I was chatting to a musician friend and something he said really resonated with me… he said:
All this talk about AI producing music… what I want is an AI that does the cleaning, does the laundry and stuff I don not enjoy… leave the fun stuff to me, I want AI to do all the boring stuff so I have more time do do what I love, to write music!
I am with your friend. By the way, all AI music I have listened until today is just crap nonsense for my ears and if someone says it will be better in the future, I don’t care. Nothing will replace spending an evening with a friend musician, rehearsing or recording, taking a glass of wine and talking about the personal story behind the lyrics he wrote for the song we are playing right now. Dear AI: you can…
For people who need to write a promotional gingle for the new toothpaste I know it can be a great tool, though.
Two days ago I saw a photo telling AI can predict breast cancer years before development. I don’t know if it is true, but if it is, that is what your friend refers.
I agree with this. Whenever I get talking with people about AI, my stance is always that AI should be used to create tools that make difficult or tedious tasks easier and quicker. We shouldn’t be creating entire pieces of music with AI in my opinion. This is why I love things like NotePerformer so much. It uses AI that has been trained using orchestral recordings to then make your orchestra scores playback with more realism straight from your notation software. It was incredible the first time I heard it used by a friend of mine.
Imagine if there was an AI tool in Dorico that could automatically detect engraving typos such as missing ties, dynamic markings over rests, overlapping items, etc… This tool could detect typos or missing things that you might not even be aware about until you have your first ensemble reading session with it.
As I just mentioned in a previous post, AI only speeds up workflow; it does not replace you. That’s fine by me. It’s the people who think it can write a song who are delusional; they are obviously not songwriters…yet. Maybe a toothpaste commercial or some understated underscore. It’s part of our landscape now, but it won’t replace original creativity.
I personally accept my new AI overlords. 
But seriously, I view AI no different than the rise of drum machines and samplers. It was a nw technical tool that creative people could use to make creativity. Drum machines created some new genres but they also didn’t replace skilled drummers or the need for unique drummers in music genres that required it. And then also, samplers added the ability to sample parts of recordings to use them, and also ability to trigger samples for specific drum elements. Many of your favorite cherished records you grew up with had drum samples assisting the drum part to make the song sound more potent on radio.
But that’s sort of lacking a point. Of course genres that still required drummers still required drummers. It only begs the question if there are genres or situations that lost that requirement.
As I wrote in a different thread when I started out as a working recording engineer in NYC in '01 we’d hire a drummer, bassist, guitarist, singer and so on for all that went into recording a commercial. The first to go was probably the drummer. Haven’t recorded live instruments for ads in about 2-3 years now.
I think therefore it’s fair to say that even if some genres are maybe “immune” as far as live music goes, this part of the industry has seen people lose their jobs over drum machines and synths and samplers and computers.
You could see it that way, sure, but technically there is a world of a difference here. If you are talking about “creative people” in the sense that they are artists that use AI to complement their own skillset that they keep developing and they do art because they love it then fine. But AI is going to kill off a huge chunk of what remains of commercial writing and production for both advertising and film and more. In that sense the people that are “creative” are going to replace composers and more with stock AI music instead, cutting “us” out of the creative process.
I suppose the upside is that we now can also create visuals using AI so we’re really all losers together. But that’s maybe not such an upside.
As I’ve said before, none of this is a big problem for people who don’t really care about the ratio between real human created art and machine content and who make a living doing something else, but for people who make a living in the arts or just care about humanity’s ability to create without machines it’s a problem.
Also reiterated: we’re not the only ones that are going to suffer from this. Professions ranging from lawyers to doctors to investors to teachers are going to get f-ed.
Rather than argue the inevitable and its effects we should probably be trying to change society’s economic structure to deal with it. But we won’t do that unfortunately.
This is absolutely true. Here in Norway, composers for especially TV and advertising have already seen the wrath of library music for many years now – even some feature films have taken the liberty of bypassing a human composer in favour of library music.
Financially, I can roughly divide my projects in two categories:
Now, the people in the second category, like producers of reality TV, don’t really see commissioned music as this vital artistic thing they cannot live without, as long as they’re fine with what stock music can give them with a couple of clicks. AI music now takes this many steps further by letting a TV producer or editor create his or her “own” stock music. Composer colleagues of mine have already lost jobs because the producer wanted the AI music instead. It is already happening.
What do I do about it? I ally myself with other creators within film and especially theatre, that think the same way I do. People who are not interested in hearing what the AI creates, but rather wants the creative input of a human being. This naturally means I will have to rely even more on the “artistic” gigs like theatre plays, and less on the “quick buck” ones.
That presents a challenge, because historically through the last 15–20 years, I have needed both of them. The “quick buck” gigs have been necessary to keep the wheels rolling, and pay much more (per workday) than the “artistic” ones. Moving forward, I will surely love many of my new projects, but I also see there being more work and less pay.
