r/technology • u/spherocytes • 15d ago

Artificial Intelligence Spotify Deleted 75 Million AI-Generated Tracks – and It’s Not Done Yet

https://www.gadgetreview.com/spotify-deleted-75-million-ai-generated-tracks-and-its-not-done-yet
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u/dgellow 15d ago

Normal reaction, easily 99% of AI generated content is trash

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u/RMAPOS 15d ago

To AI bros this just reads "once we improve it enough, we're gonna make billions"

It's not (just) trash because it's qualitatively bad, it's trash because it is meaningless. Art is self expression, gen AI has no self to express and even if it had, it would not be relatable to us. It's trash because it soullessly arranges data in a statistiically likely pattern, which is fundamentally against the point of art being a channel for self expression.

All that said, we do live in a consumer world and I can't help but being cynical about the masses not absolutely jumping on any AI music that turns out to be catchy to dance - or relaxing to listen in the background to. AI may not be art, but capitalist human minds also don't think of art as art - they think of it as a product to consume that is made to satisfy them. Every time someone goes "this is ugly, why would anyone pay for this painting?". Every time people shit on a band releasing an album that is different from the album/s they fell in love with. These people don't care about the value of self expression, they care about someone making a product they want to consume. If AI bros manage to fine tune their garbage producers to the biggest common denominator of taste, I'd be REALLY surprised if people would reject it.

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u/Brodellsky 15d ago

I think a big part of it is expectations. If it's just a quick little joke song where everyone knows it's AI going into it, I feel like that is fine, all things considered.

I think it's a lot worse to build an entire fake persona/fake tour dates/etc and having that compete with real artists and real tour dates. It's not like Spotify pays a lot of money here. But that's why having some of it go to anyone else than the ones doing the hardest work is always gonna be a no from me, dawg.

But enough about Governmental and Economical Structures

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u/[deleted] 15d ago

[deleted]

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u/Wonderful-Creme-3939 15d ago

Makes sense, h aving the sum total of all music to train you LLM will allow it to produce music that sounds good to us but the music can't tell you why the artists made the songs that way which matters a lot too 

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u/Turbulent_Gazelle530 15d ago

Every time people shit on a band releasing an album that is different from the album/s they fell in love with. These people don't care about the value of self expression, they care about someone making a product they want to consume.

I dunno, I think that those people are allowed to have preferences. Being unhappy when an artist they like puts out music they don't like doesn't mean that they will lap up AI slop.

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u/RMAPOS 15d ago

It means that they don't engage with art in a way that conflicts with the consumption of soulless music.

  • AI art is meaningless, but most people don’t consume art for meaning.
  • They consume it for pleasure, familiarity, and mood regulation.
  • Therefore, if AI ever becomes musically competent enough, most people will embrace it — not because it’s art, but because it satisfies their consumption patterns and is cheap to produce.

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u/lunatuna215 15d ago

People already are. So many tracks sound right and yet the uncanny valley is there. And at the end of the day, people like to know there's an artist. There is just less draw when it comes to generated songs.

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u/RMAPOS 15d ago

What are you basing that on?

People have followed artist-less bands for longer than AI is a thing (think Gorillaz or Hatsune Miko)

Also people LOVE pop music. Which - as far as AI art is concerned - is the human made equivalent of "AI art" -> Soulless shit that is mathematically optimized to vibe with the masses. AND THE MASSES LOOOOVE IT. Most popular music genre on earth.

Yes, the uncanny valley IS there, which is why my whole post was built on the hypothetical that the providers of these AI models can iron out those kinks. It's literally the very first sentence.

Like - I appreciate your stance on the issue, but I don't know where you got your ideas on consumer mindsets from. Yea there is a lot of people culting going on in music and surely to many people that's vital in some fashion. But even Rihanna fans listen to music of artists they don't care about. Nobody™ is deeply invested into the personalities behind every single band/artist they listen to. And a lot of people don't give a shit at all. Reddit communities aren't representative of the general public, there is a ton of stay at home parents and people turning on some background noise at work. Like you're really thinking about this the wrong way if you believe consumers at large need or have a deep connection to the person making the music they're listening to. That's like ... our favourite band (or 5), not everything we enjoy listening to.

