How AI might make a lot of musicians irrelevant

it's really no secret AI is so hot right now your friend Janelle has some Fuego new AI selfies flooding your timeline your kids are having robots do their homework and you spend your nights telling computer sun to draw you a waifu as useful as AI can be it raises some very important philosophical questions for creators is Art on the way out do creators even really serve a purpose anymore when AI could replace us is it time to pack things in and give up on the dream and submit to our Newfound robot overlords the unsettling and simple fact is that the robots are coming and we might be next in line to be left out in the digital dust [Music] howdy duty buckaroons this is a video I have wanted to make for many years and now that the technology has gotten to a point where it feels like it's time to make this video I don't know how I feel about that I am both excited and terrified that this day has finally come now I understand that this idea of AI making creators and musicians useless is a very bold claim and I'm not saying that all of them will be made useless but a lot of them might so today I want to explore why that is what this means for the future of creative work and what we as creators can do to stay relevant due to the nature of the work I do I can't exactly show you in this video some of the things I know about due to all the ndas and whatnot but what I can tell you with full confidence is that the mid-journey of music is already here and it's coming a lot sooner than you would think while it's extremely difficult to accurately predict the overall impact that AI will have on the larger creative economy despite what that had trying to sell you a course on beating AI with one simple hack is going to try and tell you it does have the potential to challenge many of the traditional creative roles it's important to keep in mind that AI isn't some kind of alien omnipotent foolproof entity and it can be useful in a lot of different ways and its mere existence doesn't necessarily imply the immediate downfall and irrelevance of human creators the utopian view is of course that AI is a tool to enhance the creative process by providing a sort of ultimate collaborator while it is important to be aware of and question and challenge the ideas of AI and its relationship to creators I think it's also extremely crucial to remain open to the possibilities that it offers by learning to adapt and coexist with this new era of technology I think creators can not only benefit from AI but also Thrive with it as an increasingly important part of the creative process so let's just dig right into the ugly bits here and explore the question on every Creator's mind is AI going to take my job and the honest answer is yeah Maybe it's really really hard to say it's worth mentioning my own bias here in that I'm looking at this through the lens of a professional musician and sound designer but also as someone who has done quite a bit of design work and video content production and a lot of Consulting with companies on all of these things and especially their relationship to the world of marketing so I've seen a lot of sides to this same coin and I'm still making a living in a world increasingly dominated by AI while AI has taken many opportunities away from me it's also opened a lot of other ones and ones that are honestly more interesting and even more lucrative in most creative Industries there are the big gigs getting to work as the art director for a triple A video game getting hired to score the next major summer blockbuster or being selected to direct a new major film franchise and so on these are all the gigs we dream of but these big gigs tend to go to the same lucky few established creators get the big work as George Carlin put it it's a big club and you ain't in it so this means the rest of us are left likely where you are right now you might be an aspiring Creator waiting to get their foot in the door you might be someone doing things as sort of a side hustle or you might be one of the many many middle class creators that's making a living but isn't necessarily a household name the bad news is a lot of this stuff might be going out the window let's assume we booked an average size gig of scoring a short film with a modest budget this would probably take a few weeks to do including all the meetings and revisions and a composer earning a pretty average 300 a day for this would end up earning around six thousand dollars for three weeks worth of work this sounds great on paper and this might get a lot of people excited but it's also worth remembering that even this level of project is already extremely hard to come by a lot of people make short films that need music but a lot of musicians want to write for those short films so we find ourselves stuck in that all too familiar Catch-22 of creativity the supply almost always outweighs the demand in an industry where many creators are willing to work for free or for extremely low pay on gig websites it's already difficult enough to earn a living if you're even one of the lucky few to get the gig to begin with now for our little hypothetical scenario here put yourself in the shoes of the director someone who's maybe a student or just a first-time director with this modest budget why reasonably would you choose to spend six thousand dollars on something that could be done by a robot for 9.99 a month there's always going to be a market for human labor and human created works but the truth is that market is just going to inevitably get smaller and smaller and smaller from a business standpoint it simply doesn't make pragmatic sense to hire a staff of 10 people to take orders at a McDonald's when you could have three robots do things more efficiently and also eliminate many points of error all at a fraction of the cost similarly the transportation industry exploring self-driving vehicles and the use of automated systems for organization and warehouse management just make more sense hell AI is even getting pretty good at running kids over there's just no good job that say anymore it's not all doom and gloom though the upside of these AI tools is that it frees up a lot of resources to enable creators to create more things for as many jobs and roles as AI is going to challenge it's also going to free up the human resources to focus on more high-level tasks rather than being stuck doing much of the grunt work that typically consumes so much time and budget the unfortunate byproduct of a lot of these AI tools is that much of the magic of the creative Spirit and the collaborative Spirit gets lost when using these sorts of AI tools but the reality of the situation is a lot of the times the stuff AI can do is simply close enough for rock and roll and whenever there's a shortcut available it's extremely likely that people will make use of it especially when it comes to making money and saving time this lowering of the collective bar