"I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes"

Problem is most pop music has already sounded like its made by robots for years

I am a graphic designer and people doesn't want to hire a real graphic designer because AI make a "nice logo" for free in 1 minute. I think the problem is not AI, is people want things fast and cheap, not value imagination, good taste, long years of study and talent.

as a musician I think of what Tony soprano said once - "It's good to be in something from the ground floor, and I came too late for that, I know. But lately I've been getting a feeling that I came at the end. The best is over"

"And the Grammy for best AI prompt goes to...."

Makes me proud to be a horrible saxophone player. No respectable AI would ever dare to reproduce my crap!

The best thought on AI to date "If the "composer" didn't want to bother composing a song and used AI, why would I care to listen to it either?"

Like when Michael Jackson would say leave the breaths in, I want to hear the human parts whether they be slightly out of time or tune. It’s what makes music real.

This is from Orwell's 1984, published in 1949: "The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound." Prophetic...

Rick, you need to start a "What Makes This Song Fake" series.

Initially as a 75 year old pro musician since '63, I am SO glad I lived through this "golden age" of music/sonics/gear/sound production. I can't really imagine the world not too far ahead......

Nothing can replace the interaction an audience has with live musicians. It is a powerful force that AI can never replace. So there’s still hope…

"Go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something." - Kurt Vonnegut

AI won't stop me playing and recording music. Most of us have no audience and no money. It doesn't stop us being creative. We have to do it. The creative process means more to us.

Going back to the bed and putting the covers over my head. 64 year-old songwriter here realizing it's time to retire. Truly disturbing.

My biggest problem with AI is that the people who made the music (books, paintings, etc.) are not being compensated in any way for their work being used by a company who is making money off of their programs. Sam Altman has said that LLMs can't work if they soak up as much info as they can, copyrighted or not. To that I say...so? If you're going to use someone's copyrighted IP to make money, the person who owns the IP deserves compensation.

hey Rick, lead audio designer from Ubisoft here (and a lifelong musician), I can also hear what your kids hear. The reason you probably don't pick up on it is because you haven't worked with text-to-speech voice synthesis that much. You can clearly hear the artifacts in the vocals (especially if you listen to the reverberation, those tend to get modulated everywhere as the algorithm doesn't pick up the reverb tails well), and the overall low-end / mid-end saturation on all of the AI generated songs, in its current iteration it's really-really similar, like a tictactoe game - very basic. They all sound as if there was heavy parallel compression on them between 200-600Hz, and there's never a lot of high end. If you focus on more the overall frequency spectrum of a song (load them up in a DAW and get a frequency analyser on them, they all have almost the same curve) and how aesthetically and dynamically similar they all are from a mixing point of view, I'm sure you'll recognize these generated songs very quickly.

"...and the Grammy goes to Studio AI for their stellar hit love song, "I will find you!" sung by Liam N." [Canned applause]

Jim Morrison predicted this when he talked about the future of music.

I can hear it. I am a pianist. To me it's like a slightly flat piano in tune with itself, even the voices, with a sustain pedal held throughout. Articulation, clarity, and nuance are lost. They may be able to change it but they would likely have to revise their programming. Great show!

the other day I was at a diner and a waitress took my order ... two eggs scrambled, rye toast ... light butter, coffee, black no sugar ... home fries lightly crispy .... I'm an incredible cook ....

I'm an Art teacher in Spain and the other day, one good student who liked playing the guitar told me he is not interested in music anymore because, according to him, the majority of the people will accept this fake music and musicians won't find any job in the near future. I tryed to persuade him that a few percentatge of people (but milions around the world anyway) will enjoy living music and paying for it forever. I hope I was right...

Scary times ahead. The scariest times will be when no one can tell the difference. The worst thing that technology is doing(IMHO) and has done is making the "art" of creating music way too easy. Too many apps, AI, recording software etc. The REAL creators of music will be lumped in with all the non creators, ending careers and losing the soul and art of real songwriting, performing.

Can’t wait for AI to tell another AI that” It needs more cowbell!!”

I’m not going to stop creating music, ever.

It’s the aliasing. You can hear the aliasing in AI music/vocals. It sounds like a slight time-stretch or bit reduction.

For a lot of us in the industry, music began to lose a lot of its inherent human touch and quality with the beginning of the digital era.

The reason it’s so hard to tell the difference in some songs is because of all the vocal manipulation we’re already hearing with most singers. We’re is the pure vocal talent with a little delay and echo.