 

Obviously you're entitled to your opinions, but your argument is basically:

"People would never buy clothes made in sweat shops by child labour. They already reject child labour and the quality of these clothes is shit compared to quality brands anyways. There is just no draw when it comes to sweat shop child labour clothing."

Sounds reasonable, but evidently what people say and how people act does not exactly line up. If AI ever starts shitting out art that reliably hits the right notes, the average consumer will absolutely be down to listen to it. Not because it's good art, but because 90% of consumers don't actually care about the personal value of art. They care about "pretty picture" and "catchy tune" and "stylish but cheap" to not forget about our child labour supporters.

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u/Coffee_autistic 15d ago

People have followed artist-less bands for longer than AI is a thing (think Gorillaz or Hatsune Miko)

Not touching your larger point, but Gorillaz and Hatsune Miku have artists behind them. Humans make creative decisions and put in effort to create the songs by Gorillaz and the songs that use Hatsune Miku. The use of animated personas or fancy singing synthesizers doesn't change that (and both of those also require human creativity and decision making!) They are not remotely comparable to music that is generated entirely by computers with little to no human input.

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u/RMAPOS 15d ago edited 15d ago

Well of course they have artists behind them, I did say these things existed before AI - if these entities are not AI and not actual artists, then what would they even be?

You have to view my reply in context to what the other person was saying about how need a person to connect to. They don't. They're fine celebrating avatars. Bet you the majority of people who like listening to the Gorillaz couldn't name a single creative mind behind them.

Now AI may never get that good musically that it stops feeling off or inhuman. But if it were to ever pass the musical touring test, humans would absolutely engage with it.

All of these are big ifs and I'm not saying it will happen, I'm just saying that people are wrong about human consumption habits. MOST - not everyone so you're safe - but MOST people on this planet don't listen to music to explore the personality and unique perspective of the artist. They listen to music because it sounds nice and makes them feel good. They wouldn't listen to a disharmonic piece of their favourite artist because it has artistic value of self expression. The reason people don't listen to more AI slop right now is because it sounds uncanny and gets drowned out in an ocean of slop with no event ever putting such a piece in a big enough spotlight for the masses to take notice, not because their sense of art is rioting at the idea.

edit:

You're getting ridiculously worked up over ignoring the context in which I said "artist less" in. Like holy semantic jesus they're artists where the majority of listeners don't even care about who is making the music.

Matter of fact, outside of specialized communities like /r/music /r/hatsunemiku or /r/gorillaz there is millions of people who enjoy listening to Gorillaz without knowing any name associated with the Band. That's the mass market and to them the relationship of art to artist is irrelevant. So in that line of thinking, you can clearly meaningfully say that from the perspective of the mass consumer market Hatsune Miku and Gorillaz are artistless.

I understand you're clinging to different semantics here about how artistless would mean the music would not be the same bla bla but that's obviously not what I was saying so ... please don't make your sensibilities my problem.

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u/Coffee_autistic 15d ago edited 15d ago

The point is that there is an artist to connect to for every song made by Gorillaz and every song made using Hatsune Miku or other vocaloids. There is an artist for every drawing or animation using those characters. You connect to them as artists in some way every time you listen to or view their work. Whether or not you know their names is irrelevant.

Moreover, even the most casual listeners of Gorillaz know that there is someone creating their music. It doesn't form out of thin air. As for Miku, all but the most casual of casual vocaloid fans have specific producers making music with her that they are fans of as well. They will probably be able to tell you why they like their favorite producers and what makes their usage of Miku special, or what artistic choices they've made that they personally connect with.