So, these are interesting times indeed…
I would think that since you’re in Scandinavia there should be a possibility to push for protections in legislation. Perhaps simply banning the use of AI or changing how compensation works to protect music creators.
Politicians might as well deal with it now for the art industry because the rest of the service sector is next. And that’s going to be awful.
I know the Norwegian association for composers and lyricists (NOPA) and our collecting society (TONO) are doing what they can, together with ECSA, the European Composer and Songwriters’ Alliance (I was a deputy member of NOPA’s board for six years). But it’s a tricky road!
It is a truly a sad picture of modern society that we’ve grown so accustomed to NOT dealing with actual people. I wonder if it can ever be reversed.
Sure. The social aspect is bad. I’ve noticed a clear difference between my generation and the young ones today.
I was thinking more in terms of economics however. Entire sectors are going to get hit by AI.
Det är väl tur att ni har Statoil, eller?
“Creative” AI is just plagiarism. That’s all I have say in that regard.
I have the, possibly mistaken, impression that most producers (old meaning) were glad to see the back of orchestra session musicians because of their snobbish attitude and unionism/clock watching.
“Creative” AI is just plagiarism. That’s all I have say in that regard.
Actually, technically, but not legally (yet I hope), AI is plagiarism, even if it contributes one note or one word; it has no ability for lateral thinking. It is the definition of thinking ‘inside the box’ that everyone else has created.
I kind’a think you’re oversimplifying AI now. There’s more than one type of AI and if lateral thinking is the prerequisite for AI not purely plagiarizing other works then I think you’re probably wrong. I read De Bono decades ago and brushing up on the ideas there doesn’t seem to be anything in there that couldn’t be either emulated in AI or even organically emerge using neural networks, artificial or not.
More importantly though it doesn’t matter. Outside of whether or not a machine can be conscious and self-aware who cares if it’s plagiarism or creative? At the end of the day we a) either use the machine to create or not, and the more we do the more we’re missing out on a great experience, and b) we either consume AI generated art or not, and if we do we’ll sooner rather than later make people unemployed.
“B” is the more urgent problem we will all face.
Yeah, but do these projects worth working on? They probably have a $1000 budget for the score, which is impossible, anyway.
But yeah, I agree, I am seeing features “released” on IMDb with no composer, and no music department. Stay classy San Diego.
PS. Said “features” are not worth discussing.
I have zero interest in AI as a tool to write music. It is old news and actually, quite boring when people are defending it.
AI had time to take over the world, and it hasn’t. Onto the next trend/bandwagon.
At that budget, of course it’s impossible. However these projects would be worth working on, if the film producers could be “educated” into considering music earlier in the process, so there is actually any money left for music. The way it is now, music becomes an afterthought, instead of being thought of as on par with, say, cinematography. We have to push to change that.
I also think what makes it worse for ourselves, is that composers are so individualistic, in the way we work and think. We should be much better at organising, lobbying for the producers and actually educating them on the importance of music in films. We have to use our composer associations to make a real consensus of the actual budgeting of music in films that has some grounding in 2024 realities (but still gives us an upper hand compared to today), and then have them work with the film businesses to try to implement this. It’s a long road to actually change stuff, but at least trying is better than giving up.
I love your comment. But I have a few things to point out.
1)Producers (the crushing majority) have zero interest in music. To them it’s just a thing that makes noise behind the well paid (sometimes well paid, if they are B to Z listers, it all depends) actors. They have no interest to be educated, because they care about one thing: Money and how not to pay to things they can avoid such as a composer.
2)In the UK (sorry I don’t know where you live) we have the Musician’s Union which is pretty much useless really. But the model is great. We should have a Global Composer’s Alliance and withdraw globally from the film industry as a strike. Demand films to use composers, proper repeat fees, bring awful contracts to the table and ask for accountability and respect to the composer, among other things.
However
3)The films that use libraries will have no success, these productions have people who are in their most part delusional. So, plenty of fish out there, expand your connections, and talk to people who give a you-know-what about actual music in films. These people are out there, the hard work is to find them.
That’s like saying in 1980 that the computer had time to take over the world but it didn’t.
A very shortsighted unimaginative take.
Define “success”.
I think, unfortunately, that there are far too many people that are either just jumping on AI for personal gain or have their heads in the sand for too long that reaching critical mass to effectively fight this and “change stuff” might be near impossible.
I hope that’s not the case though.
I will define lack of success, it’s easier to make my point about such films.
These films make £5.50, will be played on Amazon Prime, Tubi and similar, or will be rented for £1.50 on YouTube, nobody will care about them, will get circa 3 official reviews, a couple of awards from festivals the producers will pay to get their films in anyway, and IMDb will gather 5 reviews, 4 of which will be from the production team, praising the film as it being a complete masterpiece.
I’ve been around the block a few times 