Is it ok to pass off AI as your own work?

[theGecko71]

Totally agree with AI is just another tool like using a Leslie Speaker on a recording. Since the Leslie Speaker doesn't typically get specific credit as a tool used on a recording, should AI? It's really difficult to know where to draw the line for permissible vs. not permissible. There's always been "secret sauce" used on recordings which is never disclosed.

Musicians often like to "credit" the instruments they use, in my experience.

 

[COOPSTER]

So I mistakenly suggested something posted here might have been AI ( and wasn’t ) but it got me thinking. We ( the K-pop house I work for) get a lot of demos from aspiring songwriters. wannabe stars etc and since Suno et al launched, the quality (& quantity) have gone through the roof. Everything is slick in execution, in perfect tune , perfectly quantised and Spotify ready mastered.

So we have a tool to check if we’re listening to AI or human talent and recently on Squiertalk a chap (or girl) posted a song that sounded like a commercial release. BTW said individual claims to have been banned here for using SoundCloud…That said the stuff he (or she) was posting a year ago was nowhere near as good so I ran “her “track through Submithub and voila:

Now its nowhere near 100% accurate but as a control I ran one of my song demos through it ( which uses an AI modified vocal, i.e. me singing but made to sound to like a girl) and it returned this as I’d expect.

So back to the AI poster, it can’t tell whether the singer is AI and the “band” is real or the other way but its definitely not human created and performed . Either way “Pamelas Pants” as she/he/they call themselves are definitely not what they claim to be…

So on a guitar forum is it ok to use AI created songs and say you “played” them? The recent Velvet Sundown furore and Spotify admitting to using “Ghost Artists” to fill out playlists has died down but is it OK on a guitar players forum to pass off AI created songs as your own work?

Now I’ll come clean I use AI very heavily: Synthesiser V and Vocoflex for my song demos, creating guides for IRL singers, even occasionally doing BVs for released tracks. But although its AI singing, the composition is my own i.e. every note and syllable has been created, by me,Syn V simply sings my words at the pitch and tempo I tell it to. E.g.

Recently one of the label execs pointed out my AI created guide vocals sounded a lot better that the actual performance by the singer on an upcoming release: War broke out in the studio and folk almost came to blows until we compromised and double tracked the IRL singer with my AI created vocal and mixed the two. The execs view was to use my AI vocal and then add the real singers “voice print” ( Vocoflex) which TBH sounded a lot better but not my call.

Then we have folk here who will use something like Audimee to create vocals for their original songs. Which I think is totally valid and in a way similar to, what we “pro” songwriters do with our AI singers. But not if Audimee came up with the vocal melody for your words, then surely it wrote that melody, not you?

The real dilemma is when the guitar, bass etc parts are played by AI or the whole song is created by AI and passed off as an original that the poster claims to have performed and composed: Is this something folks are ok with?

No it’s not okay. That said you don’t have to be primitive like me straight into a mic for vocals and line in for guitar. Tele and a dynamic-comp is all I use. Is it good? Well, that’s another discussion. COOP

 

[azureglo]

Wow 8 pages and still going, seems to have hit a nerve. From some of the comments I can see that some folks are not really aware of how good things like Suno are: Try the clip at the end of the post. Now this is an pretty stunning example of a Linkin Park type song, that few here could match. TBH I'm a session pro and even with the best musos I know I'd struggle to do this , to this standard , in less than whole day. Thats before the mixing and mastering.

Now Suno created this in less than 25 seconds. Wrote it, performed it, mixed and mastered it. Play this to most folk and they'll think theyre listening to some kick ass real band with a guitarist who can shred and singer up there with best.

Be honest can you and buddies come close to this on a saturday night in the local bar? Hell Linkin Park dont sound this good live. So arguing about if its any good is moot. It can be as good and in some cases better than IRL bands and the end consumers dont care about real musicians etc.

