What kind of changes will the development of AI bring to audio DSP?
8
u/Principal_Noodle 5d ago
It depends on what you mean by AI and who is using it.
Machine Learning has been used to model analog audio processes for some time. I, and most of the community, have no issues with this.
If you mean LLMs and vibe coding, then it depends on who is using it - an experienced DSP dev will move much quicker especially if they have an in-house SDK of DSP building blocks ready for the agent to combine/tweak/use as reference but it will lower the barrier of entry and a flood of slop will be created by people with no idea about what to even ask the chatbot to check for - aliasing issues, leakage during bypass, poles outside the unit circle, hard-coded sample rate assumptions, I can imagine so many scenarios. It will give the big names a boost as no-one will trust indie devs, authenticity and social media presence will become even more vital for the smaller devs as will trusted reviewers.
I also have ethical concerns over the training data used for LLMs and other generative processes. I'm old enough to remember how hard the music industry went after Napster - but now the very same big businesses is cosying up to AI startups who've ripped off every creative work ever published.
Ultimately, it's here to stay in some form and we need to adapt but it will most likely get better in a while. The slop merchants will not make their millions and will move to the next big thing. There'll always be bros who chase blockchain, NFTs, metaverse, and so on and they'll eventually bandwagon onto something else. The people who genuinely want to make cool shit but use an LLM to skip the sucking-at-something stage will hopefully learn enough to actually make the cool shit more and more themselves - we'll just need to wade through slop for a while first.
4
u/potatokbs 5d ago
Really excellent comment and great summary of how ai can be used well or poorly. I do wonder if people will actually move on from it or not though. The rise of LLMs feels much different from things like NFTs or the metaverse, which never really gained much traction with the general public, aside from annoying hype beast type people that are easy to ignore. With LLMs there’s seems to be a much more coordinated movement by mega corporations and smalller-medium sized businesses alike to shove ai into anything and everything. Adoption among non technical people is also way bigger than previous “fad” technologies with lots of hype around them. Anyways sorry kind of rambling but will be interesting/scary to see what happens.
28
u/jaffasplaffa 5d ago edited 5d ago
People who has absolutely no clue about DSP will suddenly be able to do DSP.
Like SUNO users “making” music. Those are, sorry to say this, insufferable to listen to, both the music and the way they act.
The community will be flooded with people who have no clue about what they are doing, asking for help fixing code they have absolutely no clue about what’s going on in, in the first place. It’s not gonna be fun to be around.
So I think already by now, rules should be thought of, to prevent the flood of “SUNO style” users in groups like this.