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much music is already drivel, what’s the harm of adding even more drivel to the pile. i am a smart person.

I mean, the problem is that drivel is what gets rewarded, doesn’t matter how it gets made. More people are able to express themselves through music than were able to before, that’s unambiguously good. That music is a commodity to be bought and sold as property is bad, same as before

Generating wav files with AI is not making music in any sense that is perceptible to anyone who has ever made music. It’s a different thing entirely, and it sucks

I am an instrumentalist and have also long embraced electronic and digital means as well. My musical horizon is broad: I can enjoy procedural techniques as well as a live jam session. The key is to be “in” the music, and when you’re in the music, no tiny detail is insignificant. Every moment counts.

If someone can express themselves by externalizing something that they couldn’t before, that’s a capability worth reproducing at some, socially-determined, cost. The fact that capital incentivizes using any capability to produce wasteful garbage is nothing new, and worth any cost to struggle against

i think this misses the entire point and process of music or even creativity as such. it’s not the case that there is some “music” out there that a computer can solve for. the music that is there is made by being engaged in music making. genAi music is a poor imitation of a song, made non-musically

There’s no objective place to draw that line, though. Put yourself in the position of arguing with someone using that same logic against using computers to make music at all. Could even push it further and say using any instrument except your own body isn’t making music. It’s a matter of degrees.

Lazily prompting a machine once and publishing the result to game an algorithm is different from an extended back and forth resulting in an end product a person really believes expresses something they couldn’t have otherwise expressed. The thing I will stand by is this: A work created with the

sincere intent to express oneself and make meaning is of inherently higher social value than a work motivated by the aim of creating a profitable commodity regardless of the tools used to create it.

the “no objective line” is a fallacy, i’m saying the objective line and it’s between making music and using ai to avoid the friction of creation

So the consolidation of the prior existing techniques into what’s being called “AI” right now represents a qualitative change? I agree with that. I think that making value judgments based on which configuration of tools were used in a thing’s creation, rather than the incentives motivating its

creation, is idealistic and reactionary. E.g. I would rather a classless, stateless society in which everyone’s needs are met that produces exclusively truly self-expressive unlistenable trash using any tools you could name than the current world.

i think you’re trying incredibly hard to justify an inherently anti-creative tool, one that also happens to be inextricably yoked to the capitalist mode of production and ownership, and weirdly the fact that musicians themselves are rejecting this nearly wholesale is irrelevant. they’re not wrong!

My analysis falls out of my pre-existing interpretation of dialectical materialism and orthodox Marxism basically effortlessly. The hard part is articulating it, and not giving up in frustration.

i don’t think the tech *couldn’t* be reproduced by a socialist structure, but i am comfortable with claiming it would be unlikely to be developed. it’s a capitalist product that addresses capitalist drives: the product over process, alienation over community, shortcuts over contemplation.

A collectively-owned computer accessible by anyone containing nearly the totality of civilization’s output and knowledge? A machine capable of performing the undesirable specialized labor that presents one of the primary obstacles to a horizontal society? A tool that allows anyone with language