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Let us and the other members of the forum know how you feel about including an AI sub-forum on Young Composers Forum! Reply to this thread if you don't see an answer in the poll that you'd like to see (click "Other"). The staff will take into account the opinions of the members at large but reserve the right to make the final decisions regarding the future of AI on Young Composer's Forum. During the recent 2025 Christmas Music Event the Young Composer's Forum has experienced an unprecedented influx of AI generated music into the forum. This has caused quite a bit of contention and adversity not only for the members but also for the staff. We have argued about all the different reasons why AI should and shouldn't be included in the forum and have given many different rationales for each point of view. Here are some of our thoughts: @chopin: I'm ok with it, as long as submissions are handled in a dedicated subforum, AND the following: You must explain your process. Did you write a series of prompts? Did you mix tracks? If so, are these tracks AI or human created? If this is a song with lyrics,the lyrics must be original. @Thatguy v2.0: I think AI generated music should be banned on our forum. I'm not talking about it's use in sound samples, like AI generation in voice samples for a vocal piece, or making string instruments sound as lifelike as possible. Sound samples are just really good now. This is a composing forum, dedicated to the art of composition. Typing words as a prompt for machines to output sounds is offensive to me as an artist, especially when calling it your own composition. The issue I have with an AI subforum is that it will always be tied to the site as a whole. The original intent of a place where young people could learn from more experienced composers and also share compositions of all styles and skill levels is gone. I'm sure it's neat to see what AI comes up with with whatever creative words one could share with it, and I'm also sure that we could all learn some interesting things from it's output. But do we need YC to have that? Or should that knowledge be gained somewhere more appropriate? Analyzing it from a studious viewpoint isn't something I'm guessing would be the reason people are sharing their AI music. It will mostly be just promotion, but maybe I'm wrong on that (I guess a lot of people already use YC for that lol). @Henry Ng Tsz Kiu: I am against AI music, since I think it's sacrilegious to those who really work hard on their own to write their music. Using AI to compose for me is just an act of theft without really assimilating those great music in the past. To involve AI to their creative process to compose and call the outcome "their" "music" and call themselves "composers" is just a shameful act. YC to me is a place where both the composer and the reviewers can learn by giving and receiving feedbacks, and both sides should have give and take. In the case of AI "composers", they can only take and wouldn't be able to provide useful feedback except luring other members to use AI like them (just like drugs), and when they receive any feedback they wouldn't be able to change the details of their very "own" "music", apart from clicking another button to create another music track. This will literally ruin the crucial function of YC as a forum. Nonetheless I still welcome an AI subforum, definitely not for the reason of liking AI music, but to me it's like the legalisation of alcohol and smoking. There's no way to prohibit people using AI to "compose" at all, and given the trend the number of AI "composers" will only increase. Having an AI subforum may attract those newcomers who don't know how to write to our forum, check out other members' works and start to really write with their brain, instead of outsourcing their brain to AI. Also, AI may develop in a way that knowing its trend would be important, and having an AI subforum would be beneficial to knowing the trend. Prohibiting AI music to enter any events/competitions is my bottom line. @Omicronrg9: (he is sick and will express his opinion in due time) @UncleRed99: (see his reply below) @PeterthePapercomPoser: My rationale for why AI music should be included is that I, as a composer, value good music and good musical ideas regardless of where they come from and am always willing to learn from whatever piece of music gets created either by human or machine or a combination of both. My rationale for not including AI is that it might open the forum up to people who inspire dissent on both sides of the aisle. Composers who don't use AI may inspire dissent because they don't want to be classed among others who just wrote a prompt for an AI and want to call themselves "composers" for that reason. People who support AI and use AI to make music may inspire dissent because they think they belong to our community without the knowledge and effort that such membership usually requires. Those "composers" then feel on an even playing field and feel free to critique or evaluate other composers music without really knowing nor caring how much know-how it takes to create your own piece of music from scratch.

Quoting what I wrote in a thread earlier: Furthermore, unless a sub-forum for AI music can be quarantined, I strong believe that all AI music should be banned. Quarantining in this context means nothing posted in this sub-forum will be presented to users by default, unless they specifically looked for it (new posts/replies in this sub-forum will not show up on the sidebar on the main page etc). Without quarantining, just making an AI sub-forum is the equivalent of allowing AI to exist on this website in its current form.