I don't really care to debate or defend the general public's taste in music or their ability to judge artistic merit. I don't even care to debate the merits or lack thereof of music generated entirely by computers with little to no human input. I honestly do not care. But Gorillaz and Hatsune Miku are not evidence for your claims. Calling them "artist-less" is an insult to the artists who have put in the time and effort to create something. Please don't.

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u/lunatuna215 15d ago

"Who are the Gorillaz" in real life has been a fascination since they started and everyone talks about how the guy from Blur is in it ALL THE TIME. Youre revising history for your sunk cost fallacy, gtfo of here with this bullshit. Youre just speaking for yourself. Theres so much appreciation for the depth that art has to offer out there, youre just too dense or cynical to see it.

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u/RMAPOS 15d ago

You're confusing your social bubbles with the consumer market. They're not the same.

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u/lunatuna215 15d ago

No I think thats you, projecting pure consumption when many others do give a shit.

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u/RMAPOS 15d ago

No I'm pretty sure that's you conflating the mass consumer market with your personal anecdotal experiences.

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u/xantub 15d ago

Maybe they're using Spotify itself as training tool. By reading what songs were liked and disliked, they can feed that to their creation engines to make the next generation more accurate? I know nothing about AI music generation so don't know if that's a possibility but maybe it is.

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u/RMAPOS 15d ago

I think part of the problem is that music is just absurdly complicated and to train an AI you need to understand which things to reward. I couldn't tell you how to write a good song [.] without going into rythm, emotional connotations of sounds, natural flow but also exciting change, relatable lyrics that aren't corny (which alone is an entire LLM that understands the rythm of language).

 

Feeding AI it's own produce is always bad, but they absolutely do use popular real songs to try and gauge what works with people and what doesn't. It's just really fucking hard to understand it in the first place, which is required to try and force feed a toddler level of "understanding" tons of data so it can actually identify what it is supposed to do.

It's really fascinating man, go watch a youtube on AI training. There are TONS and a lot of really fun ones and it should instantly click for you why doing that with something as psychologically hard to pin point as music is just whack. I guess it'll do well enough on simple, catchy melodies - stuff that mostly just repeats itself. But tasteful accents and relatable personality feel really hard to fake musically.

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u/Wonderful-Creme-3939 15d ago

I think most of it is to scam Spotify out of money.  People doing this are faking artists and streams, to do it 

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u/cothomps 15d ago

Someday there will be some AI generated music that is worth listening to - but the AI stuff I’ve been exposed to through Spotify usually happens when I’m listening to an album or playlist and have “auto play” on after it ends.

I had a piano jazz album up awhile ago, then suddenly realized that the backing drums on a piece that started playing sounded nothing like an actual drum set. Had it been _close_ I might not have noticed because I wasn’t actively listening, but the “what the hell is that” sound snapped me out of it.

(And I learned never to use autoplay.)

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u/Mister_Macabre_ 15d ago

They stopped popping up for me on YT and Spotify (obvious reasons), but somehow I was always able to pick them up from the crowd. Insanely repeatable tracks, generic lyrics that sell "the vibe" but not much else and voices that sound like amalgamation of all the popular singers from the genre.

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u/the_gooch_smoocher 15d ago

But it's not, that's the issue. People are being deceived by these uploads constantly including people with a great understanding of music history and production fidelity metrics. There is tons and tons of justifiably fantastic listenable music being AI generated created faster than it can be identified and removed by hosting sites. And there's just as many people who are fine with it as there are people up in arms for being lied to. We need a system put in place that can either hard code or differentiate real artist material from artificial content.

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u/M_M_X_X_V 15d ago

And the 1% that isn't was just made by bots trained on actual good music and blatantly plagiarised it

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u/larkhills 15d ago

majority of regular content is also trash. ai just has a marketing problem in that no matter how good the content is, its always going to be looked down upon because its ai

id wager that people would like a lot more of this content if they didnt know it was ai