It the folks who do this stuff and claim they played it I have a beef with ( and so should you). They bought a computer generated product and claim they made it. Which is my point with "pamela", here , and on Strat Talk and Squier Talk and possibly many other places. I'm not bitching about AI because thats pointless. It's here.

Simiilarly "performance & conceptual artists" who create fake bands as an artistic statement ( but keep the streaming revenue nonethless) are just shills latching onto a lucrative side hustle, good luck to them. There is an apocryphal story abouht Jasper Johns dealer of who it was said could put two empty cans of beer in his window and they'd sell. Johns duly created that as a sculpture and of course, much money was made. Or Duchamp signing a urinal as R Mutt and putting it in an art gallery that promply sold for a large amount, its an easy excuse to for fraudsters : I wasnt misleading you, I was creating an artistic concept, yeah right

BTW Modified AI usually means something created by an AI and timestretched, pitch shifted etc- it started life as data from a learning model not someones demo tape. If a whole song comes back with over 75%, its likely that the core of the music youre listening to has been generated by Ai then tweaked to hide its Suno or Udio algorithm tags as this and many other tools can easily determine this. Its fraudsters trying to cover their tracks.

Anyway, listen to this and ask yourself, could I write, records and master a song this in 25 seconds , starting from 15 words on a napkin?

Oh, and listen closely to the newbie who just posted "his" awesome new track in the "My Music" pages before heaping praise on "his incredible skills", chances are your admiration should be directed at Suno development team.

AI is a de facto tool for money making music business now but lets not have it spamming places like TDPRI, we old duffers actually like learning to play things on instruments while we can...

(Music track begins 05:40)

 

[sadfield]

I don't think using AI to create music is like using a Leslie speaker. That is a case of YOU using a tool to shape the sound of your harmonies and melodies.

The current AIs are used by people to plagiarize actual art.

Except AI can be and is used as a tool shape the sound of harmonies and melodies. Neural amp modellers are exactly that. Vocal transforming AI is exactly that.

Vocal melody into a saxophone, but the input source could be any instrument. The melody is still the creation of a human.



Given that 99.9% of the worlds population come with a built in instrument from birth, AI has the potential to put music production into the hands of everyone. That's powerful.

 

[theGecko71]

Wow 8 pages and still going, seems to have hit a nerve. From some of the comments I can see that some folks are not really aware of how good things like Suno are: Try the clip at the end of the post. Now this is an pretty stunning example of a Linkin Park type song, that few here could match. TBH I'm a session pro and even with the best musos I know I'd struggle to do this , to this standard , in less than whole day. Thats before the mixing and mastering.

Now Suno created this in less than 25 seconds. Wrote it, performed it, mixed and mastered it. Play this to most folk and they'll think theyre listening to some kick ass real band with a guitarist who can shred and singer up there with best.

Be honest can you and buddies come close to this on a saturday night in the local bar? Hell Linkin Park dont sound this good live. So arguing about if its any good is moot. It can be as good and in some cases better than IRL bands and the end consumers dont care about real musicians etc.

It the folks who do this stuff and claim they played it I have a beef with ( and so should you). They bought a computer generated product and claim they made it. Which is my point with "pamela", here , and on Strat Talk and Squier Talk and possibly many other places. I'm not bitching about AI because thats pointless. It's here.

Simiilarly "performance & conceptual artists" who create fake bands as an artistic statement ( but keep the streaming revenue nonethless) are just shills latching onto a lucrative side hustle, good luck to them. There is an apocryphal story abouht Jasper Johns dealer of who it was said could put two empty cans of beer in his window and they'd sell. Johns duly created that as a sculpture and of course, much money was made. Or Duchamp signing a urinal as R Mutt and putting it in an art gallery that promply sold for a large amount, its an easy excuse to for fraudsters : I wasnt misleading you, I was creating an artistic concept, yeah right

BTW Modified AI usually means something created by an AI and timestretched, pitch shifted etc- it started life as data from a learning model not someones demo tape. If a whole song comes back with over 75%, its likely that the core of the music youre listening to has been generated by Ai then tweaked to hide its Suno or Udio algorithm tags as this and many other tools can easily determine this. Its fraudsters trying to cover their tracks.

