Google is embedding inaudible watermarks right into its AI generated music::Audio created using Google DeepMind’s AI Lyria model will be watermarked with SynthID to let people identify its AI-generated origins after the fact.
The singers of that music actually have to use their voice to sing into a mic compared to someone on a computer typing in a prompt.
As much as I dislike modern pop music, I will definitely say they put in more work than the people who rely solely on an AI that will do all the work based on a prompt.
My own feelings on the matter aside (fuck google and all that) this has been something chased after for a long time. The famous composer Raymond Scott dedicated the back end of his life trying to create a machine that did exactly this. Many famous musical creators such as Michael Jackson were fascinated by the machine and wanted to use it. The problem was is he was never "finished". The machine worked and it could generate music, it's immensely fascinating in my opinion.
They go into the people who opposed Scott and why they did, and also talk about the emotion behind music and the artists, and if it would even work. Because the most fascinating part of it all was that the machine was kind of forgotten and it no longer works. Some currently famous musicians are trying to work together to restore it.
The question then is, if someone created their life's work and modern musicians spend an immense amount of time restoring the machine, when the machine creates music does that mean no one spent time on it? I enjoy debating the philosophy behind the idea in my head, especially since I have a much more negative view when a modern version of this is done by Google.
I feel like the machine itself would be the art in that case, not necessarily what it creates. Like if someone spent a decade making a machine that could cook FLAWLESS BEEF WELLINGTON, the machine would be far more impressive and artistic than the products it made
That was a great episode of 99PI. Would love the machine restored.
IIRC, It's not so much that it made music, but that it would create loops through iteration to inspire people. He wanted it to make full busic but it was never close to that
This assumes music is made and enjoyed in a void. It's entirely reasonable to like music much more if it's personal to the artist. If an AI writes a song about a very intense and human experience it will never carry the weight of the same song written by a human.
This isn't like food, where snobs suddenly dislike something as soon as they find out it's not expensive. Listening to music often has the listener feel a deep connection with the artist, and that connection is entirely void if an algorithm created the entire work in 2 seconds.
That's not really a gotcha though. They're saying they aren't going to actively seek out and listen to auto-generated music. If they happen to hear some and like it, that wouldn't mean they actively sought it out and listened to it.
Lately in youtube I'm constantly been bombarded with ai garbage music passed as a normal unknown bands and it's getting really annoying. What will happen when there's an actual new band but everyone ignores them because you would think it's just ai?
What will happen when there’s an actual new band but everyone ignores them because you would think it’s just ai?
Their music will speak for itself and elevate them above the AI that is making worse music.
You're asking the wrong question. What happens when you hear something you like, then find out it's made by AI and all of a sudden you have to pretend you never liked it?
A needle in a haystack is much harder to find if the haystack is the size of a truck. People don't have infinite time to listen to music, and if it's almost all the same, they'll stop trying to find upcoming artists, ai or not.
Music snobs have been doing this for decades, pretending to like the shittiest pink Floyd b-side because the normies don't get it and acting like Abba's entire catalogue isn't solid bangers because disco isn't cool, until it was again then they'd always loved it.
It'll be just like it always is, Pete Seagar with an axe trying to stop Bob Dylan playing an electric guitar. I remember when people hated d&b and said it wasn't real music and all that shit now they're all telling bullshit stories about how they were og junglist massive.
People will use ai to make really cool things and a loud portion of the population will act superior by pretending it's bad, time will pass and when the next thing comes along all those people will point at the ai music and say 'your new music will never be as good as real music like that' but the people listening to atonal arithmic echolocation beats to study to or whatever the next trend is won't pay them any attention.
This raises the question of will AI style be the next big trend? Imagine if real painters started painting oil paintings that look uncanny and surreal like an Ai generated art, weird hands, or weird eyes. Imagine if a real quartet decided to play an AI generated piece of music.
Audio created using Google DeepMind’s AI Lyria model, such as tracks made with YouTube’s new audio generation features, will be watermarked with SynthID to let people identify their AI-generated origins after the fact.
In a blog post, DeepMind said the watermark shouldn’t be detectable by the human ear and “doesn’t compromise the listening experience,” and added that it should still be detectable even if an audio track is compressed, sped up or down, or has extra noise added.
President Joe Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence, for example, calls for a new set of government-led standards for watermarking AI-generated content.
According to DeepMind, SynthID’s audio implementation works by “converting the audio wave into a two-dimensional visualization that shows how the spectrum of frequencies in a sound evolves over time.” It claims the approach is “unlike anything that exists today.”
The news that Google is embedding the watermarking feature into AI-generated audio comes just a few short months after the company released SynthID in beta for images created by Imagen on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.
The watermark is resistant to editing like cropping or resizing, although DeepMind cautioned that it’s not foolproof against “extreme image manipulations.”
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That's actually an accurate description of what is happening: an audio file turned into a 2d image with the x axis being time, the y axis being frequency and color being amplitude.
Sounds like a bad journalist hasn't understood the explanation. A spectrogram contains all the same data as was originally encoded. I guess all it means is that the watermark is applied in the frequency domain.
I wonder if being able to generate music will make people less interested in actually bothering to learn how to do it themselves. Having ai tool makes many things so much easier and you need to have only rudimentary understanding of the subject.
Yeah, like most people don't realise but until about 1900 most piano music was played by humans, of course there were no pianists after the invention of the pianola with its perforated rolls of notes and mechanical keys.
It's sad, drums were things you hit with a stick once but Mr Theramin ensured you never see a drummer anymore, while Mr Moog effectively ended bass and rhythm guitars with the synthesizer....
It's a shame it would be fun to go see a four piece band performing live but that's impossible now no one plays instruments anymore.
People are never going to stop learning to play instruments, if anything they'll get inspired by using AI to make music and it'll get them interested in learning to play, they'll then use ai tools to help them learn and when they get to be truly skilled with their instrument they'll meet up with some awesomely talented friends to form a band which creates painfully boring and indulgent branded rock.
Those are a bit of false equivalencies, because all of them still required human input to work. AI generated music can be entirely automated, just put in a prompt and tell it to generate 10 and it'll do the rest for you. Set up enough servers and write enough prompts and you can have hundreds of distinct and unique pieces of AI music put online every minute.
Realistically, putting aside sentimental value, there isn't a single piece of music that humans have made that an AI couldn't make. But I hope your optimism turns out to be right :/
I believe it will depend on a couple different factors. Putting keywords into a generator isn't the same as laying your hands on an instrument, being able to physically play it yourself. However, if the result is so perfect and beautiful that a person could have never possibly come up with it on their own, it might be discouraging (but I can't really see that happening)
Maybe but people who are good at things already can use it as a tool to be better. You can combine the skills you do have with ai for the skills you don't have to make something you never could have before.
I like to make games and for me this means I could make my own game music. I just don't have the skills to do that on my own and make it sound good. But with ai I could get music that matches the quality of my other work.