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AI and the Future of Bardcore (Patreon)

Published:
2024-07-09 19:34:19
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Folks, I've decided to outsource my work to AI. Now I'll finally be free to stop making music or art and just lie face down in a field somewhere.

I jest, I jest. Please enjoy this exploration into the current landscape of AI generative music. I learned a lot in the process, and have taken the edge off my existential dread just a little bit.

Out of curiosity, how has your profession or hobby been affected by the tide of AI? Have you been personally impacted? It feels like it all happened so fast, and is only accelerating from here.

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AI and the Future of Bardcore

They say "know thy enemy," so in this video I give various AI music generators a spin, and politely ask ChatGTP to create some lyrics.

Comments

Farhad Hakimov

Answering the question in the nethertext, I actually work in/on AI lol If it soothes anyone, a lot of people making generative AI really don't want people to lose jobs because of our work, so - doing what we can to lessen this kind of impact. My personal perspective in the meantime is to maintain as much personality and authenticity to your work - in a way limiting it, but limiting it to your person, making sure it comes from -you-. Your following will stay and grow. AI is good at repeating and mixing patterns, but (so far, and in the foreseeable future) each individual model is only as original as a single fellow person (i.e. has its own consistent style), or not at all.

catcard

I'm billing you for treatment for the heart attack the first sentence gave me. :P I write as a hobby and I can't begin to express how stupid all this AI stuff is. Art is about the soul of humanity and all the ways we can express things to one another. Someone else said something like this better, but, "Why would anyone want to read something that no one wanted to take the time to write?"

Hildegard von Blingin'
>>143163020

I do appreciate you weighing in then! I see it as a "cat's out of the bag" sort of situation, and have been genuinely excited by the prospect of it making work flow easier in some ways, but also of course worry about how it's going to affect peoples' livelihoods. We're living through some weird times.

Hildegard von Blingin'
>>143163253

Hehe my apologies for that! Fair enough, I can't see myself reading a book created by AI. I guess I can see its use in boring or technical writing, but not in fiction.

Jim Scardelis
>>143163253

I find it fun to have AI write silly mashups of things that no one would pay for, and aren’t even worth saving, but good for stress relief / getting unblocked when my brain is tired from writing reports. Like, for instance “write a short story combining Lord of the Rings with Feudal Japan”.

BumroyV2

You gave me a heart attack with that title and fake-out opening. Very relieved to hear you're not buying into AI. To your question, I work at an accounting firm. The execs saw fit to spend an ungodly amount of money training a AI model for us, and, probably because of that, they *really* want us to use it. Unless directly order to, I never will. The energy cost of AI is astronomical, to say nothing of its ethical and practical issues. Since you mentioned the Sony lawsuit, you might also be relieved that Goldman Sachs of all corporations sees AI as far too expensive with far too little benefit. I can't believe Goldman Sachs is on the right side of an issue.

Farhad Hakimov
>>143163253

Ooh, likewise. I've been playing "create and roleplay solving a detective mystery with me" every now and again with different models, come to think of it. Unfortunately, AI is not very good at being original, but if you're willing to be the "original" factor in the stories you're making up together, that can be quite fun!

Jim Scardelis
>>143163020

Like any other new set of tools that come into existence, some people’s lives will be enhanced by it - for example, it can do some of the boring & time consuming parts of a task for you, freeing you up to do other things. So as long as you’re flexible and maybe self-driven (?) it can be good. On the other hand, there are people who just want to do those simple, repetitive type things. They might need to learn to do something new. But then again, there’s always been new tools. People still paint with a brush and canvas, even though iPads and Procreate exist, so there’s hope.

Don Proctor (lostagain)

Thanks for the smile. My hobbies are golf, fishing, kayaking, and backpacking/camping. AI doesn't really have a place there. So it hasn't affected me there. And I retired last year, so.... The first song was remarkably, scarily good. The others not so much. The last one from Udio, the voice was a bit flat. Lacking in timbre. Same for the 1st one from the second generator. The other two weren't Bardcore, but Irish Folk. SMH.

