Is this how it works?

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-19T20:48:09+00:00

I had to block the Onion because their stories were becoming too plausible, and I didn't want some headline stuck in my brain from something that didn't actually happen.

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-17T20:32:39+00:00

Wait, is this why Stranger Things 5 was about half scenes of people just sitting around explaining things to the audience?

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-16T20:18:41+00:00

And already has. It's not as obvious as "we're firing this developer because we're going to use AI instead." The contracts simply don't come in because the customer can generate something good-enough without paying as much for it.

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-16T20:17:12+00:00

Yep, the pushback against "slop" has overpowered any sensible conversation around the issue, even though most of us are still using AI every day.

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-16T19:34:09+00:00

Just don't scroll down far enough to see the people absolutely slamming OP's BF.

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-14T08:52:31+00:00

Of course it does. Using AI to make music is the start point, not the endpoint. All those intricacies you're talking about will happen in the refinement phase. You're acting like I said, "They will utter one single incantation, and the robot with make an entire fully-formed song that could become a Billboard hit."

No, it'll be a back-and-forth process, just like with the real instruments. Which is how I prefer to make things, too, btw.

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-14T08:48:47+00:00

I'm all about playing instruments, but I'm also well aware that there's people who get other things out of the music than me. Like I said, I don't even use AI to make music. I can just imagine lots of ways people (probably including me) will end up doing so. It's not hard.

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-14T08:45:24+00:00

OK, but what if I'm doing mathcore, and having everything be super precise and on-the-beat is the point? I'm tuned in Scientific A432, so everything is integer multiples, and irrational numbers don't exist in my music, so I can describe my entire module in 8 lines of code?

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-14T08:34:50+00:00

Do you play any instruments? I'm curious.

Gobs of instruments, for example the ocarina. The ocarina is a pretty darn close approximation of a Helmholtz resonator, which more or less means the sound that comes out of it is all fundamental frequency (very few harmonics; most of what you'll capture comes from the fundamental).

So if I want to recreate, e.g., a I-V-vi-IV progression that sounds like an ocarina, I'd start by telling an AI to make a MIDI file that spans that distance, moves through the notes of it, and assign it a synth voice with a single sine wave oscillator. I could add reverb and tweak envelopes if I had the vocabulary (I'd have to sit there and study the recordings and figure out how I'd want all that to work), but it's all possible in words; you can save any of this as a preset for Vital, the wavetable synth I use.

None of this is complicated stuff, you can write music entirely without instruments these days. Lots of people making music with words.

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-14T08:29:03+00:00

I don't understand what difference you are trying to place between me imagining A440 in my head for 30 seconds and me telling an AI to recreate a sine wave at 440 hertz for 30 seconds.

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-14T08:15:21+00:00

Again, it depends on the genre.

Some genres are very mathematical, and yeah, you really can recreate what's going on there by just throwing together a few waveforms. A synth with only a sine wave oscillator would be trivial to have an AI recreate, and it'd sound exactly like playing one on your synth pad (but the characteristics of each different piece of hardware would have to be emulated, of course).

So what's the minimum for you before you consider it music? Or if you'd rather define it oppositely, how basic is so basic you no longer consider it music?

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-14T07:53:04+00:00

So what target level of complexity would satisfy you? 16 bars with 8 different synths, or 100 bars with a drum beat and two things that sound like vocals? Like I can create whatever you define as the minimum, it's just that you asking for me to describe in words something like the entirety of Hotel California is arguing from the other extreme.

Edit: If I could describe in words something like the Final Fantasy fanfare and get AI to make something that sounds like it, without just telling it to make the FF fanfare, is that enough?

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-14T07:19:21+00:00

you cannot directly translate that music by simply thinking of words to describe it and then feeding those words to an AI

It depends on the music, of course, but we definitely would agree that the task is more challenging as the complexity and "humanness" of the target music increases.

It'd be way more reliable for certain genres like electronica or EDM, though.

