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judge2020 | on: We should be more ambitious with the software we build
I think so. Regardless of what drummer() is, I think the important part is disclosure, and thus expectations.

If I found out afterwards that your album's songs each had a single long recording of a drum track that you didn't make or refine at all, i'd be upset, because I thought the album was your creative output and that you carefully chose how it was constructed.

If you tell me upfront "the drums are a placeholder while I work on how to do them" then I can still enjoy the rest of the album, whether that part of the track is AI or not. But if you instead were to go in and take the time to carefully craft the drum track for the album, I don't care if AI was used to make the actual waveforms of the drum beats.

I think the problem is that, the more AI is used as a way to take shortcuts in your work, the less I can attribute to you, and the more it's just "correct" and thus generic. If you use AI as a tool to enable you to do creative work, then I think it's fine, I just want to know what I should judge as being 'you'.

Similar thing: Epic: The Musical is a concept album made in Logic Pro X. None of the instruments actually played or were recorded (at least by Jorge). But I enjoy the album on the basis of how Jorge's mind arranged the instruments, how the songs are written, the humans singing it and the emotions they put into their performance, etc. I don't think anyone thinks Jorge hired an orchestra nor sat there and played all those instruments himself.

So, when someone says that they like the trumpet in some part of a song in Epic, they're actually saying that they enjoy (A) the trumpet is there at that specific moment, and (B) and what decisions Jorge made for it - like its length, any effects added to create its sound profile, etc. This person probably subconsciously knows that Jorge did not actually blow into a trumpet to make that part of the song.

williamcotton | parent
Imagine the attribution for the drum tracks is "Hire-a-Drummer". Neither the artist nor the listener know if the actual drum tracks were from a human drummer, a programmed drum machine, or AI.

Is the issue, "hey, it might be AI, therefore on a metaphysical level I do not enjoy this as much as if I knew for certain that the drums were recorded by a real drummer"?

Or separately and without the complication of "Hire-a-Drummer", what about failing to disclose that drum tracks were hand-sequenced on a drum machine?

Or separately, is the issue that the drums were outsourced in the first place?

That is to say, if a human drummer is hired and the only instruction is to "add some dope beats to this track" and the drum tracks are used thereafter without any further refinement, does/should this affect the listener's perception?

judge2020 | root | parent
It's the outsourcing at all, and it mostly just changes how I see a song. A ton of R&B tracks have their underlying beat outsourced, and you know that because the songs have a producer tag (and the producer gets credit in the metadata), but they're still enjoyable. A producer tag for AI would be nice but I know it won't happen.
williamcotton | root | parent
So a singer-songwriter who plays all the instruments, produces and records all of their material? I mean, do we get down to the details of microphone choice and positioning?
horsawlarway | root | parent
https://xkcd.com/378/

This is what comes to mind reading this thread.