Quixotic Raven

I also had a bit of a heart attack at the title. While I’m not personally affected, I know many people who work in the games industry who are definitely being negatively impacted. Big companies have been firing a lot of people over the past year and more and the people at the top of most of those big companies are very interested in using AI to eliminate more jobs. I’ve heard from someone I trust that this will fail and they’ll end up spending a lot of money trying to keep from paying people for their jobs but it’s taking time for the Idiots in Charge to realize that they’re wasting time and money. That’s making it hard for the people who have already been losing their jobs and are having a hard time finding work. I do have to say that I don’t believe everyone working in AI is responsible for the idiots looking to eliminate jobs, I absolutely believe there are plenty of people who are working ethically trying to make the work of game devs easier but sadly the ones making the most noise are the ones who aren’t being ethical about it.

Victoria Pride

I'm a jeweler and my boss used AI to design a pendant. it is the most fiddly thing to make waxes of, cast in metal, and polish. I hate working on it and its only good thing is that there's only been one sale of it in 2 years

Julian Gonggrijp

Thanks for the great question, this topic is quite important to me. I might get a bit ranty, apologies in advance. I graduated in artificial intelligence (the field of study) and I work as a scientific programmer, so the current AI hype is affecting me from multiple angles. Firstly, the products that currently draw a lot of attention (ChatGPT, MidJourney, etcetera) are basically just a new scale (i.e., huge, only affordable to the super rich) of one particular AI technique (neural networks) that has existed since the 1980s. The super rich are invested in painting this as a revolution, as this allows them to make more money out of the hype as long as it lasts. To the general public, this makes it look as if "AI" suddenly popped out of nowhere, distracting from the wider spectrum of techniques and theories that are being actively explored by AI scholars and engineers, which they have been doing since the 1950s. Policymakers are being distracted, too. As someone with a passion for AI in the broader sense, this bothers me. Secondly, there are lots of very persistent misconceptions about these products. Every time I hear them, I feel a desire to battle those misconceptions, but it is an impossible job for me as an individual. The investors are literally fighting a war of misinformation, and the products themselves put up a good show of pretense. It often makes me feel frustrated and lonely. My only solace is that it is a matter of time before people start to realize that these products are not as useful or valuable as they are made out to be. Thirdly, some of my colleagues, generally the less experienced ones, use these products instead of human-written documentation or as a way to generate code. Both of these practices worry me. The answers lie on a fuzzy spectrum between advice that the tool directly plagiarized from a human author and advice that the tool more or less randomly recombined from multiple sources. The former is trustworthy and the latter is not, but it is never purely one or the other and for less experienced developers, this is generally hard or even impossible to distinguish, anyway. For generating code, an additional problem is that the tool only helps with writing so called "boilerplate code"; writing the same pattern of code over and over. This leads to large amounts of low-quality code. A human author can achieve much better code quality by abstracting away the common patterns. Fourthly, the hype attracts clients who think they need "AI", invariably with unrealistic expectations. There have been two occasions already where my team had to actively avoid being sucked into a pointless time-consuming exercise. It is not too difficult to say "no" to such projects, but it does tug on our attention. It takes mental energy, because there are valid use cases for smaller neural networks that you can run on your own hardware, and there is a grey area in between as well.

Gabriel Olearnik

I’ve experimented with a lot of AI for creative writing. It’s very good at interpreting themes, picking up literary nuances and references, and it does in 2 seconds. As to the actually writing, it has a kind of stiff style which is appropriate for corporate reports, but is at what I would consider 30% for poetry and literature. This for example, was entirely handwritten, and the AI versions of it were vastly substandard https://www.linkedin.com/posts/olearnik_weekend-literary-writing-2-mins-of-your-activity-7215431366870507520-E1xE?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios

Gabriel Olearnik

This post has intrigued me. Who else here is a creative or an artist?

Hildegard von Blingin'
>>143165047

Sorry again for the heart attack! :P Right, true, there is that added other concern of the environmental impact. That is interesting to hear Goldman Sachs' stance on things!

