I assume most professional musicians, composers, and engineers will be wary to reveal that they're using AI in their productions these days. There's a lot of stigma attached to it – and people will be quick to judge.

I started thinking about this after I bought a virtual voice plugin that can produce uncannily real vocal performances (Dreamtonics Synthesizer V). I'm using it for my own tunes, and I do all the work like I usually do. 2/

And yet, there's this nagging feeling whenever I use it that I owe people an "explanation." I don't agree that this should be the case for reasons mentioned below, but... there it is.

The company defines the technology as AI, but there are some important distinctions that set it apart from the way most people probably think about AI. 3/

For one, the vocal models are based on the voices of singers they hired for the purpose – there's no wholesale scraping of the entire Spotify catalog. I don't understand the technicalities, but the way the vocal samples are manipulated is apparently AI.

From a musician's perspective, it's basically like any old virtual instrument: The plugin and all its dependencies are stored locally on your hard-drive, and you don't drain your local power supplier every time you produce a vocal. 4/

And you still have to do all the hard work – you have to write the lyrics, the melody, and perform and manipulate the performance with keyboards, controllers, and an advanced set of parameters. Just like you do with an orchestral sample library.

It's not exactly a sample library, though. Until now, the entire expression range of a sampled violin has, more or less, been limited to the physical recordings of the instrument. 5/

Synthesizer V goes beyond this, and manipulates sound in ways that (I can't explain!). I'm convinced that in a very short time, traditional sampling will be old hat; violins, saxophones and neys will all be "generated with AI" – technologically – whilst still being played and manipulated by the musicians like today.

But will producers ever tell you – the listener? And do you – the listener – think of this as "cheating," or "not real"? 6/

And if so, will you also think of Adele's sad, sampled, soft pianos from 2011 as "cheating"? When is an instrument an instrument? And when isn't it?

Is it okay for a mastering engineer to use a similar, locally stored, "morally defensible" AI tool to get the mix to 80% of its potential, and concentrate on the last 20% – or is it cheating? 7/

I think this kind of "AI" – whatever it is – is in the same place today that the gramophone, microphones, loops & samples, autotune, once were – there's a lot of resistance, prejudice, and misunderstandings. But it's as undeniably a central part of music's future as these other contraptions are to its past.

And terrible dreck and lack of talent will remain the same – Suno sucks bad, and people who for the life of them can't write or produce a decent tune, will still make it sound awful. 8/

A lot of things will change for professional musicians and composers. Revenue sources will dry up. And automatically generated slop stock music will soar. But I don't worry for a second that the new tech will ever replace creative people. Because people will never stop loving singing, playing, composing, arranging and engineering music.

And we will always find ever new and creative ways to use, manipulate and profit from new technology – even ones as scary as this one. 9/

@terjefjelde personally I miss more nuance in the discussion today. AI isn’t new at all, and lot’s of tools have been using artifical Intelligence for years.

LLMs are still quite new, and brings a lot of questionable practices like insane use of resources, uethical use pirated content, steal first ask later (or wait for a trial), capitalistic exploitation of a hyped market and so on. But this is not AI as a whole, there is a big difference of the various players in this field.

@mosgaard Yes, I agree. I suppose there are roughly three main strands of resistance to AI in music:

1. What you mention – a backlash against massive, resource-heavy models driven by mega-capitalism without moral grounding, trained on data where creators are neither informed nor compensated.

2. That it's a dishonest way of making music — that listeners are being misled, and that musicians and engineers, by using AI, are taking shortcuts and handing over the work to machines, 1/

@mosgaard and that they're not really making the music themselves, and that this flattens and marginalizes creativity.

3. That it will take jobs and income away from hardworking people in the music industry.

Point 1: I completely agree it's a real problem that needs to be addressed and regulated. 2/

@mosgaard (where the only politically corrent and generally accepted answer in circulation at the time seemed to be: "Yes, it's possible, but only if you're Kraftwerk")

And right now, you're already seeing some fairly political, almost boilerplate statements, where platforms like Bandcamp and Pond5 exclude AI, but only (in Bandcamp's case) offer vague definitions of what is actually acceptable and what isn't, 4/

@mosgaard or (in Pond5's case) wholesale bans, effectively excluding everyone apart from those with an acoustic guitar and a 4-track recorder.

And then there's that track that was recently excluded from the Swedish charts (a lovely little piece, if you ask me!) because AI was used, and because the artist's identity was… um, “unclear”? 😄

This point is going to become a real battleground — and one I'll be following with great interest. 5/

@mosgaard Point 3 I think is true. But I also think, unfortunately, that it's a shift that can't really be stopped – beyond trying to create new opportunities within a new reality.

Lots of thoughts on this subject, sorry! 😅 6/end

@terjefjelde I agree with so much of what you're saying, and I think it's such an interesting topic.

In developments like these, you will always have those against, those defending and those trying to find a place in the middle. Right now there is very little "in the middle" - at least here in my corner of the fediverse - and very much against everything AI or totally pro AI. And what people mostly mean is LLMs.

@mosgaard Morten, I would like to turn this into a blog post. Is it okay that I include your replies, and post the entire conversation? I'd like to keep your perspectives on nuance. Of course, if you allow it, I'll link to the Mastodon thread, and extend my thanks to you.

It's basically a blog without an audience – this is just for convenience and readability. It's easier to post a link to a blog post on Bluesky than split it into 30 posts!