What if AI made the best BOC album you'd ever heard?

[luminousdusk]

I guess a comparable thing is, let's say you met a girl online and spent weeks talking to her every day, you click hugely and fall in love. Would you be disappointed if you eventually found out she was an AI?

I think this is a reasonable analogy

[μasch]

Telling IDM to not experiment with IA is like saying to kid to never dare to have fun with the new toys that just came out.

I think you're maybe missing the point of the thread. I'm not at any point saying that people shouldn't experiment with AI, I am myself loving interacting with it. ChatGPT is genuinely incredible and I can see so many positive use cases for it.

I'm simply asking the question, when we can for instance put into the command line "write me an album in the exact same style as Boards of Canada", and then we find that the AI generated music is indistinguishable from BOC themselves, will you care?

You know it's funny that you're asking that, because from my understanding, BOC is probably one of the most clonned electronic band. And a lot of BOC-alikes manage to pratically mimick perfectly the duo's style.

Yet i never saw anyone complaine that those ppl were impersonating and making obsolete the interest in the original material.
But suddenly an AI does it and everyone panics... i mean come on.
(btw i'm not specifically pointing to you ofc , but i have seen my fair share of moral panicking over twitter to be fed up of the debate entirely)

This is a non-issue for one simple reason : both human and machine boc clones are based on what's already known and expected from their discography. However BOC is also known to have always pushed their music in directions radically different from those previous experiences (tomorow's harvest, geogaddi etc.).
So in the end, it really doesn't matter if you can copy what they already made, because they will keep making stuff that is different and unexpected (so far they have).

So yeah no worries, AI or not, BOC is still going to be BOC.

[μasch]

I guess a comparable thing is, let's say you met a girl online and spent weeks talking to her every day, you click hugely and fall in love. Would you be disappointed if you eventually found out she was an AI?

Btw I'm on the Topdown Dialectic bandcamp, what's the story? I've never heard of them before.

Weird and off topic analogy IMO

There is a major difference between an AI used to make sound/music and a virtual/AI Artist.
One of those two already existed for a while in the music industry, and the other is absolutly not dehumanizing in anyway.

Unless you think AI will always be equal to virtual artists made by corporations, but then thats quite the slippery slope...

[luminousdusk]

Weird and off topic analogy IMO

I think an analogy has the right to be off topic lol but really I think it's a fair analogy..
It's about becoming emotionally invested in something only for that to be subverted

What if you were to buy a rare vinyl, An Aquarius single for instance and found out upon receiving it that it was a very good counterfeit.. Wouldn't you care?
Just because it wasn't an original Boc pressing why would that matter? The music is the same and the vinyl looks feels and plays the same so what's the difference? You like the music and that's all that matters right

[Wildfire]

You know it's funny that you're asking that, because from my understanding, BOC is probably one of the most clonned electronic band. And a lot of BOC-alikes manage to pratically mimick perfectly the duo's style.

Yet i never saw anyone complaine that those ppl were impersonating and making obsolete the interest in the original material.
But suddenly an AI does it and everyone panics... i mean come on.
(btw i'm not specifically pointing to you ofc , but i have seen my fair share of moral panicking over twitter to be fed up of the debate entirely)

The way AI is going, it will be nothing like these 'BOC-a-likes' that we all know and sometimes love. It won't be a slightly naive and clumsy attempt like most of them are. I can always tell when someone is trying to be BOC, but it's always missing something quite fundamental to their sound.

AI will be able to pick up on those nuances and do it far more realistically. I think a lot of people in this thread are really quite underestimating just how powerful it is already, let alone the speed at which it's improving. The general consensus is that it will always be distinguishable, it has no soul and therefore will never match. I guarantee you that soul too can be simulated.

[Orbited insanitarium]

The way AI is going, it will be nothing like these 'BOC-a-likes' that we all know and sometimes love. It won't be a slightly naive and clumsy attempt like most of them are. I can always tell when someone is trying to be BOC, but it's always missing something quite fundamental to their sound.

AI will be able to pick up on those nuances and do it far more realistically. I think a lot of people in this thread are really quite underestimating just how powerful it is already, let alone the speed at which it's improving. The general consensus is that it will always be distinguishable, it has no soul and therefore will never match. I guarantee you that soul too can be simulated.

You know something we don't.

I'd like to bring up a WATMM thread (grrr, arch-rivals ) about an album that has been called by members as a pastiche and a strained homage to BoC. https://forum.watmm.com/topic/103396-pr ... er-to-boc/

[media]https://youtu.be/lKvAAgLqp08[/media]
It ties into this discussion as (although personal preference) I have thought if AI would replicate boards, it may sound quite like this. Gave it a wee go myself, I'd say the album itself has a cleaner, less muddied take on the brothers music. I could probably extend a blasé mini-review to writing something more detailed, but I haven't played it much to do so.
How does it fare to you?

[jcnporter]

The way AI is going, it will be nothing like these 'BOC-a-likes' that we all know and sometimes love. It won't be a slightly naive and clumsy attempt like most of them are. I can always tell when someone is trying to be BOC, but it's always missing something quite fundamental to their sound.

AI will be able to pick up on those nuances and do it far more realistically. I think a lot of people in this thread are really quite underestimating just how powerful it is already, let alone the speed at which it's improving. The general consensus is that it will always be distinguishable, it has no soul and therefore will never match. I guarantee you that soul too can be simulated.

You know something we don't.

I'd like to bring up a WATMM thread (grrr, arch-rivals ) about an album that has been called by members as a pastiche and a strained homage to BoC. https://forum.watmm.com/topic/103396-pr ... er-to-boc/

[media]https://youtu.be/lKvAAgLqp08[/media]
It ties into this discussion as (although personal preference) I have thought if AI would replicate boards, it may sound quite like this. Gave it a wee go myself, I'd say the album itself has a cleaner, less muddied take on the brothers music. I could probably extend a blasé mini-review to writing something more detailed, but I haven't played it much to do so.
How does it fare to you?

Had a look at that thread, have to say I don't hear the similarity to the same extent those guys are. The first track on the thread maybe a bit in terms of the voices and some off-key notes (no idea what the correct musical term is but hopefully you get whet I mean). As you say, it has none of the 'degrading' processing that surely is the signature of the BOC sound?
If it isn't re-recorded through 50 different bits of 1970s audio equipment, it ain't BOC to me!

[luminousdusk]

I gave it a listen, sounds like a lot of different bands really, I don't think BoC sounds like the main inspiration, lots of autechre aphex and snares in there too but yeah it's pretty cool

[Wildfire]

Weird and off topic analogy IMO

Not really, both situations are ultimately about human connection, whether it's listening to music or falling in love. Removing the human element from both situations, for me anyway, removes the enjoyment.