Hildegard von Blingin'
>>143191206

Wow, so you're really at the eye of the storm! I do want to clarify that I think AI is still worth researching, and has such a wide breadth of potential uses that its development seems inevitable. True that there's a pretty big campaign to sell some of the big AI models as useful and revolutionary. Udio or Suno (can't remember which) was pointing to a musician using AI who couldn't perform anymore due to disability, really milking that fringe case to justify their own existence. I feel that frustration and loneliness. Mostly just a big sense of: ???? where is all this going?

Hildegard von Blingin'
>>143182188

Well said! Totally, there is a baby in that bathwater, so to speak. :P But I think you'll be right in the end that a lot of what many execs are doing will prove to be a waste of time in the end.

Hildegard von Blingin'
>>143247323

Yes, I've noticed there is a stiff quality to the writing. It can be fairly descriptive and even poetic at times, but there's something recognizable about it. I do really like that last line!

Markava

I actually use a variety of AI on a fairly regular basis and have been finding more ways to use it as my main hobby is tabletop roleplaying. I am involved as both a GM and as a player in various campaigns and AI when properly used can REALLY make it a lot easier to handle. The first area I use it is with trying to brainstorm for upcoming sessions. My campaigns tend to be very focused on character development and my goal is to get players emotionally invested in the plot and story, and that is where most of MY focus goes, where the AI comes in is with trying to flesh out scenes. For example my players are about to raid a faction that they have been giving the side eye for a long time, the faction does extensive experiments with necromancy and are essentially a dark medieval fantasy version of Umbrella Corp. So I asked the AI if it had suggestions for ambient effects and whatnot that I could describe to my players and then just told it "Those are good suggestions, do you have any more?" a few times and I had like 50 examples that I could ponder and put my own spin on. Things I come up with myself always turn out better, but its good for shaking off "brain blank" and getting the gears turning again. The second use is in creating art for my NPCs, Now this is an area where some could argue I am denying real artists work... but I don't see it that way because I have NEVER had the money to have artwork created for every NPC I have ever introduced. My main campaign has like 100+ notable NPCs running around, and that's just the ones that have survived since their introduction. Even if I were only paying sketch prices to cheap artists who are selling themselves painfully short I could not afford to do that, and I do NOT have any talent in that field myself nor do I have time to craft quality art for them all if I did. So I use AI to generate decent quality images, and then NPCs that become especially near and dear to my players and my own presonal characters go onto a list to at some point have an art commission done. (I also offer my players one reasonably priced commission or some money towards an unreasonably priced commission each year around Christmas time as my gift to them.) And yes I know some people would say that this is borderline plagiarism since as mentioned by some other people in this thread AI mimics others, I would then ask is it less ethical than what many other people do where they just browse online and find art they like and just use it without permission? I would argue its better to use a cheap imitation that is clearly a cheap imitation than to use an exact copy of art that somebody put time into. Of course the other reason I can't just commission all my NPCs is all the artists whose styles I like and who I enjoy supporting have waiting lists because they have a decent base of loyal customers and can only draw so fast. My personal advice to artists is to be unique, I have access to dozens of well crafted AI art models and if I'm honest while some are better or worse at different themes there is a clear and consistent "Oh yeah thats AI art." feel to them. AI cannot do "new" ideas and it struggles with specific ideas as well. If I ask for a girl wearing a flower dress it will churn out more decent looking images than I know what to do with. But if I ask for an image for an assassin character of mine wearing a red dress with a black rose hair ornament and a blue tear drop shapped pendant it will struggle and most likely fail. The greater the specifics you ask for the greater the struggle. If it gets the pendant right, it gives me a crown of actual red roses in her hair, if it gets the hair ornament right its a red rose, if its a black rose its not a hair ornament and the pendant is all wrong and the dress is also black and so on and so forth. The more things you need it to get specific on the more impossible it is to get them ALL right at the same time. THAT is where real artists will always thrive because they actually understand what is being asked.

Kevin O’Donnell

I am reminded of a story that Picasso once declared that a disputed 'work of art' was actually from his hand, but undoubtedly a fake. He said, 'Yes, I have painted many fakes!' The hard position is that anything created, by any means whatsoever, can fail to meet an artist's own approval.