thoughts on AI songwriting service/sites?

[CoolCat]

I was introduced to the AI songwriting stuff.
Personally I was amazed as it wrote in seconds beautiful, Pop chart worthy done songs. Its sounding better than 95% of HR stuff Ive done or heard..

The example I watched was the human puts in the words, then selects genres and AI writes fully written songs in 5 seconds or so.
All genres and voices and wow.....a few of them in genres I like , were amazing. Some of the chord stuctures so impressive I wanted to go learn what they or ..er...it...had used!

I can only imagine the bombardment, tsunami of songs to be saved onto the web, the internet the cloud or whatever. Take all the songs now being uploaded and multiply by 50,000,000?
Kids and parents and non musical people can type in joke words, fun words, or heartfelt poetry and click on a "AI thing"....and boom a well done, well structured song in 5 seconds!!
and a person can do 100 songs of the various genres and then the words can be tweaked etc....

It was so good I thought where does this go? I cant imagine ever needing another human band or HR to record music for commercials or movies. It will evolve and the human using the AI will get better too. I suppose the difficulty will become "finding" the good songs in the piles of 400 million songs a year being created then.?

And I wondered who owns the song? AI ...the webpage owners or the person , the human writing the words? Can I copyright a AI song that I wrote the words too and selected the correct genre as my own?

Its fun to say the least to take your words and have A I make a well done song from them. Using better chord changes or better selection of instruments than I ever did. And its mixed and mastered better than anything Ive done in my years of goofing about trying to duplicate EMI in my closet.

So a new Tsunami....of change. I guess its here to stay might as well try to be open to it?

 

[Eric Malone]

Do you have a link to a website, or application? I'd like to hear some of this Beatles worthy music that 'AI' is spewing out.

I have used very basic AI as a glorified thesaurus to help me work through some lyric ideas. Aside from that, I'm not a fan.

 

[CoolCat]

Im a newbie too, but one is SUNO....they did a song that was equal to the Hollies early good stuff...lol
You might need to listen to 3000 or so to find one you like.

"there's no accounting for taste"

 

[spantini]

I think it's cool. But . . It worries me. About what, I'm not sure. In a very general way, this doesn't seem too different than what record companies had been doing for the past 60 years with creating the product (e.g. songs) first, using writers and session musicians (e.g. Wrecking Crew) to put out a record with a band's name and no band in sight.

Not exactly the same, but considering AI wasn't available, it's weirdly close, IMO.

 

[Eric Malone]

Not exactly the same, indeed.

The wrecking crew were all incredibly talented musicians,
contributing their unique touch and skills to the music they were presented with.

That cannot be compared to feeding a computer AI algorithm and expecting even remotely the same
result.

Having your music written for you, and session musicians perform it is certainly nothing new - but at least the music is real. With AI there will be no human
in sight, let alone a band.

I think AI is a passing fad anyway, kind of like compact florescent light bulbs. AI's effect and contribution to music will be fleeting at best.

EL

 

[mbsmike]

Not exactly the same, indeed.

The wrecking crew were all incredibly talented musicians,
contributing their unique touch and skills to the music they were presented with.

That cannot be compared to feeding a computer AI algorithm and expecting even remotely the same
result.

Having your music written for you, and session musicians perform it is certainly nothing new - but at least the music is real. With AI there will be no human
in sight, let alone a band.

I think AI is a passing fad anyway, kind of like compact florescent light bulbs. AI's effect and contribution to music will be fleeting at best.

EL

I'm in full agreement with your take. Once the newness wears off and folks understand that there is no "intelligence" at all just huge databases to draw from, good or not, it will be forgotten. Already ai companies are struggling because businesses (one of the main intended targets of ai) are not seeing any real benefits from ai and are backing off investments. I think ai is just a feeble attempt for hardware and software companies to reinvent themselves, similar to the cloud ( which did work) but my goodness people it is a server sitting in a building that you can upload and download from, nothing to do with a cloud or the sky! I used servers for the very same purposes in my business LONG before anyone supposedly invented the cloud......geez.

 

[grimtraveller]

I was introduced to the AI songwriting stuff.
Personally I was amazed as it wrote in seconds beautiful, Pop chart worthy done songs. Its sounding better than 95% of HR stuff Ive done or heard..

I think I'm at the point where I can safely say that no matter what an AI music tool would write and no matter how brilliant sounding, it wouldn't write what I would write. Not if it was intelligent !

Some of the chord stuctures so impressive I wanted to go learn what they or ..er...it...had used!

That's not at all surprising. Some of the oldest recorded {on paper} pieces of music have impressive chord structures. I am the Walrus and Strawberry Fields Forever have impressive chord structures. But equally, absolute shit-tons of great songs have basic, unimpressive chord structures.

Its fun to say the least to take your words and have A I make a well done song from them

Except of course, that it's not you that has done it, musically.
I think AI encroaching on art is beyond questionable. But I'm an old fart standing in the way of "progress." Or maybe I'm like that little kid who no longer wants their Mum to select what they wear and they want to make their own choices, even if they look ridiculous to everyone else.

Using better chord changes or better selection of instruments than I ever did

I know that I'm really stubborn this way, but ultimately that's always a subjective call. In the past, I've gone with a suggestion that someone has made and endlessly regretted it. Once I've written a song, it never even occurs to me that the chord changes could be better.....or worse.

And its mixed and mastered better than anything Ive done in my years of goofing about trying to duplicate EMI in my closet....

For me, that is a reality that never changes, whether or not AI exists !
But my mixes are my mixes....

I guess its here to stay might as well try to be open to it?

Perhaps one of the main reasons that I'm so opposed to AI in music creation is that I find writing songs easy. I've never had writer's block and have no difficulty coming up with stuff. I'm also very patient. In the bath a couple of days ago, I came up with a segment of a song that I really liked. I like the melody and I have a brief idea of a bit of lyric. Now, it may be 5 or 8 years before that song is ever completed but so be it.
I understand why people would use such a tool. But I won't, any more than I would use GPS/Satnav to get somewhere I already know the way to.

 

[markmann]

I think AI is great for creating background music for grocery stores and elevators, may even training videos or certain soundtracks but I can't see it going further than that.

 

[Porter]

I put a few prompts in to ChatGPT to see how it would go writing songs. One of the first prompts I put in was to 'write the best song chrous ever'... one of the lines was 'we are the ones who make a brighter day, so let's start giving'.
Granted, a great line.. but I bet if that was in a popular released song, there would be a few questions asked.
I am too of the opinion that AI is a passing fad in its current state. It's great for looking at existing data and mashing it together to produce something that looks OK, but there is a loss of creativity in the process.
In saying all of the above, I know you had to feed it information, but BiaB was released in 1990 and was borderline what some of the GAI is creating today.

 

[mbsmike]

I put a few prompts in to ChatGPT to see how it would go writing songs. One of the first prompts I put in was to 'write the best song chrous ever'... one of the lines was 'we are the ones who make a brighter day, so let's start giving'.
Granted, a great line.. but I bet if that was in a popular released song, there would be a few questions asked.
I am too of the opinion that AI is a passing fad in its current state. It's great for looking at existing data and mashing it together to produce something that looks OK, but there is a loss of creativity in the process.
In saying all of the above, I know you had to feed it information, but BiaB was released in 1990 and was borderline what some of the GAI is creating today.

I agree, of all the software I've owned Band In A Box comes the closest to being "intelligent".