18 minutes ago, Lindsey. said:

I think all rob was pointing out is you are talking about another song contest that is not BJSC in the BJSC forum and the tags do make it look like you were trying to get traffic from here to enter the other contest you're hosting, there was no criticism of your banner or the reason you're hosting it?? I think if you have queries like that maybe direct them towards the mods of the forum you're hosting something in first or even the mod lounge/help section so there's no confusion with why something is being posted in another topic etc 🤷🏼‍♀️

Well I wasn't, I'd literally just posted the confirmation thread, and thought I'd do the right thing and ask if it was ok as a general practice. As @Iz様 🌟 was the author of this thread, as well as part of the forum management who have oversight on all forum events, including song contests, it seemed perfectly fine to ask my question right here in this thread rather than starting a different topic somewhere else.

I wasn't asking Rob or the other BJSC mods if it was ok for me to have a banner in that contest, as it's obviously not their concern, but I did want to know if there was a "universal" rule or standard that should be applied across all of the song contests on BuzzJack, as that would be much easier to navigate for hosts that do present multiple events during the year across a range of sub-forums on BuzzJack. Is that not what this thread is here for, to invite discussion on AI's use in song contests like BJSC?

It was just a throwaway comment Wardy, don't worry about it x

Not to give any excuse but I honestly feel like I have to give my thoughts regarding AI visuals in BJSC 175!!!

They were just a creative hosting tool for me because I always wanted to create BJSC national airlines, and was not meant to replace or undermine anyone’s work including mine...but since then I became more educated and now I'm more aware regarding the use of AI and I understand why it can feel uncomfortable, and I appreciate it being pointed out...BJSC means a lot to me as a shared space, so peace and love <3.

This is actually the first time I'm learning that the LUNES track was AI. I'd been wondering for weeks why it did so poorly in the final, oops!

Otherwise, nothing new to add. I hope to avoid AI entries altogether but agree it's going to be more and more of an uphill battle over time.

me neither and I was even participating in the Finals listenthrough!

Guess it was when my Wi-Fi suddenly died, but it's weird that I thought I left a comment on the chat during that song.

On the first listen I liked the Lunes song, but after finding out that it is AI it did not get points from me. I want to push real artists.

It is completely understandable that it is not possible to filter out each AI-generated song, so I think it is very difficult to veto each AI-song. What happens if a song wins and it later turns out that it is AI? You cannot filter out everything - this would just lead to safe entries from more or less established artists. I think this is not ewhat we want.

Now that I’ve officially submitted other song for the pop contest, I can share the first whose composer/vocals are AI too. Honestly, even after in the comments, nobody noticed anything.

Song

10 minutes ago, Nine And ¾ said:

Now that I’ve officially submitted other song for the pop contest, I can share the first whose composer/vocals are AI too. Honestly, even after in the comments, nobody noticed anything.

Song

This happens a lot with Youtube comments, partly people so oblivious they leave generic 'beautiful music' comments or something to that effect, and partly bots themselves, dead internet theory and all.

6 hours ago, DaTilt said:

On the first listen I liked the Lunes song, but after finding out that it is AI it did not get points from me. I want to push real artists.

It is completely understandable that it is not possible to filter out each AI-generated song, so I think it is very difficult to veto each AI-song. What happens if a song wins and it later turns out that it is AI? You cannot filter out everything - this would just lead to safe entries from more or less established artists. I think this is not ewhat we want.

Oh true, I have thought that for safety I could go to older entries or an artist I know makes real music, but that does lose some of the discovery magic I'm here for, I might do that more than I used to though.

Hopefully we don't go through an entire contest without uncovering any AI entries, and I think it'd be hard for them to win once it's known. That said, the tech gets better at doing what it's doing each day, so it's quite possible it becomes harder to notice them, duplicitous behaviour in itself of course. I've started looking at song credits and other provenance a lot more closely in the last few months.

22 hours ago, awardinary said:

Well I wasn't, I'd literally just posted the confirmation thread, and thought I'd do the right thing and ask if it was ok as a general practice. As @Iz様 🌟 was the author of this thread, as well as part of the forum management who have oversight on all forum events, including song contests, it seemed perfectly fine to ask my question right here in this thread rather than starting a different topic somewhere else.

I wasn't asking Rob or the other BJSC mods if it was ok for me to have a banner in that contest, as it's obviously not their concern, but I did want to know if there was a "universal" rule or standard that should be applied across all of the song contests on BuzzJack, as that would be much easier to navigate for hosts that do present multiple events during the year across a range of sub-forums on BuzzJack. Is that not what this thread is here for, to invite discussion on AI's use in song contests like BJSC?

I don't mean everything I post to be speaking as an admin, you know - here I'm just someone who enjoys entering a song contest and wants it to continue healthily. Each other song contest runs independently and can do what it likes, but as there's a significant overlap in participants in most of them, I imagine it would turn out much the same.

To add my two cents, I think this is ultimately one of those things where people will vote with their personal conscience on an AI song and ultimately BJSC as a community can dictate the morality of entering a 100% AI generated song - which judging by the comments in this thread is not likely going to be succesful.