The nail-in-the-coffin of my playing-out-days was standing on stage - looking out at the glowing faces of people who were staring at their phones instead of watching the band. For 90% of the people who consume music (not this group obviously) they're not even going to get through a whole song before scrolling to something else. Those people deserve the crap that AI is going to give them. I'm a recording/mixing hobbyist now. I spend hundreds of hours writing and mixing songs that no one will ever hear ....and I love it. It just feels good to be creative...audience or no audience.

"I wrote a song using AI", that's probably the most delusional/annoying part of this. They really think they wrote those songs. It's this new wave of "AI artists".

What's going to happen, over a long period of time, is that AI will replace musicians. People will create their own stuff for their own playlists, but after years of AI being identical to a real human voice, REAL PEOPLE will be the cool thing. And when someone hears your music and asks you for the prompt, you'll reply "No, it's a real person".

A whole new level to the "Turung test" experiment/scenerio.

This will force artists to stop using autotune in order to stand out.

Layla needs to release an AI ear training course.

There is a beacon of hope. This channel and channels like Drumeo showing people what it's like to make music and make it great. The beauty of how changing one little thing can completely change the feel of a song.

I've always been strongly critical of autotune and all other technologies made to "correct" singers' voices. The imperfections in our voice have a unique quality, a real kind of beauty that shouldn't be tampered with. And if a singer depends on autotune to sound decent then they shouldn't be singing in the first place, they either lack effort or talent (or both).

At 61 years old, I have worked in IT for almost 40 years. AI terrifies me. I am also a musician/songwriter. I work with people in my field who think that AI is amazing, wonderful, can't wait to use it fully in production. Why? It makes their work easier. This is what makes me cringe. I use Siri, I use Alexa. So, I guess I have to admit that I use AI even in those fledgling ways. But, now that I have heard that Apple wants to fully embrace AI in their upcoming OS, I am not sure if I will even upgrade. We already have students writing their thesis papers with AI. We already have "so called" songwriters writing their "music" with AI. Its at work in our daily lives in hospitals, government. Why are we so excited to give up our creative selves, to give up every ounce of self worth, every ounce of pain and memory that it takes sometimes to write something to just sit back and say to hell with it...AI...you just do it all for me? Why are we just dying to be lazy and lethargic? Why don't we want to work for anything anymore? Why are very smart people excited about it all and not even looking at the danger of it? I can think of so many sci-fi things that have warned us. And we forget that so many of those sci-fi things that we have seen over the years have actually come to be. But, no. We think we know better, don't we? We think we are smarter than what we create. This is a tragic step. I hate it.

The reason we (At least today) recognize AI is that it sounds as "tinny" fake as the auto-tune stuff that's coming out of the major music labels. The voices are already so manufactured that *no one* sounds natural.

The joy that making music brings us is likely the only thing that will sustain the ‘real thing’.

The most disturbing thing is that Carolina-o does sound like it has real emotion to it. I can imagine hearing that at some small club in Nashville and thinking "That's good, I want to hear the rest of her music" I am totally taken in by it

"You got baggage, I got room" is a beautiful line as well

Most people aren’t making music anymore. They are making content.

I hope there is a label and a filter and a disclaimer required for all AI soon. That we we can choose.

We should’ve known that once computers and DAWs became the main way of making the actual music, that computers would start singing the lyrics as well.

Heard this from a friend the other day: "AI was supposed to help us with the boring and unpleasant mundane tasks so that we have more time to be creative and compose music, draw, etc. but the first thing it took from us was art. So now AI draws and makes music and we will have to keep doing the unpleasant stuff". Alas, truer words have never been spoken.

Music industry got so obsessed by monetizing recorded music that everyone forgot what music was in the first place: An interactive performance of shared human cultural experience. This form of music will always exist and AI will not replace it anytime soon. The same as it will not replace other art, only the digitally reproducible product, not the work and the performance of the art itself. AI as it's currently done is only good enough to create rather generic unoriginal permutations of stuff that already has been done hundreds of times before. It can only imitate human interaction but it will not be able to perform human interaction unless we give it a sensory body. Which might happen one day, but then I'd think monetizing robots on doing actual useful stuff, like household chores, medical applications etc. might be worth a lot more and once the novelty wears off the human error will be praised again.

I'm glad I listen to the older stuff from the pop/rock scene and Jazz/Blues. Keeps me sane and I don't have to worry about AI.

"You got baggage, I got room" Damn, AI came up with a pretty banger line actually

Live performances, improv, and authenticity are going to be what will make a musician stand out

I am a photographer that photographs people. I post a lot of work on Flickr. There is now a lot of AI imagery on Flickr created by non-photographers of non-people. The images sometimes look pretty good, but they are slightly unrealistic. They have gotten noticeably better in the last year or so. Anyway, this is happening in all of the arts, not just music. I definitely feel your pain.