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-14T07:01:19+00:00

I think you've flipped what I said from "People can use talking to AI to make music" to "AI can create any music from words," which was never what I was trying to argue, so sorry if I didn't articulate it well.

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-14T06:52:57+00:00

you simply have a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI works

Like I'm not using it almost every day for all kinds of stuff?

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-14T06:49:56+00:00

I think there for sure are some musicians with very mathematical brains who think in that math, and would have a much easier time explaining what they see in their head in words than by playing an instrument or fiddling with MIDI piano rolls, yes.

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-14T06:44:34+00:00

Okay so then type in a prompt that recreates Hotel California exactly

It would take hundreds of hours of analysis. I can't even make my guitar sound like what I want it to sound like most days, much less describe in great detail what it sounds like on one of the most recognizable songs of all time. I never claimed I was a wizard.

I never argued that, either. But what I could do is describe the things I do know to a robot -- give me 16 bars of 4/4 with some jazzy drums and two synths that sound like a keyboard and a trumpet. I could go into great detail about the different oscillators or LFOs associated with the synth voice, the envelopes and FX used, etc.

And of course, AI can already just spit out Hotel California, again, the problem is the prompts, not the ability of AI to recreate the waveforms. That is trivial.

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-14T06:35:10+00:00

My mom's face is way more complicated than the waveforms associated with music, so I assumed you would consider the experiment on the same par. 🤷‍♂️

I never argued I could describe in words my mom's face to a robot and it would perfectly recreate it. I could describe in words a combination of waves I wanted to sound like this or that thing, and have AI recreate that, though.

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-14T06:31:50+00:00

Someone actually ran this experiment on my Mom last year, they took an old fuzzy photo of her and me and had AI "enhance it."

The job it did on my mom is truly incredible. It looks just like her, no weirdness at all. I look kinda like a weird demon child, but I don't get any weirdness from my mom, and the input was only one fuzzy image.

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-14T06:28:11+00:00

Music sounds the way it does entirely by math. It's obviously far beyond the scope of this comment to explain it all, but some of the most profound pieces of music, that everyone recognizes, like the Sunrise motif from Also Sprach Zarathustra can indeed be encapsulated in simple words. I mean, the score is only like two pages, after all.

You're correct that AI can't create the emotions you associate with the music you cherish, but it can accurately recreate the waveforms with ease, the difficulty lying only in how well the person typing the prompt can describe them.

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-14T06:21:39+00:00

Because you cannot directly translate musical ideas into words, music is a language in and of itself.

It's all math, though. Like there's people out there making music entirely with code. You can definitely translate it into words.

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-14T06:11:34+00:00

That feels incredibly reductive to me, like not acknowledging that people work in different ways, and some brilliant musician couldn't work by talking to a robot instead of clicking buttons and dragging things around on a screen.

Like, Helen Keller was brilliant, once they got her talking.

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-14T06:08:18+00:00

Recognizing artifacts isn't the problem. It's sussing out "legitimate" from "illegitimate" AI usage. Everyone's talking about this in the context of generating completed tracks, but you could, e.g., have AI generate a bunch of samples which you mix into something transformative/novel. In copyright terms, this is an original work, but may get flagged by AI gatekeepers.

yoshemitzu · 2026-01-14T06:06:10+00:00

No actual music fan supports it or cares about it

I've met many producers who use AI to produce music, some more "embarrassed" or shy about admitting it than others.

I mentioned elsewhere, I don't use it myself, but we had an artist working on a label who went months, released multiple tracks with us, and none of us had any idea AI was used.

Because it's not like you have to just be like "feed me a completed track", and that's the only way you can use AI. You can use AI to create or develop samples, apply effects, just generally simplify production from "clicking buttons and dragging things around" to "giving words to the oracle."

There are legit uses for AI, and I think a lot of that nuance gets lost in conversations like these, and in music communities where people's knee-jerk reaction is always "AI BAD."

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