I do wonder if we're at a crossroads now though and we're increasingly going to have a lot more songs being released as part of the wider music industry that are at least in part made with AI without it necessarily being disclosed.

In general, I think artists have always sought inspiration, shortcuts, or examples to base their work on. They didn’t take it from AI, but they did borrow from each other. There were plenty of cases of copying, especially from musicians in faraway countries who you’d never hear on your local radio or TV back in, say, 1980. Today, everything can spread much more easily, and copying doesn’t happen in the same way it used to. Samples are used, and big stars have built new songs on someone else’s melodies, shaping their careers in the process.

AI doesn’t invent melodies out of nothing either, it creates music based on what already exists ( stylistically, vocally, melodically ) doing essentially the same things humans did before AI, only illegally, since it doesn’t pay anyone for copyrights on voice, style, melody, etc.

Whether AI has a soul or not, I think, is an individual question. People are the ones who put soul into something and experience it in their own way. Some collect crystals or stones at home, believing they have a soul or emit energy, while others see them as just rocks to throw into a river.

Ultimately, for me AI isn’t creating anything truly new. I also believe that everything in life can be both good and bad, depending on how we, as humans, use it. But we are just humans, and we will inevitably misuse everything, and that’s the biggest problem. People are a bigger problem than AI itself. AI is just a manifestation of everything around us, of ourselves, and ultimately of today’s music industry. It’s a reflection for me.

I had a mild panic last month thinking that Dani Sylvia, who I came 2nd with a few years ago, might actually be an AI artist when I saw this new release:

The cover art is like… exactly what AI comes up with and the song itself is much beneath previous material in almost an AI-like sense and I was like “…surely not?!”. I don’t think she is upon further research but I guess this just backs up the argument that sometimes it is tough to know.

forced enshitification of every aspect of our lives by tech bros and dipshit ceos chasing short term stock market gains by following along the latest pyramid scheme of choice in corporate America does not need to find its way into my online escape thank you

I would prefer a ban on any and all AI generated „music“ from being entered into the contest tbh. It’s not music, and therefore it’s not eligible to participate in a music contest. It’s nothing more than soulless theft of the creativity of real musicians by tech bros with the emotional depth of a piece of paper who see the world purely as dollar sign

It’s a little challenging in practice to get that call (banning an AI song) correct every time and it’s only gonna get harder to detect with time but let’s see.

28 minutes ago, Silas said:

forced enshitification of every aspect of our lives by tech bros and dipshit ceos chasing short term stock market gains by following along the latest pyramid scheme of choice in corporate America does not need to find its way into my online escape thank you

yes comrade

Fully agree with the general consensus in this thread. I think ultimately the problem that I have with AI is replacing the creative process entirely, so not with things like AI stem separation software being utilised to (for example, on the recent Beatles single “Now and Then”) take vocals that would otherwise be unusable to use in an entirely new piece. In many ways I see it similarly to sampling and when that became the new fad back in the 1980s, there were many examples of lazy sampling (parodied by the KLF!) which just simply cut another artists creative output and rearranged it without much thought, and also plenty of other examples - I would cite Liam Howlett of The Prodigy here - he was able to utilise obscure or very different sounding samples, which were meticulously sought out and expertly put together to change up their own piece of music. There is definitely much more creative aptitude demonstrated by the latter and IMO makes a much more interesting sound.

From my own personal experience, we have increasing use of AI now in weather forecasting, at a seminar last summer which discussed AI prediction of tropical weather systems (hurricanes etc.) using historical reanalysis data, I asked about whether AI was only able to simply recreate and predict what was in the dataset already and whether it could predict unprecedented events? They explained that they had tested this and that when they took Cat 4 and Cat 5 hurricanes (the most destructive storms) from the historical training data, the AI models stopped predicting those type of events! So in the context of most things AI really it is just a reflection of our own knowledge and existing creative output and has no place in the creative industries - not only on a moral point but from a practical point too.

Whether you ban outright or leave the collective to judge through the semi-finals/finals etc I'm not too fussed about, though in theory it might be easier to add it to the auto-veto list as that would protect participants from criticism (though I don't believe we would do that, see previous 2 contests) it may, as been shown here, be increasingly difficult to research and may actually exclude genuine artists in error. I don't think you can create a perfect system sadly but I think this community is supportive enough that nobody would be attacked for inadvertently sending or voting for an entirely AI produced track, so I would tend to leave it as a case-by-case basis, even if that is an imperfect solution.

1 hour ago, Doctor Blind said:

Fully agree with the general consensus in this thread. I think ultimately the problem that I have with AI is replacing the creative process entirely, so not with things like AI stem separation software being utilised to (for example, on the recent Beatles single “Now and Then”) take vocals that would otherwise be unusable to use in an entirely new piece. In many ways I see it similarly to sampling and when that became the new fad back in the 1980s, there were many examples of lazy sampling (parodied by the KLF!) which just simply cut another artists creative output and rearranged it without much thought, and also plenty of other examples - I would cite Liam Howlett of The Prodigy here - he was able to utilise obscure or very different sounding samples, which were meticulously sought out and expertly put together to change up their own piece of music. There is definitely much more creative aptitude demonstrated by the latter and IMO makes a much more interesting sound.