It is in the voice. I had this specific AI basically write me a Taylor Swift song and my wife, who is not musical, described the vocals thusly "It sounds like they are combining a handful of voices to get an 'average' of a female voice". I was like YES, that's it. Also I had it write me a prog rock song. What it gave me blew my mind. The lyrics, while in spots were totally lame, were also BRILLIANT in other spots. The music was like, System of a Down/Tool/RUSH and when I had it close out the song with a minute of instrumental music… it went balls-out Dream Theater, complete with Petrucci-esque guitar solo. In a year or so record companies won't need artists for ANYTHING anymore. They'll just need some puppets to "Milli Vanilli" a tour.

Congratulations, Rick. I'm 69 years old, an amateur musician and user of DAWs, and I've always loved technology. However, your video made all of us think even more about the dystopian consequences of IA than we already did.

In the 1950's we outsourced reproducing timbre to tape machines. In the 1960's we outsourced projection to amplifiers and location to reverb effects. In the 1970's we outsourced rhythm and pulse to electronic circuits. In the 1980's we outsourced drumming to drum machines and recall to digital discs. In the 1990's we outsourced being in tune to Autotune and recalling mixes to DAWs and computers. In the 2000's we outsourced field recording to sampler packages and creating strong performances to looping tech. In the 2010's we outsourced high performance orchestral, vocal and instrumental performance to sophisticated samplers. In the 2020's we outsourced musical performance, skill, accuracy, versatility and taste; This year we outsource composition and bypass the need for any meaningful human involvement in music making whatsoever. "Music is its own reward" - Neil Finn

Support your artists, big or small. This is the time to show your support, a like, a comment, merch, live shows...do what you can to support artists

Nothing will ever replace a real life concert experience

As Gillian Welch wrote: "Everything is free now"

The scary part isn't how it sounds now, it is a brand new technology. The scary part is how quickly it will develop and improve. Give it a few years and it will be incredibly hard to tell them apart from the real thing.

"Welcome to the club." Say the photographers, illustrators, writers and researchers.

For me, the Suno songs are easier to recognize the AI vocals on (for now), but the Udio vocals are a bit harder. It's a bit harder still when you're using a mic to play the song for us for this video, instead of us listening directly from the computer, like your kids are doing, but you definitely hit the nail on the head, that it's only going to get better & better, and soon, very few people will be able to recognize an AI generated track & vocals.

I can tell by the distinct artefacting. They're most obvious on long vowels. On previous versions you could clearly hear it in the pitch bends, but listening to these examples, that has greatly improved.

That Jacob Collier gag is one of the most brutal takedowns in the history of the channel! 😂

I have to confess. I tossed on Neil Young Live Rust and cranked it up on Powderfinger. Terrible singer, instruments barely in tune, no idea tempo, total garage jamming - and I got chills and a few tears came to my eyes. It’s been a long time since recorded music hit me like that. I miss that sound in my life.

I noticed a few things about the AI-generated songs that might explain why they sound different to me: Reverb and Digital Harmony: The female vocals seem to have an excessive amount of reverb and a digital harmony that feels too precise. It’s something that can be achieved by humans using a DAW, but it’s unlikely to occur naturally when singing. 8-bit Interpolation: There’s a subtle feeling like the vocals are interpolated from an 8-bit track. It’s hard to describe, but it gives a slightly artificial vibe... like the vocals don't sound 8-bit... but rather they are missing SOMETHING? Audio Filtering: I detect a faint hiss that seems like there was more and it has been removed, resulting in an unnaturally clean but still has remnants of a hissing sound. It reminds me of poorly recorded audio that has been filtered to sound like it was perfectly recorded in a silent sound booth - but sounds just a bit off. It's also then enhanced with this always the same average over-the-top reverb and harmonization... it's like taking crap black and white photos and "fixing them" by pushing contrast. it doesn't really make it better it just "hides" the flaws without adding anything. I’m not sure if I’m right about this, as I don’t have the musical ear/expertise to be certain. These are just my impressions, and I might be overthinking what I’m hearing. Ha! Great video - I rarely watch youtube videos from start to finish - this one though was riviting.

I tried to discern the "echo" that Lela mentioned hearing. I couldn't hear it on your KZfaq video, so I visited the uDio website. Immediately, track after track, that "echo" sound became so apparent. If you hadn't pointed it out, I'm not sure if I would have noticed it. However, once I heard it, I couldn't ignore it. It just continued to resonate throughout the music.

As an old old (now retired) engineer, I spent much of my career trying to persuade people that "Just because the technology exists, you don't have to use it."