Anyway, listen to this and ask yourself, could I write, records and master a song this in 25 seconds , starting from 15 words on a napkin?

Oh, and listen closely to the newbie who just posted "his" awesome new track in the "My Music" pages before heaping praise on "his incredible skills", chances are your admiration should be directed at Suno development team.

AI is a de facto tool for money making music business now but lets not have it spamming places like TDPRI, we old duffers actually like learning to play things on instruments while we can...

(Music track begins 05:40)

I respectfully disagree. Suno is not "good." It's a plagiarizing algorithm. It did not "write, perform, mix, or master" anything at all. If the "song" reminds one of Linkin Park, that may be because it took bits and pieces from Linkin Park or similar bands! It's not communicating anything to me. I'd rather go listen to Linkin Park perform their own music, even if they aren't as "good" by some measure that I fail to comprehend. And, no, nothing I make will be like this, because we are real people.

 

[theGecko71]

Except AI can be and is used as a tool shape the sound of harmonies and melodies. Neural amp modellers are exactly that. Vocal transforming AI is exactly that.

Vocal melody into a saxophone, but the input source could be any instrument. The melody is still the creation of a human.



Given that 99.9% of the worlds population come with a built in instrument from birth, AI has the potential to put music production into the hands of everyone. That's powerful.

So there one might say that YOU are composing but not performing the music. I'd still rather hear real humans do the performing, though. Mozart composed his symphonies on paper with a piano forte, and then conducted an orchestra to perform that music. Every musician got to add his little bit of humanity to the performance and thus they all communicated the art.

 

[toanhunter]

Wow 8 pages and still going, seems to have hit a nerve. From some of the comments I can see that some folks are not really aware of how good things like Suno are: Try the clip at the end of the post. Now this is an pretty stunning example of a Linkin Park type song, that few here could match. TBH I'm a session pro and even with the best musos I know I'd struggle to do this , to this standard , in less than whole day. Thats before the mixing and mastering.

Now Suno created this in less than 25 seconds. Wrote it, performed it, mixed and mastered it. Play this to most folk and they'll think theyre listening to some kick ass real band with a guitarist who can shred and singer up there with best.

Be honest can you and buddies come close to this on a saturday night in the local bar? Hell Linkin Park dont sound this good live. So arguing about if its any good is moot. It can be as good and in some cases better than IRL bands and the end consumers dont care about real musicians etc.

It the folks who do this stuff and claim they played it I have a beef with ( and so should you). They bought a computer generated product and claim they made it. Which is my point with "pamela", here , and on Strat Talk and Squier Talk and possibly many other places. I'm not bitching about AI because thats pointless. It's here.

Simiilarly "performance & conceptual artists" who create fake bands as an artistic statement ( but keep the streaming revenue nonethless) are just shills latching onto a lucrative side hustle, good luck to them. There is an apocryphal story abouht Jasper Johns dealer of who it was said could put two empty cans of beer in his window and they'd sell. Johns duly created that as a sculpture and of course, much money was made. Or Duchamp signing a urinal as R Mutt and putting it in an art gallery that promply sold for a large amount, its an easy excuse to for fraudsters : I wasnt misleading you, I was creating an artistic concept, yeah right

BTW Modified AI usually means something created by an AI and timestretched, pitch shifted etc- it started life as data from a learning model not someones demo tape. If a whole song comes back with over 75%, its likely that the core of the music youre listening to has been generated by Ai then tweaked to hide its Suno or Udio algorithm tags as this and many other tools can easily determine this. Its fraudsters trying to cover their tracks.

Anyway, listen to this and ask yourself, could I write, records and master a song this in 25 seconds , starting from 15 words on a napkin?

