I hesitated to make this post because I know how this community feels about generative AI, but after finally sitting down with Udio as a veteran composer and musician with over 30 years of experience, and publishing a song that is currently trending/charting on the Udio platform, I think it's a good opportunity to demonstrate the usefulness of generative AI for artists like myself and the positive impact it can have on the entertainment industry.
Here is the song:
Listen to Transfiguratio Animae (Full Version) by Blambda on Udio. Discover, create, and share music with the world. Use the latest technology to create AI music in seconds.
www.udio.com
What is noteworthy here is that this was merely an experiment and the first [full] song that I published on this platform (I published a snippet of the song first to gauge appetite and encourage the community to riff off it). I knew going in that my options would be limited since my ability to control the outputs were limited to prompts, but I saw the potential in the technology and understood that people with strong musicality and good prompt engineering skills (both are requirements for high quality outputs) would likely rise above the rest, and that is exactly what happened. The point here is that artistic intentionality is something you can imbue in AI generated content, but the degree of intent will always be limited by the level of control that you have over the outputs. A basic prompt and a sophisticated, well-informed, well-structured prompt are going to result in widely different levels of quality, and iterative prompts exponentially boost that quality. And in this case, I simply used my musical sensibilities and experience to guide the model the best I could. You simply cannot get this level of precise intentionality without understanding what you're doing, full stop. And that's important, because it means that even when using generative AI (even with only prompts!), artists still provide significant value compared to the average consumer that lazily requests a random song. I don't think artists are going anywhere and our talents will always be valued, even when AI has far exceeded our ability to produce high quality content.
If you're interested in my process for generating this song, you can read about it my reddit comment here:
Having said all that, though I was able to create something I was eventually happy with on the platform, I cannot seriously use this as part of my workflow until I have much greater control over the output. The model was doing way too much heavy lifting for my tastes, and I had to fight with it a bit to align with my intent, and no artists wants that. Once there are some real editing options, I see this as a very potent tool in the toolkit and I'm very much looking forward to when that day comes. What's most important for me is the creative aspect, the production aspects are less important and I would actually prefer for AI to rid me of a lot of that tedium.
EDIT:
I should add that I did not intend for this post to be a slight against laypeople using Udio. There is absolutely value in that and I fully encourage everyone to try it out. I just wanted to provide a little optimism for artists who are worried that AI-generated content getting better will mean that people will no longer be interested in their content, when the opposite seems to be true.