The beauty of it is, as a musician, I make music for myself, I enjoy the process and satisfaction of creating what I like. If other people like it, thats a bonus. AI may create a destination, but will never replace the journey.

Rick, I’ve been waiting for you to talk about Ai music! I was hoping, you’d generate some and break down their chords or melodic pattern! I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on that. I made a playlist for my daughter’s baptism party and it is all Ai music - with personal stories, names, even the date of the baptism. They were all within the songs. I let the playlist play in the background and no one knew it was all Ai. Although some were wondering why some of the songs mentioned my daughter’s name. 😂

the cool thing about this is that you wont have to stress too much about producing a song. Once you have the melody, lyrics, you can ask AI to produce it for you and you crank out a fully produced song in a day. Kind of cool for people who enjoy the playing aspect and not so much the audio editing/production.

Hey Rick. I'm a sound engineer and a couple of months ago a client brought me his background vocals made by AI. They were different "characters" male and female. Yet on all of them there was a frequency stood out in all of them that added up in the sum of all backgrounds and made it sound horrible. Your son is on to something. Incredible hearing that kid.

I was born in the late '80s, loved technology all my life, first gen to grow up on the internet, in one year the assault tech is making on creative workers has turned me off of looking forward to the future and realizing that no, we're actually going to see some of the most dystopian predictions come to pass, because this tech is all in the hands of sociopathic, predatory companies with no vision for anything but the next fiscal quarter. I am so disappointed that somehow all the potential came to fucking this.

I had a large (9 peice) cover band in the 90's in which we had a stage show run entirely on computer playing out some of the backing tracks via MIDI alongside a click track. Not exactly the same thing but boy did it work well! Our music was always tight and spot on. Later I recorded them onto mini disk. The audience never seemed to mind, what mattered was the end result. It just has to sound good as well as sound like the original. It couldnt do the hard work of creating anything of course.

I'll tell you right now. It's not the echo in the voice. It's the way they deliver the lines. They have non-standard patterns in the meter of the lyrics that are sung. With sometimes a digital voice that escapes older folks. If I put the right prompt in for instrumentals, I CANNOT tell the difference.

For the first time, Im happy to be 75. Why, you ask? Because I was fortunate enough to live through a time where great music was composed by genius’s of my time. May I say, Lennon, Dylan, Page, at the very least? Im so sorry for my great grandchildren musical future. But I have left my playlist and encourage them to listen always. Long Live Rock n Roll! 😊

I hear it now, but the thing is, that's what I hear in every major top 40 production vocal that's not AI as well.

I couldn’t recognise that thing as easy as your kids. Such an incredible gift they have.

I can hear it too. I've been messing around and trying to create all kinds of different music to see where the limits are and how I can recognize it. The vocals all have a bit of a pitch corrected sound to it combined with very faint reverb that doesn't match any other instruments. The music itself almost always lacks direction, same with the lyrics. Sometimes it will add little flourishes on the lead or vocals but it does this without a reason. That all and the fact that it's all compressed to death makes it easier to recognize it than you might think it is. I give it a year until we can't hear the difference but I do hope that there will be laws for this stuff in the near future.

This is why it's so important for people to get involved in making music themselves; they need to connect with that part of their humanity. As a school music teacher, I hope people continue to see the value in kids singing and playing instruments rather than simply being consumers.

My daughter is talented, hard-working, and brilliantly creative, with the soul of an artist. She's wanted to pursue fine arts as a career since she was a small child. She's received nothing but encouragement from teachers and mentors and even some patrons. Now that the time has come to decide what to do after highschool, though, she sees no viable future for herself in art. She'll still create art, but her post-secondary studies and career won't really be in an artistic field. My heart really goes out to our world's artists, whether they be visual artists, musicians/ composers/producers, dancers, poets/writers, performance artists or others. Given the consistent and prominent role of artists in social change, protest, and revolution, I worry about the vacuum left in their wake.

When I listen closely to the vocals it sounds like to me that everything is perfectly on time to the point where the singer jumps notes exactly on the beat or has a linear perfect glissando. It’s very subtle and I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference without trying.

I describe the echo as the sound cylons made in the old battlestar galactica. It's a digital almost rattle with some modulation. I hear it too.

Rick, you briefly touched on a very important aspect of this trend: Over the last decade (or more), human voices have been so processed, so manipulated, so quantized, that producers have trained our ears to accept what sounds like computer-generated music. Now, computers are trying to emulate voices/instruments, so our ears are already accepting of it. Auto-tune is horrible, but everywhere. AI music is the aural equivalent of "plant-based meat".

