AI’s impact on audio production has, of course, become a hot topic in the game music world.
50?! Those are some rookie numbers, my guy… You’re not gonna see any movement on that chart until you bump up that input by orders of magnitude. 🥴🤌🏼
His field isn’t that big in total.
Used to work in film audio post-production. Saw the writing on the wall the moment the AI cancer start to spread and moved to a new line of work. Really sad to see this.
I love his music so much that I knew who this article was about before opening it. I regularly just listen to both games OSTs.
Well that makes me feel less bad about the situation regarding my own career issues currently. If a dude like this can have trouble, anyone can.
i’ve seen people do fifty resumes A WEEK to basically the same result
I keep thinking of that manager that sent in a perfect resume for the job he posted, because HR denied all applicants, and it proved that HR was using some bogus AI or algorithmic filter to auto deny resumes.
But it doesn’t have to be AI. A former colleague of mine (who had both on the factory floor experience , all the way up the ladder over decades, and an MBA) was looking for a high level job and took 6 months of bogus interviews where HR keeps having you come back only to deny it at the end. For same role some said Overqualified and some HR said not enough experience. Lol pick one.
Yep. When I got laid off last year my goal was 10 applications a day.
Most resulted in no response. Of those who did respond, most were boilerplate rejection emails.
Did you find a job yet?
Now that I think about it, I’ve only had two situations in my ~15 year career where I was able to get a job via a “cold application”. One of them was the worst employement experience of my life. The other one was great.
There was some level of “getting my foot in the door” with all my other jobs. Internship after my Masters program, meeting someone at an non-work event and getting hired via former employers/colleagues.
That really sucks for your friends. I’ve been there and it really kills motivation.
yeah it sucks because every employer wants you to be excited for their company… but if you get excited, youre likely to get let down when you get rejected
As a musician I feel like AI is currently destroying music. It won’t generate anything new or truly creative, but damn does it make “good enough” take 10 seconds.
AI is destroying everything.
I remember meeting someone at an event that told me how great it was.
His argument was, “can you even tell it’s AI?”
I said my biggest problem is that it’s destroying new artists and original music.
How so? People are still allowed to make original music. The actually good music is human made anyway.
In the era of algorithmic recommendations, it doesn’t matter if you make good music, it only matters if it cost the platforms 0.00001 extra dollars to recommend you vs any slop.
I agree but there is a lot of people back to buying music from artists and keeping their own servers and vinyl/cd collections. Even the kids. It might never be mainstream but there will always be art and artists.
Les artist making a living out I’d their art means that will make less, and the algorithms will bury their work so they will have an even more uphill battle.
The current system is already stacked against new artists in favor of popular ones. This stacks them against a machine that can generate a century worth of music in hours, 24/7.
That there will still exist few artists and they will make a few sons means… Little
Abso-fucking-lutely. I don’t think it’s quite there yet, it puts too many strange artifacts in the music currently, but it’s getting damn close to “good enough”.
Too many people think the danger is that it’s awful. The danger is that it’s mediocre. Because cheap, easily reproducible, and mediocre beats excellent, expensive, and messy every time because AI doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t go on a bender or get caught doing something reprehensible or burn out. It’s never late. It just sits there waiting to be told what to crank out next.
So you’ve got this thing that can’t move art forward. It can’t inject that one really fucking cool thing in there that changes everything. AI can’t hate a song it’s creating so it emphasizes things in a weird way.
Compare it with Max Martin productions. He didn’t invent manufactured music but he created a hell of a pipeline for folks to rhyme fire with desire. But even that relies on people who can sing with the timidity of youth and the confidence of a person who has been told the world is theirs. Or someone with no real understanding of a song singing it in a way that gives it a different meaning than the original intent. Or someone barely hanging on and pouring their entire person into their performance because they have nothing else.
AI can’t do any of that. It can’t turn a word into a god damned grenade. It’s going to remix everything that came before. Not in new and exciting ways. Not in thought provoking ways. But in algorithmic ways. It’s flat. The lyrics will tell a story that resolves. The rhymes will be perfect. You won’t get a banjo in metal or a calliope in video game music unless it’s a game about a clown. It’s not going to give you soul and wit. It will give you a snapshot of where music has been and is up to the point of its last training data.
I have an entire tangent about how it’s being used politically currently (go look up Danny Bones) and how it does not get tired or embroiled in controversy and being “good enough” makes it the perfect propaganda machine. But that’s for another day.
Modern elevator music.
Hey, I happen to like elevator music. Smooth Jazz takes talent, okay!
I like easy listening, which is kind of a precursor to elevator music.
You said more than I did in my whole fucking rant. That’s exactly right.
No, your rant was beautiful.
I’ve been really enjoying just playing my acoustic instruments, not bothering to record anything at all. I think campfire sings are going to make a major comeback.
Now there’s a silver lining!
People will have to stop trying to monetize their passion projects and start creating for the undiluted love of the art.
Of course, that means they’ll need to find other sources of income. Which, under late-stage capitalism, is a disaster in its own right…
But at least our dystopian hellscape will have rad campfire songs!
It might also be a boost to indie devs and open-source projects. Again, not great for anyone set on it as a career path. But a small silver lining for the rest of us…
This is my hope for the bot-infested future, too. Acoustic tunes shared in the moment with your friends in person. A correction back towards the authenticity of real life in contrast to the curation of digital identity. I guess I’m optimistic in my pessimism.
It depends what your standard is for good enough, honestly. If you’re making art for the art, I certainly haven’t seen anything from AI music that seems actually artful, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable putting my music out into the world that didn’t feel like art to me. If you’re churning out 30 second jingles for advertising or microtransaction-riddled mobile games, maybe then the standard is lower
E: of course, if “good enough” is “enough to make a C suite douchebag give it the okay with dollar signs in their eyes” then yeah.
Jesus fucking Christ on a shiny tandem bicycle. When the Alexander Brandon can’t find work you know it’s bad 😭
On the bright side, maybe an indie dev can him for cheap!
… uggghhhhh…
It’s the same in the animation industry. The greats are struggling to find work.
I’ve had Era’s End on my playlist for years; such a fantastic album to use as focus music. After seeing this story, I’m going to pick up another album of his.
Next it’ll be Inon Zur…
@timsweeney what were you saying about employers seeing streams of resumes after laying off a thousand Epic employees?
They are seeing them. But they aren’t hiring a composer, they are hiring the AI company trained with that composer work.
He and Michiel van den Bos basically wrote the soundtrack of my youth. Really bizarre to see Siren is struggling to land a full time job. Sad times indeed.
Why aren’t they syndicalizing?
For better or worse, I don’t think it’s viable.
Just my opinion, but I think we would need some sort of new model. ‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.’ and all that…
Syndicalism is the “new model” that supports workers, not capitalists. It’s worked b4.
I am all for it.
As I said, just my opinion that we will need something radically new, something suitable for the challenges of the information age.
