@mattsheffield

I mean, it's needle drop.

Like, don't get me wrong: there's a composer who makes a couple hundred thousand a year literally listening to this and shitting their pants, but I listened to as much as I could stand (about a minute) and it was just needle drop.

You know - generic, unimaginative, cheap-o background music. Trite, formulaic, expected, sterile.

You play it behind the DeVry University commercial because they refuse to pay for real music.

Needle drop.

@mattsheffield

See also:

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/11/13/no-fake-ai-music-bought-onto-a-minor-chart-is-not-actually-popular/

The AI boosters have been pulling marketing stunts trying to 'make fetch happen' for a while - call me skeptical at this point.

@mattsheffield aside: subjective outputs coming out of genAI has a significantly different context to (supposedly) objective outputs coming out of gen AI.

When there is no need for genAI outputs to be objectively correct (e.g. 2 + 2 = 4 according to defined axioms), the picture looks different.

I don't have an easy way of mentally reconciling the following personally:

1. a human person learning music and organically creating music which necessarily has been influenced by how they learnt music and their lived experiences.

2. a gen-AI tool processing musical inputs and generating music which is necessarily informed by inputs and randomness inherent in the gen-AI tool (for sake of argument lets say authors of the inputs were suitably financially compensated)

3. when some people (I'll put me in that category) listen to music, I don't typically have an appreciation of the background of the artist. I'll also disclose that I haven't been looking for AI music.

Is it as reductive as - a gen-AI tool is less creative because it can only blend inputs? And then its a matter of incremental improvement & expanding inputs until creative equilibrium is reached.

Conversely looking at it from the outside from a purely utilitarian viewpoint, why spend all the effort, resources and externalities into making music when we already have musicians?

@mattsheffield

“Should only beautiful people be allowed to make music?”

Woah, hold your rhetorical horses buddy: What’s this “allowed” business?

Anyone *can* make music, you just open your mouth or grab even the most rudimentary instrument. *Making* music has been an intrinsic part of the human experience (at least) since the dawn of our species.

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