@StefaanHimpe

1 year ago

Artificial intelligence has been making surprising and original discoveries for many years now in areas outside art (e.g. the Moderna COVID-19 vaccines - maybe the best you can get at the moment - are designed by AI in record time, which is a major reason they were so quickly available; or recently an AI came up with a faster way to do 4x4 matrix multiplication, a hot topic in engineering). Art has long been considered out of the realm of AI but recently there's been a Cambrian explosion of AI-art applications. At the moment most of the attention seems to go to generating essays, having conversations, generating images and videos from text prompts (spoiler: it's pretty mind-blowing what is possible nowadays and the evolution in this area at this very moment is incredibly fast, reaching new major milestones every 2-3 months or so), but music in principle can be handled with the exact same techniques. In fact, illustrators fear for their future at the moment and I'm convinced it's only a matter of time before many composers will face the same fears. At the moment, the AI system needs a prompt - so e.g. you need to ask for an illustration of a "bear wearing flowery glasses doing the dishes while riding a motor cycle in line drawing style" (or something like that - no matter what you can think of, the system will make it for you in a matter of a few seconds; it's already used today to design new buildings, shoes, etc). So the task for an illustrator/designer might shift from being able to draw to being able to come up with original prompts (which might not be what they actually like to do). Of course, just because type writers and word processors exist never stopped people from writing by pen. So while these AI systems might change the face of "commercial" music, I have no doubt there will always be people writing music by hand, trying to come up with things the AI maybe would not have come up with.

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