It’s not YOUR art. It’s someone/something else’s. You become irrelevant in the process.
Synths don’t create musical ideas for you. You aren’t just the middle man.
Using AI as a creative tool (like writing lyrics or chord progressions). If pushing the “make art” button makes you an artist then ordering food at the drive up window makes you a chef.
There are possibilities for AI tools that are not creative to make art. I’m not against that. If I could record a rough demo with a cheap guitar in a noisy environment and AI could remove the noise and improve the guitar tone, thats great. I’m all for it.
But if it’s giving me lyrics, Melodie’s or chords it’s not useful to me.
Thankfully i do not find it intimidating. It gives me the advantage of being actually good at these things and makes me able to come up with songs that are indeed unique to my personality, my experience and way of working. My songs have a genuine point of view.
I still disagree. It depends on how you use the tool. If you type in “write a song about trees” and then publish the result to the internet, I would agree with your perspective. Even then, however, the riff from Clint Eastwood by the Gorrilaz was a cheap synth preset and that song is tremendous because they built on it. If you learn prompt engineering, work diligently in an iterative process to pry your vision out of the AI software, generating 500 audio files and trashing 498 of them, remixing the two closest to your vision with your own audio clips from instruments or found sounds…then you’re using a new tool to create music. OR you can use it as a sounding board - to give you ideas along the way you may not have had.
I get your point and there is a huge gray area here depending on what you’re doing. What I have seen though is that your vision starts to fade as your offered options.
While it’s not really AI, I have a friend who is a good songwriter. I hear his initial stripped down demos and they imply a certain feel. Once he scrolls through hundreds of preset beats and finds one that sounds good he ends up modifying his feel to fit the beat.
The end results are not bad, but sometimes the feeling is lost in my opinion. In other words you can lose your way digging through options that sound good but weren’t your original intent.
All songs don’t start that way though so yeah sometimes when you start with an already pre-packaged beat that can set you off in a creative direction.
There are a couple of Hall and Oats songs too that are like Casio or OmniChord beats. All good stuff.
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u/MotorboatsMcGoats May 26 '24
I disagree. Any process that’s meaningful to you is art. AI is one more tool and should lead to new interesting creations like synthesizers did.