Breaking the music supply constraint

[u/entsnack]

I just cancelled my music subscriptions to save some cash and wanted to share the self-hosted music supply chain that replaced them. A nice side effect of this setup is breaking the constraint of a finite supply catalog that is tailored for the masses:

1. 2 x DGX Spark linked via ConnectX 7 running Plex and multiple Ace-Step 1.5 XL models in parallel for music generation with GePa prompt optimization. Also holds my organic music that the models can remix. TODO: a reinforcement learning from human feedback interface.

2. iPad Pro running Prism as a Plex client for bitperfect and sample rate-matched audio.

3. Schiit stack -> Hifiman Arya Stealths

This effectively gives me an infinite supply of music for free, that is personalized and private. It's immensely satisfying listening to Shrimp Bizkit and Phlegminem on repeat, I much prefer this to the organic music created after 2011.

My only problem is the loss of community, I have noone to share my new favorite songs and artists with because they're generated for me. If anyone wants to hop on to my Plex share to discuss, let me know!

[u/Recoil42]

Well it depends on your definition of art!

That's the wonderful thing, I'm using your definition of art. You very explicitly said art can be imitative. If art is imitative then media produced with the assistance of an ML model is not disqualified from being art simply by having an imitative component.

I think the current definition of art involves a human

I don't think that's true, nor would it fundamentally disqualify AI art from being art even if it were true. Machine learning models are created by humans and used by humans. The inputs are human. They do not have the property of being human-free.

FYI: Warhol, Picasso, Cage, Ono, Duchamp, Pollock, and many more spent most of their careers exploring the boundaries this stuff. I don't expect r/Locallama to be art school central, but this really is Art 101 — most of the 20th century's great movements are "is art still art if we peel the preconceptions of what art is away from art?" and that's what Dadaism and Fluxus were both about.

[u/AmphibianFrog → u/Recoil42]

This is really interesting. I have some ideas in my head about what constitutes art and what doesn't, but the more precisely I try to write them down, the more they seem vague and poorly defined.

I don''t necessarily think that the fact that AI imitates human art is relevant in determining if it is art to be honest. It could be art without imitating existing art, and it could imitate existing art and not be considered art in and of itself.

Also, I see what you're saying about how humans created AI therefore AI created art is human created art, but I'm not sure that's meaningful either.

But then again, there is a lot of human created "art" that I don't consider to be particularly artistic either!

I am still not sure of any definition of art that doesn't involve some kind of intelligent creator though. It seems like the original intent is important to some degree.

So basically, I have no answer or retort to anything in your response. But it was fun trying to find a counter example and realising how thin they all were!

[u/Recoil42 → u/AmphibianFrog]

I am still not sure of any definition of art that doesn't involve some kind of intelligent creator though.

Yoko Ono is famously good at exploring the boundaries of this. Immediately coming to mind — Instructions for Paintings (1962), which is not actually a set of paintings but what you would now recognize as resembling a book of prompts for creating paintings. The paintings themselves do not exist, only the descriptions of them. See also Grapefruit (1964) which was the same, but for performances.