“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

Personally, I think “no gen ai music” would be well-enough understood as a rule to exclude AI generated songs but not music where AI has been used as a novel tool as part of the production process.

Alternatively, you could hold off on adding a rule like that and leave upvotes/downvotes as the method for evaluating posts with gen ai music. If this community starts to get inundated with low quality posts you could then revisit enforcing a rule?

“Was it possible before 2020?” is a decent rule of thumb. I’ve written procedural music for 4 MHz computers. It’s not good, but it’s fundamentally distinct from having a robot do the thing for you. It is entirely reasonable for any community to say no thank you to that kind of effortless content.

That said: I have no personal objections to the robot that does the thing for you. Too many comments and blog posts go ‘oh it’s terrible, I’d never tolerate this in my industry… anyway here’s how I use it in my hobbies.’ I don’t play those games. The tech is fine. It’s a jack-of-all-trades. People can and will use it to entertain themselves, and each other. Whatever grand philosophical declarations we can make about art - you can still do everything the hard way, for those high-minded goals. People putting on the uninterrupted smooth jazz channel while they read are not listening to music in the same mindset as whoever’s working that saxaphone.

I think there’s a difference between say a sequencer that has a machine learning model behind it, and a model that’s trained on stolen music that takes words as input and outputs slop.

If you look at Synthesizer V for example, the voice providers were compensated and aware of what they are signing up for. The providers in the past back when it was concatenative synthesis who didn’t feel comfortable with a machine learning library, haven’t gotten one (e.g. Cangqiong). It’s also a much smaller company operating on a different scale. You won’t find Kanru Hua or Dreamtonics lobbying the American government bribing the U.S. president so they can be above the law. Sure, nowadays I’m sure they rent a server farm for their training, but I recall Hua training the initial models on his PC in the late 201Xs.

I think for me personally that’s where the sweet spot is, machine learning used to be a helpful tool in a creative process. Whether it replicates a voice, or an instrument, or helps filter noise. It can be done in a manner that doesn’t involve theft or the ruination of communities.