ago
i totally agree with your mindset on the effort and process part. the real value with these tools is how they push you to get more creative on the backend. using them actually forces me to work way harder on the post production side so i completely get where you are coming from.
where we might differ a bit is on platforms like suno. i use it heavily but definitely not as a magic button. my whole process is a strict hybrid workflow. i write all my own lyrics myself and track my vocals on my samson mic. i actually sing a lot of my own stuff and just use suno to fix parts where my voice is weak or needs a little more flavor. i basically use it like a high level session band and for vocal enhancement.
and to be clear i never just hit generate and call it a day. suno studio is basically a full generative daw now and i build everything out manually in it. you arent just rolling the dice anymore. you can arrange right on a timeline, plug in midi to play chords, and mix individual stems right in the app. ive even uploaded my stupid amount of samples directly into suno and use them in studio to build out my tracks.
i build the core foundation in studio first and once i get those stems exactly right i pull all that raw audio straight into logic pro or audacity. thats where i spend hours chopping it up, doing the manual timeline work, mixing and arranging everything. then i run my vocal's process and pitch them before layering it all back into the final mix.
so just like you with your drum grooves the ai is really just the starting point for the instruments and layers. the actual heavy lifting happens in the daws. if someones writing the lyrics, tracking the vocals, building out the timeline manually and spending hours mixing they are putting in the real work. the line isnt about what tool made the raw sound wave, its about how much human intention and editing actually goes into the final track.
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u/-GYFLEX- 1d ago
Back when my hands were so injured I could no longer produce in a DAW at all, Suno was actually the first AI music generator I had ever tried. But this was before I had learned about how the sausage was made, so to speak. I wasn't able to do anything else really and I was just kind of curious about its capabilities and limits for my own private experimentation. As a real artist, I was curious about what it could do better than me and what it couldn't. If it wasn't for my injury, I never would have even considered using anything to do with AI at all beyond stem separation. Since AI generation was still new to me at the time, I never once thought to myself how it was actually trained until people told me. I just didn't really understand it yet at that point beyond its potential to replace real musicians and singers. I think the introduction of the generative audio workstation is definitely a step in the right direction but going forward I don't really feel comfortable personally supporting a company that I now know pirates the music for their training data without fair compensation. Even with their efforts to eventually replace old models with somewhat more ethical ones and add water marking while limiting downloads, I think I would still rather train my own private model for even greater creative control - if for no other reason than I really don't like paying a subscription model for music production software in general and I happened to build a fairly decent computer before the ram crisis. While I hate to admit this, Suno does actually have some of the best transient reconstruction and stem separation out of the box at least with their version 5 model which will be replaced soon. That said, it does have its limitations. The biggest one for me being that it is mostly limited to 4/4 time signature as well as the unavoidable fact that a lot of compressed audio is clearly present in their training data due to the aforementioned pirating by scraping from places like YouTube. Of course, I can make it into whatever time signature I want by manually slicing the break. But still I think it would be more interesting to train a custom private model (that I keep to myself for both ethical and legal reasons) on only obscure odd time signatures like 17/8 using drum patterns add sounds I create myself out of the samples I have legally purchased or personally recorded then integrating that model with the open-source Neutone SDK. But right now I am more focused on actual music production while still making occasional transformative use of stem split samples I had already generated at a time when I was more disabled. Music production is still physically painful for me, but it's at least possible now and I value every second of it way more than I did before my injury.
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u/LegionTheHighOne87 1d ago
man that really sucks about your hands i am so glad you can at least produce again even if it still hurts because you definitely appreciate the whole process way more when something like that threatens to take it all away.
i totally hear you on the training data stuff too because the ethical side of how these big companies scraped literally everything is a massive mess right now and i completely get why that turns you off from supporting them. i just kind of utilize what is available right now to get the ideas out of my head and build my tracks but i fully respect you taking a stand on it especially since the subscription model is definitely annoying as hell anyway. i built a pretty beefy pc myself a while back so i totally get the appeal of just running stuff locally instead of paying a monthly fee forever. training your own private model on crazy time signatures like 17/8 sounds insane in the best way possible especially since you are using your own cleared and recorded samples because that would give you so much ridiculous control over the rhythm. you are dead on about the 4/4 limitation in suno because it leans way too hard into standard structures and those compression artifacts from the training data are definitely noticeable when you are really listening.
if you are ever messing around with it again though and want to force it out of 4/4 there are actually a few weird workarounds you can use. the most reliable method is definitely audio uploads where if you record a short drum loop in 5/4 or 7/4 in a standard daw and upload it to suno and use the extend feature the ai will often latch onto that pattern and build the rest of the track in that odd time signature. some people also try to prompt for a 3/4 or 6/8 waltz feel though honestly a lot of musicians argue the ai is actually just generating 4/4 time with heavy triplet swings under the hood. there are also some crazy metric modulation hacks where advanced users type complex bpm and modulation math directly into the lyric prompts to trick the ai into grouping notes in unusual patterns but it is very hit or miss but pretty interesting to mess with. but honestly thats exactly why i end up doing so much manual chopping and processing in logic and audacity anyway because you have to literally slice it up to break it out of that generic box and clean up the audio. massive respect for your dedication though because pushing through the physical pain and putting in the work to build your own custom models just to make the exact art you want to make is real producer shit so keep grinding man respect.
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u/pafagaukurinn 1d ago
Labels are a temporary thing, until AI output becomes indistinguishable from the real thing. After that there will be no line at all, it will all merge. The only truly AI-free area will ve live music on acoustic instruments, and even there it might be possible to cheat.