Will AI Replace Creators? It Is Not What You Think It Is

Hot hot hot topic and with a lot of excitement and fear surrounding it. AI advances and ChatGPT disrupted collective consciousness and for a good reason. Scientists and engineers created a really powerful product which is already shattering multiple job markets, especially creative ones. Who would of thought that soulless machines CAN create captivating art.

I remember I used to hire an artist on Fiverr to design an album cover for me and recently I just paid ~10$ for Midjourney and did an album cover myself

It took me a lot of tries and this is the best that I've got. As you can see AI is struggling a bit with making objects realistic, like the guitar having 11 weird tuners, and it is jet uncapable of writing comprehensive text as you can see in the bottom right corner. If you want to work with Midjourney, photo editing skills are a must. And there is the first point I want to talk about -

What You See On The Web Are Highlights

Stunning AI images and AI winning art exhibitions are all highlights, which make the truth seem much better than it is. A lot of successful AI artists do a lot of working in Photoshops to correct AI mistakes. It is also important to note, that there is a lot of luck involved. The whole Midjourney experience feels like "if a lot of Monkeys had a lot of typewriters, they would produce works of Shakespeare". You just sit there and generate image after image until the you are somewhat satisfied with what you get.

When I requested a drawing of a woman, Midjourney decided to give her 2 pairs of ears and 4 fingers, not the kind of picture you would expect. The technology and the drawings are impressive, no doubt about it, we just need to be careful how we view the whole trend.

My next experience with AI was when I was designing my online mixing and mastering website. Wix.com suggested me to fill my webpage with AI generated text. What I got were long paragraphs of watered down language. The only intend for this text was to fill the computer screen with pixels, instead of giving a potential customer the information he or she needs.

Nobody Has Time To Read Your Walls of Text

ChatGPT is actually good at generating long essays, stories, blog posts, movie scripts and everything that comes in a form of text, but what the technology is missing is, that people are evolving past that kind of experience and they do not need a screen full of fluff. Media has become more visual and more compressed. People quickly take what they want and move to the next peace of content. Imagine ChatGPT writing this article. Not in a million years.

When we look at music production, we find that people who use ChatGPT to generate lyrics for a song, and write about how groundbreaking that is, have a false assumption, that it is the text which makes a song and not the melody and the rhythm behind the lyrics. Imagine AI writing lyrics for Gnarls Barkley - Crazy. Would a person, who is making the song out of AI written lyrics, ever sing them the way Gnarls Barkley sings them? Can AI create the same rhythm and melody behind Gnarls Barkley performance? I doubt it can.

AI In Mixing and Mastering

I had an experience with a couple of AI mixing and mastering related products. iZotope Ozone AI mastering assistant uses the power of AI to make your song loud, bright and pumpin for that Spotify release. To phrase it simply - the way this technology and similar ones work is that it has trained its AI on a bunch of commercial songs and what it tries to do is - match your EQ curve to the EQ curve of other songs.

Now my horribly produced song can sound obnoxiously loud, overly compressed and scratchy bright, because that what happens with AI bandage in a music production world.

iZotope is a great company which makes a great products and they have a lot of bright minds on their team, however approaches like this will never make a bad piece of music sound good or even above average. You just cannot approach music that way, because 95% of a mix is done in the production and on the individuals tracks and their respective balance. Slapping somethin on a mix-bus and trying to fix mix-related issues is a mistake that novices usually make and now we are making an AI product out of it? Really?

At The End of the Day

At the end of the day, AI technologies have not yet caught up to human potential and have a few underlying issues that will always make it inferior to human talent and expertise. I can say 'always', because a lot of things do require human input and judgement to even function. And if you want to have your song mixed and mastered by conscious person who wrote this article, you can contact me!