Poem: w- wheigh- waken oh wheigh- oh waken glare... ...dithers ...flares ...n'fathom ...oblivio- Explanation in score :). Musescore.com Link I have a love for minimalist, kinda hard to understand poetry like this. I have been in a composer's block for a bit and decided that wth, I'll make a score in the same way I've taken to poetry: With limitations and a time restraint. You may disagree with my interpration of the scale, that is OK with me. It is more of a label than anything else, at least I struggle to find a clear tonic in pieces like these. Really the decision of the scale and therefore my naming of the piece in B-flat is just based on my initial limitation. Microtonal fingerings have been tested (and measured) by me on the clarinet. For a player more clarity would obviously be involved (charts). Explanation (5th page, not sent here because it includes personal information): Poem explained: w- wheigh- waken oh wheigh- oh awaken glare [at the sun] [the sun] dithers [the sun] flares [the sun does] n'fathom (=doesn't fathom) [to your existence the sun is completely and utterly] oblivio-[us] Liner note to composition: I was experimenting with some notes on the clarinet and ended in a fun pentatonic scale. In a throwback to an interest, or perhaps an obsession, in obscure scales I had back around the time of Covid, I decided to try to limit myself into an odd scale. In B flat the scale is basically a Lydian with a minor seventh and an augmented third. The intro and outro (solo parts) experiment with some very small microtones I found on the clarinet. For any additional information or questions, feel free to contact me Written on the night between jan 4th and 5th 2026 while watching the WJC ice hockey match between Finland and Sweden.

My answer of "Other" on Question 1; I don't downright "hate" the idea of generated music, as we've adapted as a society from traditionally only ever using real live instruments for music, into the use of MIDI, VST2/3, and other realistically generated playback sound. So I believe it has its uses. I've even from time to time, as a sort of "test" to AI like GPT for example, submitted a PDF and .mp3 copy of something insignificant that I wrote to the AI to see if it is truly able to determine the tonality, mood, and atmosphere of the music, while also experimenting with how well it was able to provide fast and productive feedback on the score itself. I can't say it did as good a job as people here who share my level of expertise and well beyond it, but in a pinch, It was able to identify the mistakes that I made, intentionally, on the score, as a test for what it was truly capable of and what level of knowledge in Music theory was available to it. It was dead wrong about a couple of things, as I tend to notice regularly when you ask an AI a direct question without any leading context. So the advice received should be taken with a grain of salt. Also why I believe that Bot generated music can N E V E R be a genuine form of music simply due to the fact that it's incapable of understanding the true purpose of music, it's intended affect on the human mind and emotional center, and will never be able to live up to the true original's standards of creativity. All it will do is utilize what it can find online and on streaming platforms to mimic impactful sounding music. Which to some may be enough, but to me that undermines the entire community of people who spend hours, days, weeks, months or even years to compose something intricate of the same length / duration of music that could be created with AI in seconds, and is created without any true "thought" or "feeling" put into it. Regarding my Other answer of the last Question; Potentially, we could add a form to fill out with required fields in the sub-forums for music submission posts... Such as; Work Title (untitled if not yet established): _________________________________________ Composer/Username: _____________________________ Key Signature (Maj./Min.): _______________________________________ Starting time signature: ______________ Instrumentation or Ensemble Type: ___________________________ Additional Details: ___________________________ Description of Piece: _______________________________________... *required Please attach a plain (or) watermarked PDF copy of your score (for Notation Software Users), including either a YouTube Link or attached .MP3 file for playback. If using DAW software, please attach both a MIDI file, .MP3/YT Link, as well as a description of MIDI, VST2/3 Instruments used and a few of the FX Editor plugins that were used, in order help maintain the orchestral compositional authenticity of our community 🙂- Sorry, must've had a brain fart right here. fixed it. Obviously this is simply a suggested set of questions that would be up for consideration, editing/alteration, omission etc... but I feel that this would curb most if not all low-effort "hey guys look, I just wrote this today" **(Attaches a fully mastered, 5 minute long EDM track, fresh out of the shower wearing Day clothes after trying to pass it off like they created a fully completed track with full mastering and editing by working on it tirelessly all day long just for it to have been an AI the whole time after they simply asked it like 3 prompts to alter results...)**