Oh, and listen closely to the newbie who just posted "his" awesome new track in the "My Music" pages before heaping praise on "his incredible skills", chances are your admiration should be directed at Suno development team.

AI is a de facto tool for money making music business now but lets not have it spamming places like TDPRI, we old duffers actually like learning to play things on instruments while we can...

(Music track begins 05:40)

I mix music for a living, the song example you showed is frankly rubbish, I'd reject it, it doesn't matter that the AI can write it faster than a human being, it simply isn't even close to the best of the best human minds, I can't help wondering if there's some kind of gain for you here by promoting it so aggressively, is there an agenda behind what you are saying? you have the right to your opinions but I will say I'm genuinely not that impressed with it.

 

[toanhunter]

Given that 99.9% of the worlds population come with a built in instrument from birth, AI has the potential to put music production into the hands of everyone. That's powerful.

yes... for a cost, it costs money! there's nothing powerful about it, it's just another scam, social media was the same when it came out.

 

[sadfield]

So there one might say that YOU are composing but not performing the music. I'd still rather hear real humans do the performing, though. Mozart composed his symphonies on paper with a piano forte, and then conducted an orchestra to perform that music. Every musician got to add his little bit of humanity to the performance and thus they all communicated the art.

Like any tool, they can be used skillfully, judiciously or not. To my ears that sax tracks the inflection in his voice well, containing the essence of the performance, keeping the vocal quality. Is performance about the feel or the timbre? It's a taste thing, some people love ultra polished, faultlessly produced music. Not me though, I tend to go of bands when they get more studio time with success.

The point really was to show that application of AI in music is a broad spectrum.

There's plenty of existing music that moves people, that was made devoid of collaborative performance.

yes... for a cost, it costs money! there's nothing powerful about it, it's just another scam, social media was the same when it came out.

It costs a hell of a lot less and is more accessible than studio time, hiring mixer engineers, etc. A whiff of protectionism?

 

[theGecko71]

I'm going to add one more thought to this thread and then make myself leave it:

In my view (and I've spent some time thinking about this), the problem is Capitalism. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to market economies whereby people trade goods and services. They have existed for millennia. Markets are not a bad way for people to exchange goods and services. The problem is Capitalism.

Why? I think it's because Capitalism commodifies all value. Everything in Capitalism is a commodity, even YOU. As Capitalism has wormed its way down into our souls, many people only think of themselves as commodities and consumers of commodities. We are human resources to our employers, not people, not thinking-things with souls, just commodities. And that transformation of humanity has perhaps affected the way we view everything and everyone else. If, in a Capitalist culture, "music" is just another commodity, too, then it is true that "consumers" don't care about "real" musicians. Human resources just want to consume "music" as another commodity.

In a market economy, a musician composes music and then trades his or her art for other goods, of course: food, wine, shelter, or cold hard cash. But the musician is trading art as a product of his artistry, not merely as a commodity. In a Capitalist culture, "music" is meaningless as art, and the consumption of it by human resource units is merely a holdover of their pre-resource psychologies, I suppose, or merely a meaningless "pleasure" not meant to communicate anything at all--because there is no meaning in anything except in money and profit.

AI is consuming massive amounts of water and electricity so that the controllers of AI can crush our souls, so that we no longer consider anything, even art, to have any meaning. To them we will consume AI produced music, and AI produced movies, and AI produced novels, and the AI Controllers will have power over us forever. And it won't do them any good, because they have surrendered their humanity to meaninglessness.

 

[toanhunter]

Like any tool, they can be used skillfully, judiciously or not. To my ears that sax tracks the inflection in his voice well, containing the essence of the performance, keeping the vocal quality. Is performance about the feel or the timbre? It's a taste thing, some people love ultra polished, faultlessly produced music. Not me though, I tend to go of bands when they get more studio time with success.

The point really was to show that application of AI in music is a broad spectrum.

There's plenty of existing music that moves people, that was made devoid of collaborative performance.