I take photos. The exact same conversation is going on in my community. At first everyone can spot AI. Then it tricks half the people. Then it gets to the level where it fools 95%. Mission accomplished. There is no stopping it. If you are a creative in any sphere, there is someone who has tasked an AI program with "learning your craft" with the end goal of replacing you.

They can hear the reverb in the voice. There’s no human warmth

AI can never take music from me.

It's what we have privileged in our post-rock, autotuned, multiband compressed, loudness-warring pop music world. Until AI dropped we were already sounding more and more machine-tooled, and what we didn't count on was the fact that we were just making it easier for AI to imitate us. It's actually harder for AI to imitate stuff that ISN'T beat corrected, autotuned, compressed to a fair thee well.

Rick… I’ve been a VO guy for nearly 40 years, my bread and butter being corporate training courses, instructional videos and HR tutorials for new hires. I thought I could make it to 70 yrs old while still working in the studio. Ai came too quickly, and I‘ve now lost a couple of clients I’ve worked with for 30 years… that just called and said “bye”, we’ve been told by corporate that Ai is “good enough now” that they can stop paying VO people. Those 2 contracts were worth around 50k. I have not been able to find a way to replace that income, and I’m freakin’ hurting! Same goes for my friends & colleagues who work in fashion/commercial photography/videography. These greedy companies no longer need a model, a shooter, grips, lighting, wardrobe help, location scouts, and more… all because Ai can create a more realistic human image than ever before. When we allow computers to supplant us as creators of art, who do we become??

In the early eighties, I remember being in a studio and it was the first time I came across the LinnDrum and the Fairlight. Initially, the use of the Linn sounded so mechanical and robotic to me but ten years later listening to it, very much less so. I still like some of the Fairlight sounds even though I’m told by people who ‘hear’ after reading specs that, “They’re only eight bit!” Of course implying how could they sound good?

After using udio for a few months I can notice if its ai, there's just something about the reverb you will start noticing after listening for a few hours. I also avoid letting it make its own lyrics because there's two words it works into almost every song ECHOS and NEON.

I hate this is happening, HATE IT!! I’m not a musician, just a lover of music and I’m in awe of musicians! The dedication to learn an instrument is inspiring and I admire anyone who learns an instrument and I am moved to tears sometimes by the masters!

Saddest thing i´ve ever seen, it´s like a nightmare I didn´t even imagine coming 15 years ago, when I was obsessed with music.

Ok, ya got me in the intro. I was like "yup...thats clearly AI.... oh wait..." :D

The reason you known it's ai because for some reason, ai cant have 1 voice singing for some reason. They always have a backing harmony playing at the same time.

Who would have guessed that opposable thumbs would get us in so much trouble. We're rendering ourselves obsolete and no one knows where the off switch is.

I firmly believe this is the best moment for us musicians to remind people the power of live music. We sure had a good time earning some money through selling our cds, or even streaming royalties but, for better or for worse we’re all going back to what it used to be: getting paid to let an audience hear, connect, let loose and feel live music. AI has been changing the world a while ago and it ain’t stopping and it ain’t gonna feel sorry for anyone… it’s better to get ahead of the curve, learn how you can use it creatively too and maybe even make some money while at it too, why not?

I am 39 and I can hear it too. I can instantly tell all the commercials written in AI now as well from the voice and writing style. Many commercials in the fake voice of famous actors now.

You're completely right. It will get better, unrecognizable. It is the beginning of the end for musicians unless something drastic happens. What? Nothing.

I predict a massive split in the industry coming soon: A whole non-digital, non AI movement.

I spent some time with Udio when it first came out, and actually turned out a handful of tracks that I ended up really liking. In fact, to the point where I found I was listening to those almost more often than other stuff. And it reminded me of something someone said a little while ago: If people are saying they are lonely now wait until everyone has their own music generated specifically for them that no-one else knows, and the common language of shared music disappears. Strange times.

This reminds me of a phenomena in gaming. Over the last few years there’s a category called TAS (tool-assisted speedrunning) where gamers use computers to amplify their gaming (think split section reaction timing for racing games). But the gaming community keeps this as a separate category from human only gaming. It will be hard to enforce with the flood of content but maybe something like this is a solution. The line has already been blurred with autotune and other production tools but (maybe) we can embrace AI in its own categories and have other AI-free categories.

a couple of months ago, most of the music I listened to was from techno DJ's on twitch, but after I heard "It Started To Sing" I started tinkering with Suno and now what I mostly listen to is music that I summoned and customized myself. Mostly Halloween songs about The Devil, which no real musician would specialize in. So I'm listening to a lot more songs with lyrics than before AI. We're headed for a completely personalized entertainment world very soon.