Will AI replace real musicians at some point? [Discussion]

I think, AI songs will be popular, but not the way you described it. Instead AI will be used to personalise music and/or to fit to a desired mood and feel, creating a unique experience. I am not sure about how this will be achieved. I have some musician friends who worked on machine learning projects, but when I asked them about these, they said they were not proud of it, because they feel like they removed some of the magic behind the audio.

As in many things that are automated in some way, it's going to be of a less quality then something that's "handmade"
Even if AI gets advanced enough to create flawless music, I highly doubt it could even come close to music that's made by a musician as AI can never replicate feelings or emotions as such. Only interpretations of these concepts, which would as well give only interpretation of "music"

If we are talking about "pop" as in genre not popular music, then this could probably create even better music than that, as pop as such is usually as simple as can be and it's only quality is being catchy. But if we are talking anything beyond that - no way it could replace it. For one you could look at blues, country, rock music. While there are tons of mindless repetitive shit, there is also music with soul and musician specific tunes or lyrics.

I dont doubt AI could be used for various useful applications and be used for some specific tasks that would make it cheaper to use AI instead of humans. But as in music - I dont think anything replacing musicians is likely in near future. I dont doubt that for reasons of earning money AI could be used to pump out one song after another to only generate money through radio, but if anything, that would probably drive out any last remaining decent musicians who make pop music.

The anime Carole & Tuesday tried to explore something like this but it became a political mess instead (it ended up focusing more on racism than music somehow). But there AI wrote the music and its lyrics and humans performed the songs.

As long as humans still want to make/perform music, there will be people making music. I can't imagine AI taking over things there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4Ph02gzqmY

It already feels like AI is making all the popular music nowadays, and with all the digital manipulation the performances you hear are less about the technical skill of an artist and more about the image the present. So yeah maybe there will come a day when fully AI generated music has a place. But I'd like to think there will always be an appreciation for genuine technical prowess and skill exhibited by humans.

I feel like, it would be a thing, but not THE thing, something like pop, an IA will always play safe, chord progression that are standard for the industry, even in some cases of IA made music you can see a trend in lyrics that are really common in mainstream music (sexualized lyrics, repetitions, etc)

But what i'm more intersted it's in Visuals IA. There's a EDM artist called Karma Fields, wich for a long time people say it was IA generated, but now it's stated that it's a guy making the songs, but maybe and just maybe the sound desing it's IA made, but the visuals of all the songs, and the live events, it's completely IA generated. Watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTzbax2daKs Karma Fields - Skyline

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlgqTJb406Y Karma Fields - New Age/Dark Age (The full album with the integrated IA visuals)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUflZ9qm8rU Karma Fields - The Hex (A teasing of the visuals in live stage)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyC7L_dtScI Kinda an explanation of the project

Sorry for my crappy english

I don't know about radio (haven't listened to it since I was a kid in my stepdad's van) but people who don't do music just for the money, enjoy making and playing music and that will never change.

GPT-3 has also been making the rounds online. It generates text so convincing you barely can tell if it's a human or machine-generated.

Auto Tune certainly changed things, and I'm sure we're due for another revolutionary technology like that in audio sometime soon.

If it can pass some sort of music Turing test where a statistically significant number of people are not able to discern whether a song was made by an AI or not, I think that would be a big step. In it's earlier forms, it can also be used to simply help inspire a musical idea. We have to remember what we have right now is just the beginning (and even now, quite impressive), so it's only going to get much better.

I would say performance is one of the things the AI couldn't replace. Humans have limits, so when someone is really good at playing an instrument or singing a song, its quite special. Also, I personally like the tiny imperfections in a live performance that reminds you that what you are watching and listening is indeed by a human who will make tiny little mistakes along the way.

This is regarding AI made specifically for music though, if we get to the point of generalized human-like AI, that might create a scenario where performance and skill would also be valued from the AI, and so an AI musician would be just as impressive as a human musician.

I'm fairly sure Stock Aitken Waterman were already AI-powered robots parachuted in from the future to disrupt the music industry...