It costs a hell of a lot less and is more accessible than studio time, hiring mixer engineers, etc. A whiff of protectionism?

not protectionism, it can't compete with a human, like ever, it's no different to AI art, it's not coming up with the next mona lisa is it, it just comes up with pastiche versions of the originals (which is what feeds it in the first place) if it had no human input then it could not come up with anything, it reminds me of a parasite, that's the closest resemblance.

 

[cousinpaul]

I imagine there will be many who, having purchased the app, will simply use it as they will, claiming ownership. Reading through this thread, there seems to be an assumption that Suno et al will sound as good as (or better than) other platforms. Show me AI tracks that are truly awful. That may point to human involvement and possibly some level of skill in play for a pleasing result.

It's been a very interesting thread. Thanks all,
CP

 

[Lou Tencodpees]

I think the real danger of AI's encroachment into art/music is that it'll discourage human artistic pursuit. The attraction will be to the tech, not the art. I'm already at the "what's the point?" precipice, and the current state of music is playing a role in that mindset. I'm a hobbyist who's had a lifelong passion for creating and recording. Something has been sucked out of that passion.

I think its more complex than the AI equation, could be I'm simply tapped out and have completed that life journey. But if a guy spent his life carving little figurines that he felt proud of, then saw hundreds of people churning them out with a 3D printer, chances are good he may pack his carving tools away.
I sense a certain feeling of artistic obsolescence looming.

 

[azureglo]

I imagine there will be many who, having purchased the app, will simply use it as they will, claiming ownership. Reading through this thread, there seems to be an assumption that Suno et al will sound as good as (or better than) other platforms. Show me AI tracks that are truly awful. That may point to human involvement and possibly some level of skill in play for a pleasing result.

It's been a very interesting thread. Thanks all,
CP

And thank you Cousin Paul for coming for the ride.

I think the real danger of AI's encroachment into art/music is that it'll discourage human artistic pursuit. The attraction will be to the tech, not the art. I'm already at the "what's the point?" precipice, and the current state of music is playing a role in that mindset. I'm a hobbyist who's had a lifelong passion for creating and recording. Something has been sucked out of that passion.

I think its more complex than the AI equation, could be I'm simply tapped out and have completed that life journey. But if a guy spent his life carving little figurines that he felt proud of, then saw hundreds of people churning them out with a 3D printer, chances are good he may pack his carving tools away.
I sense a certain feeling of artistic obsolescence looming.

Lots of us feel that way, remember that playing an instrument has many, many benefits beyond financial gain so don’t give up just yet. Think of it like food, McDonalds may rule the restaurant sector but folk still grow organic produce and enjoy it. Hopefully communities like this will still be a safe haven for like minded souls.

 

[sadfield]

not protectionism, it can't compete with a human, like ever, it's no different to AI art, it's not coming up with the next mona lisa is it, it just comes up with pastiche versions of the originals (which is what feeds it in the first place) if it had no human input then it could not come up with anything, it reminds me of a parasite, that's the closest resemblance.

But I wasn't talking about automatic song generation. I was talking about AI tools that allow users to convert singing (or any other source) into other instruments, that have some resemblance to a half decent recordings. That is powerful and hands song creation and production to anyone that can create and hum/sing a melody.

 

[hopdybob]

Soon that may change with AGI.

and that AGI is????

 

[azureglo]

and that AGI is????

Something that is slighly more frightening than my ex who put Hagelslag on everything including salads. Go on give yourself a scare,

AGI

 

[uriah1]

I only used cliff notes once.
It was a shakespeare issue as I recall.

 

[hopdybob]

Something that is slighly more frightening than my ex who put Hagelslag on everything including salads. Go on give yourself a scare,

AGI

hagelslag puur bij aardbeien of banaan en op roggebrood

 

[Geoff738]

No. But do the actual creators who the AI stole from get compensated. And if so, how.

Cheers,
Geoff