through technology means more people will be able to create more things which I do think in the end is a benefit to humanity as a whole and the advancement of the meta of art but we already know the cost of this with the flood of YouTube channels the playlists overflowing with new artists and online blog articles generated by robots for what we lose in the distinctly human idea of connection and collaboration and creativity feeding creativity we more than make up for with unimaginable levels of efficiency with all that soul-crushing fun out of the way let's move on to the other big question a lot of creators have on their minds how do commission-based artists stay useful in an industry where AI just makes more sense well that is really the million dollar question here and if you figure it out then you should probably go put a patent on it I think the main thing we need to focus on to progress towards an answer to this is simply looking at the nature of how AI works but it goes without saying that AI is really complicated stuff and exploring all the details of it would just be Way Beyond the scope of this video so instead we're going to skip over a lot of the details here and just focus on the points that are important to our situation AI is trained using large amounts of data this data tells the AI how to accomplish the thing we're asking it to do the end goal with AI is basically just to create a system that can accurately make predictions or take action this is also why you see so many AI art tools with settings to mimic certain artists or Styles and this is also why they tend to perform better when they're told to do so this isn't to say that AI can't come up with new ideas it's more that the ideas it does come up with are just inferred from the information it was trained on as human creators we have so much more in the way of skill and experience and perspective and this innate ability to iterate in the creative process that AI simply can never match and I think this is the real key to understanding what you can do to Future proof yourself as a Creator what we lack in efficiency we more than make up for in unbelievable amounts of imagination and Innovation the ethics debacle here is pretty obvious and has been an extremely hot topic of discussion lately and it Dives pretty quickly into some Black Mirror level mind Fury the ideas of what makes art real the question of ownership the replacement of humanity and art and the inherent bias of AI all raised some very important and interesting philosophical questions that I think are worth debating but of course again this is well beyond the scope of what we can cover in just a single video however I think the most important thing we could take a look at is the idea of value as creators our work is valued based on its representation of our intent and its impact on the World At Large a piece of art might start a conversation between friends about color theory or the importance of a historical event a film score might inspire a young person to learn an instrument a documentary about addiction might very well save someone's life but this of course is all entirely subjective the value of AI generated art is equally subjective and raises questions about its realness and its potential for derivative work especially given the nature of AI needing training however all human creativity could be argued to be derivative as well due to the necessity of experience and influence so it's all a really big mess in the end and a headache maybe we could save for exploring in a future video so if AI is going to take our jobs as creators what does that mean for us as creators is creating just altogether useless now is it time to go get that computer science degree you've been putting off in favor of sitting around pursuing a dream that's never going to happen is it time to just give up on your art and go get a real job absolutely not I think that that level of pessimism is just stupid while creating for financial success is what a lot of people get into creative work for whether they want to admit it or not it's becoming harder and harder and many of these AI tools will only make it that much more difficult to make a living as a Creator much like the invention of nuclear arms there's simply a Pandora's Box here that we've opened that is never going to be shut I think in the end the real value of creating as any creative professional will tell you comes from the Fulfillment of making something and the idea of AI taking over the grunt work through imitation is I think ultimately a good thing this gives us as artists so much more creative freedom to pursue the idea of fulfillment and explore new and innovative ideas instead of being stuck writing generic stock library music along with 10 000 other musicians can be competing to get that same set of scraps or running around shooting generic stock footage this might mean that in the future it's going to be harder for creators to break into creative Industries but the encouraging upside here is that the best way to stand out is to be truly and absolutely unapologetically yourself and stay true to your Creative Vision and not worry about fitting into the mold if you're gonna go out and create something create something worth imitating well that ended on sort of a spicy note there didn't it but hey thank you so much for your support on my last video that was actually my best performing video in the history of the channel and believe it or not it actually broke that record in only eight hours which is just mind-numbing to think about I absolutely love discussing these sorts of topics and of course if you're down I would love to continue to do so in the future but these are videos that aren't easy to make there's a lot of research a lot of writing a lot of editing and a lot of other stuff that goes into them and of course probably goes without saying these aren't necessarily the most sponsor friendly videos when you're going against the grain of I mean pretty much everything so if you want to support the channel and make future videos like this possible I have a patron Community you can join I have a instrument library and sample pack store you can check out for stuff you might dig for your next project and of course I've got a ton of links down in the description you can use to help support the channel and make future videos like this possible all at no extra cost to you a huge thank you to my patrons and everyone else who has supported the channel for keeping things chugging along here and of course a very big thank you to you for watching I hope you enjoyed it I hope you learned something and of course as always I hope this inspires you to get out there and make something awesome

Channel: Venus Theory

Views: 166,798

Keywords: Venus Theory, sound design, bitwig, bitwig studio, fl studio, logic pro x, ableton, cubase

Id: USsh-XK6s6U

Length: 15min 7sec (907 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 12 2022