From my own personal experience, we have increasing use of AI now in weather forecasting, at a seminar last summer which discussed AI prediction of tropical weather systems (hurricanes etc.) using historical reanalysis data, I asked about whether AI was only able to simply recreate and predict what was in the dataset already and whether it could predict unprecedented events? They explained that they had tested this and that when they took Cat 4 and Cat 5 hurricanes (the most destructive storms) from the historical training data, the AI models stopped predicting those type of events! So in the context of most things AI really it is just a reflection of our own knowledge and existing creative output and has no place in the creative industries - not only on a moral point but from a practical point too.

Whether you ban outright or leave the collective to judge through the semi-finals/finals etc I'm not too fussed about, though in theory it might be easier to add it to the auto-veto list as that would protect participants from criticism (though I don't believe we would do that, see previous 2 contests) it may, as been shown here, be increasingly difficult to research and may actually exclude genuine artists in error. I don't think you can create a perfect system sadly but I think this community is supportive enough that nobody would be attacked for inadvertently sending or voting for an entirely AI produced track, so I would tend to leave it as a case-by-case basis, even if that is an imperfect solution.

I think this pretty much summarises my feelings. As someone who is looking to return to the contest, I didn't even consider that there could be the possibility of sending something AI generated, and that people had sent AI entries recently!

I definitely wouldn't have been making any real attempt to sift them out before, but I've been thinking about it for a few days and it's now something I'm sure I don't want to encourage. I like the idea of using AI as an assistive tool (especially when it comes to drafting documents/taking and summarising notes), and it might even be a reasonable idea in terms of bringing your own songs to life if you need a demo and can't sing - but I'm very much against it being used for any of the creative aspects of the recording process to be honest. In my view, it completely diminishes the value of musicians, and a human vocal should always be used for non-instrumental tracks, where possible! Again, no issues with AI touching up a person's vocal (basically autotune) but I listened to that LUNES song... And that's not even hiding the fact it's pinched Lana Del Rey's voice 😂 Previously, I'd have thought "oh, they sound like Lana", but now if I hear something that sounds too similar to something else, I'll be looking for live performances etc!

That said... I'm not sure they should be banned. My perspective isn't the same as everyone else's, and I think we should all vote for what we feel deserves the votes. This isn't a popularity contest: if people decide an AI song deserves to win, it's not the end of the world, if an AI song flops, then at least the artist is never going to be sad if they were to stumble across this forum and find out that their song wasn't loved by everyone here 🤷‍♂️

I feel very strongly about this. AI "music" is pure theft and plagiarism, and a scourge on an industry already plagued with issues around exploitative streaming services underpaying artists. This slop should not be sold and should not be sitting alongside real work by artists on streaming platforms and stores. It's trained on a vast database of actual work without the consent of artists and spits out unholy generic amalgamations. Unfortunately, it is getting more sophisticated, there are fewer "artefacts" and it's getting harder to tell. If you just want to enjoy a song and aren't listening for it, it can be tricky.

At the very least, I think it should have "[AI]" preferably in the title, or failing that in the same place you get the little "E" for explicit. And it should be banned from being sold commercially.

AI can be a great tool for things like stem separation and other 'engineering' tool. Some creative uses (like Headache, mentioned earlier I don't mind because it was the 'recording' of the voice only, and it was clearly a deliberate artistic decision), generating a specific sample that can be chopped up and manipulated. But a fully AI song that isn't made with intent is artistically worthless and I can't take it seriously. At best, fully generated AI music is alright for non-commercial comedy and satire.

As far as this contest, I won't blame the countries making the entries because of how difficult it is to tell if it is and I'm sure it's not intentional, but the moment I find out a song is AI (and I will be researching songs much more frequently that I used to) I will be vetoing it from my votes. As for looking for entries, I'll either enter older songs or do a lot more research on songs I enter, which is a shame because it used to be so cool finding 'faceless' obscure artists, I'll just have to do all I can to verify they're real. I would love a total ban but in lieu of legislation to clamp down on this shit it's tough to police in an online song contest for mods volunteering their time, I get that.

In terms of using AI for banners etc, no one's selling it. I kind of feel like (even generally speaking) if it's not commercial and it's transparent what it is a lot of the harm is reduced. People don't have infinite time, and it can bring ideas to life... but it has none of the charm that even lil paint jobs have. Even though it's unlikely people would commission art for a contest like this so no artists are missing out, I feel the same way about AI 'art' as I do music, I'd much rather see real art. As far as this contest goes it's a lesser evil and hosting is a tough job (or seems to be, haven't had the opportunity yet! :O ) so I get why people use it, it's more about the idea/ concept when hosting, and the key thing is it's voluntary, not commercial.