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I was looking for videogame remixes one day and found a channel doing Little Nemo from the NES. I used to love that game and thought it was an odd pick for remixes, one you don't see too often so I clicked on it and ... it was incredibly underwhelming. I listened for a few minutes and something was kind of off but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. It was AI of course.

I'm not much of a music person, I've been listening to it daily for my entire life but I don't know much about theory. Still, when it comes to remixes, you can usually tell why someone remixed a song. They like that particular song, or there's a motif that really struck them. They'll pick out certain sounds or elements and build on them, single them out and rearrange them. It's very intentional and you can tell.

AI-generated remixes lack this intentionality. It was like someone had twisted a dial that just said "complexity" and that was it. There were more intricate layers of beats and instrumentation on top, but it wasn't doing anything. I sat there and listened for 15 minutes and it was like I heard nothing. Nothing new stuck in my head, there was no riff or little melody that made go, "Aw fuck yeah! This is what it's about!"

That's how you can tell AI generated music.

Sadly, a lot of slower and minimalist genres have been decimated by it though. Vaporwave, chillcore, dungeonsynth. A lot of these had large bodies of work to train on and it's a lot harder to tell due to their subtler nature, but you'll usually notice the artist has a new hour-long upload every day. If you click through it at random, you'll begin to notice that while the tones shift, the overall pattern of the entire hour-long mix is still kind of the same?

It's bleak, man. Fuck that shit.

If you can't tell the difference and it fits how you listen to music, I guess who cares?

AI software writing up musak doesn't matter to me because I don't listen to music that way.

I'll know the bands I'm listening to are real because I will have manually downloaded their music after reading reviews, magazine articles, or things like albumoftheyear.org just like I've been doing for the last half decade.

Music streaming services suck and not only because they will promote low cost bands to you. If you actually give a shit about music then stop being so lazy as to have an algorithm fill your trough with slop and then being surprised that it's AI slop.

Or just continue eating the slop if it pleases you. 🤷

It's a bit of a contrarian take, but I think people need to start adding more intentionality to how they live their lives. If music is unimportant to you, that's fine. But nowadays everyone just watches the shows they're recommended, listens to the music that is picked out by the algorithm, and reads what is fed to them in their feeds...figure out what's important to you and curate it for yourself.

idk they are different and both good. right now im listening to my own manually composed music because the long complex note structure actually has meaning and is pretty. Sometimes I listen to my ai songs because they can be pretty in their own way too, especially my fey song and my necromancer one where her voice does a superinteresting highly emotional energetic thing i would never have dreamed to put in one of my own songs. Also sometimes I like playing music on piano or viola. There are many types of music. I like alot of them :)

Tip 1: It's being promoted. The music industry would love to get rid of musicians.

I haven't listened to new music in over a decade. That includes hearing songs by contemporary artists. Everything sounds the same as it always did.

Why should anyone care whether music is AI generated or not?

Lol this is how pop music is created with formulaic, focus group approved garbage over engineered to be the most palatable and sell well.

I have yet to hear an AI generated song that didn't have some obvious tells in the vocals. Like how you can hear autotune, but it's even worse than autotune. Crackly/crunchy, heavily distorted but only on certain words. Weird pronunciation or annunciation.

I fell hard for Dysmn, who was suspiciously dropping new music every few days. I really liked the sound, and I haven't found anything that sounds like that since. 270+ videos in under 2 years. I realized it wasn't human after a month or two.

Soooo, if anybody knows a great jazzy EDM metal noise, let me know.

There’s a pretty well known studio engineer that has a YouTube channel. He did a bit where even he couldn’t tell the difference.

We’re cooked at this point. There is really no need to bother learning a creative skill outside of it being just a personal desire to do.

There will be no money or career opportunities in the field of entertainment and arts.

This description of AI songs could be a lament about most pop music: formulaic, sweet, generic, produced in a studio to sound perfect, not human. Works on radio or Spotify, but not so much for a live audience.

Sure, that's hard to detect. AI reproduces what we've been exposed to for decades.

I've been trying to figure out if Stone Rebel is an AI band or not. They started in 2018 and have put out something like 77 albums since, but it's relatively simple instrumental. They have almost no information online except a claim that they're "based in France"

Honestly can't tell if they're a legit yet very private group, or if they were early adopters of procgen music