Comment by yapyap

Comment by yapyap 17 hours ago

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> On the other hand, I know people that want to jump straight to the end result. They have some melody or idea in their head, and they just want to generate some song that revolves around that idea. I don't really look down on those people, even though the snobs might argue that they're not "real musicians". I don't understand them, but that's not really something I have to understand either.

So if someone generates their music with AI to get their idea to music you don’t look down on it?

Personally I do, if you don’t have the means to get to the end you shouldn’t get to the end and that goes double in a professional setting. If you are just generating for your own enjoyment go off I guess but if you are publishing or working for someone that’ll publish (aka a professional setting) you should be the means to the end, not AI.

_heimdall 17 hours ago

Where do you draw that line though?

If you're talking about a person using an LLM, or some other ML system, to help generate their music then the LLM is really just a tool for that person.

I can't run 80 mph but I can drive a car that fast, its my tool to get the job done. Should I not be allowed to do that professionally if I'm not actually the one achieving that speed or carrying capacity?

Personally my concerns with LLMs are more related to the unintended consequences and all the unknowns in play given that we don't really know how they work and aren't spending much effort solving interoperability. If they only ever end up being a tool, that seems a lot more in line with previous technological advancements.

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  • bluefirebrand 15 hours ago

    > I can't run 80 mph but I can drive a car that fast

    If you drive a car 80mph you don't get to claim you are a good runner

    Similarly if you use an LLM to generate 10k lines of code, you don't get to claim you are a good programmer

    Regardless of the outcome being the "same"

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    • elliotbnvl 14 hours ago

      You do get to claim that you’re a good getting-places-er, though, which is the only point of commercial programming.

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      • bluefirebrand 14 hours ago

        Project Managers will tell you that "getting to a place" is the goal

        Then you get to the place and they say "now load all of the things in the garage into the truck"

        But oops. You didn't bring a truck, because all they told you was "please be at this address at this time", with no mention of needing a truck

        My point is that the purpose of commercial programming is not usually just to get to the goal

        Often the purpose of commercial programming is to create a foundation that can be extended to meet other goals later, that you may not even be remotely aware of right now

        If your foundation is a vibe coded mess that no one understands, you are going to wind up screwed

        And yes, part of being a good programmer includes being aware of this

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        • pixl97 13 hours ago

          I work with quite a few F100 companies. The actual amount of software most of them create is staggering. Tens of thousands of different applications. Most of it is low throughput and used by a small number of employees for a specific purpose with otherwise low impact to the business. This kind of stuff has been vibe coded long before there was AI around to do it for you.

          At the same time human ran 'feature' applications like you're talking about often suffer from "let the programmer figure it out" problems where different teams start doing their own things.

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  • probably_wrong 15 hours ago

    > I can't run 80 mph but I can drive a car that fast, its my tool to get the job done.

    Right, but if you use a chess engine to win a chess championship or if you use a motor to win a cycling championship, you would be disqualified because getting the job done is not the point of the exercise.

    Art is (or should be) about establishing dialogues and connections between humans. To me, auto-generated art it's like choosing between seeing a phone picture of someone's baby and a stock photo picture of a random one - the second one might "get the job done" much better, but if there's no personal connection then what's the point?

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jstummbillig 17 hours ago

Why?

What has always held true so far: <new tool x> abstracts challenging parts of a task away. The only people you will outcompete are those, who now add little over <new tool x>.

But: If in the future people are just using <new tool x> to create a product that a lot of people can easily produce with <new tool x>, then, before long, that's not enough to stand out anymore. The floor has risen and the only way to stand out will always be to use <new tool x> in a way that other people don't.

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Workaccount2 16 hours ago

People who can't spin pottery shouldn't be allowed to have bowls, especially mass produced by machine ones.

I understand your point, but I think it is ultimately rooted in a romantic view of the world, rather than the practical truth we live in. We all live a life completely inundated with things we have no expertise in, available to us at almost trivial cost. In fact it is so prevalent that just about everyone takes it for granted.

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  • hooverd 14 hours ago

    Sure, but they also shouldn't claim they're potters because they went to Pottery Barn.

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  • selimthegrim 16 hours ago

    Sounds like Communist Albania where everybody had to be able to repair the car and take it apart and put it back together to own one

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RHSeeger 17 hours ago

> So if someone generates their music with AI to get their idea to music you don’t look down on it?

It depends entirely on how they're using it. AI is a tool, and it can be used to help produce some wonderful things.

- I don't look down on a photographer because they use a tool to take a beautiful picture (that would have taken a painter longer to paint)

- I don't look down on someone using digital art tools to blur/blend/manipulate their work in interesting ways

- I don't look down on musicians that feed their output through a board to change the way it sounds

AI (and lots of other tools) can be used to replace the creative process, which is not great. But it can also be used to enhance the creative process, which _is_ great.

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apercu 17 hours ago

If they used an algorithm to come up with a cool melody and then did something with it, why look down on it?

Look at popular music for the last 400 years. How is that any different than simply copying the previous generations stuff and putting your own spin on it?

If you heard a CD in 1986 then in 2015 you wrote a song subconsciously inspired by that tune, should I look down on you?

I mean, I'm not a huge fan of electronic music because the vast majority of it sounds the same to me, but I don't argue that they are not "real musicians".

I do think that some genres of music will age better than others, but that's a totally different topic.

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  • randcraw 13 hours ago

    I think you don't look down at the product of AI, only the process that created it. Clearly the craft that created the object has become less creative, less innovative. Now it's just a variation on a theme. Does such work really deserve the same level of recognition as befitted Beethoven for his Ninth or Robert Bolt for his "A Man for all Seasons"?

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scarface_74 16 hours ago

Your company doesn’t care about how you got to the end, they just care about did you get there and meet all of the functional and non functional requirements.

My entire management chain - manager, director and CTO - are all technical and my CTO was a senior dev at BigTech less then two years ago. But when I have a conversation with any of them, they mostly care about whether the project I’m working on/leading is done on time/within budget/meets requirements.

As long as those three goals are met, money appears in my account.

One of the most renown producers in hip hop - Dr. Dre - made a career in reusing old melodies. Are (were) his protégés - Easy-E, Tupac, Snoop, Eminem, 50 cent, Kendrick Lamar, etc - not real musicians?

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