Hey all,
Been slowly getting back into the habit of working on MusicBrainz stuff today, and decided to put some focus into adding relations between songs I like, and the songs they sampled. So far it's been rather run-of-the mill stuff, something sampling Justin Timberlake, another sampling Limp Bizkit, some stuff I was working on few days ago sampling Skrillex, Tech N9ne, Avicii, list goes on.
However, I decided to see where the vocals came from for one of my all-time favourite tracks, that being cynical by N_dog. Song is fantastic, love the energy the track has, instrumentals are great, love the switchups, list goes on.
Decided to search the lyrics and came across the lyrics through Shazam, which matched them to a track called Fuzzy Love by Diluli. If the album art didn't already make it clear this was AI-generated, looking around further brings up a YouTube channel of the artist where the banner reads "Applied AI Architect".
I feel conflicted here with what I think about this song now. The first thing that comes to mind is disappointment that the vocals sampled were taken from a track that was AI-generated knowingly or unknowingly. The vocals aren't from a real person, which feels it should ruin the immersion, and knowing that they're almost certainly generated from a dataset without the consent of however many artists is honestly gross.
On the other hand, I weirdly almost appreciate the track more than I did before? The song itself is without a doubt made by a person, it just so happens the sample they used was from an AI-generated song. A lot of work went into it, and the fact that they took stuff that was devoid of creativity and gave it creative life honestly feels a bit uplifting, even despite the fact that the vocals would be much preferred to be from an actual person.
What are your guy's thoughts on this? Is sampling AI music giving acceptance to AI music as a whole thus bringing the music industry down, or does it come off as rejecting the idea of literally lifeless music by infusing it with genuine human creativity?
To me it always boils down to "yes I know the creator of this media (did/does bad things) but I really like this music so I'm fine giving them money and supporting their lifestyle"
Change the media to movies, paintings, anything really. If the creator is shitty, I can't condone giving them money. Every time you stream a song, buy a Blu-ray, or rent an e-book, the creator gets royalties and their numbers in some imaginary leader board go up.
Basically, if you want to listen to music like this that's up to you, but at the very least don't indirectly support the LLM thievery and pirate the song instead. Fuck jk Rowling, get Harry Potter movies at TPB. don't support EA, torrent their games. Sail the high seas for anything controversial, the creators don't need your money and you shouldn't want them to have it.