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Suno, an AI music generator

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Re: Suno, an AI music generator

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans and computers are different. It’s perfectly reasonable to treat a human being listening to something and taking inspiration differently from a computer listening to everything ever recorded.

Why is it perfectly reasonable to discriminate against the computer? Would the same apply to someone - with equivalent photographic memory - who listens to a ton of music and is thus inspired?

I think one difference is in how humans learn vs. how AI learns. A human could hear a very small amount of music and start mimicking it. AI -- at least in its present state -- needs to be trained on a huge quantity of music to start doing anything productive. What that difference means, exactly, is debatable, but it's a difference, and, I believe, one that begs deeper contemplation of laws surrounding AI use of copyrighted materials.

Another difference is one of scale. We've seen this in other areas, like surveillance. A random security camera here and there, or a random street photographer here and there, most people didn't really find objectionable. Besides which, any captured photographs or video had to be manually inspected for persons of interest. But start surveilling everyone in public, all the time, and using technology to track everyone automatically, and it starts to seem like a different construct.

A human producer putting out material that another human learns from, quotes from, paraphrases from, builds new things based on... well, that still requires time and dedication on the part of the learner. And there will be a correspondingly limited amount of new derivative material based on what the "teacher" producer created. AI systems offer the possibility for effectively unlimited derivative material, produced at an unprecedented rate.

Existing copyright laws, and existing social norms around creation of "intellectual property", have been formed with humans in mind. Humans who operate at a human rate of production, and who learn with a human style of learning. Some maybe be more efficient than others, but not so drastically different in form as AI.

Re: Suno, an AI music generator

#152
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating a song about AI taking over, and backing it with the most derivative EDM hip pop, that's some brilliant irony.

Artists: I can't make this it's too similar to my other work / other artists. Listeners: Oh yeah, that scratches the noggin, give me 10 more just like that. The drive to have to have to create something genuinely novel is how neo-classical, art and fashion got to their current state which, while interesting, is completely divorced from the kind of clothes real people actually wear or art people hang on their walls. A…

Sure you can say that popular music is all genres and formulas, but it was an artist that broke past what was common in the first place to arrive at that now-popular style of music.

Without real artists, AI is just going to lock us into the same genres of music for a very long time.

Re: Suno, an AI music generator

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like you've never played an early access game

> It's like you've never played an early access game It's like you've never thought about why we in the game industry release early access games. Getting critical feedback from people invested enough to buy into a beta test is the whole point. Even if we don't agree with any given critique, knowing that a non-zero number of players hate some mechanic, thinks something is unbalanced, or encounter irritating usability…

Though apparently not gude enough for guding my speling.

Re: Suno, an AI music generator

#154
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also a prototype, you are numb and spoiled by the speed of technological advancements. Like with good art, you need to learn how to appreciate it, see it not for whether it can be useful to you for 10$, but for what it can be in the future with a cost structure so cheap they can afford to run it on 10$ subscriptions.

> It's also a prototype, you are numb and spoiled by the speed of technological advancements. > Like with good art, you need to learn how to appreciate it, see it not for whether it can be useful to you for 10$, but for what it can be in the future with a cost structure so cheap they can afford to run it on 10$ subscriptions. Nonsense. This isn't a university research team or a FOSS project-- it's a commercial art pr…

I'm not even necessarily disappointed, I'm just observing that ultimately there's a lot that needs to happen for this to really be what they're marketing it as. I had a great time with it, generated a bunch of goofy music and got value out of it, but there's nothing it made that I'd actually listen to casually for my own enjoyment and lots of the songs are "music shapes." When I actually tried to drive toward a specific outcome I had to tweak the lyrics manually to make them rhyme and fit in meter and then generate about 12 variations before I got a single one where things were in time and it sounded like A Song.

Re: Suno, an AI music generator

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans and computers are different. It’s perfectly reasonable to treat a human being listening to something and taking inspiration differently from a computer listening to everything ever recorded.

Why is it perfectly reasonable to discriminate against the computer? Would the same apply to someone - with equivalent photographic memory - who listens to a ton of music and is thus inspired?

Because computers don't have any of the limitations that most humans, even ones with photographic memories, have.

Re: Suno, an AI music generator

#156
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also music for other functions: entertainment, background, dancing. Perhaps it finds niche there, because -let's be honest- most of the music in that category is made on the automatic pilot anyway. But I also find it an idiotic attempt. It doesn't inform us about anything, and it makes any idiot with a mouse think they can create. Instead, they're listening to music that's worse than what YouTube has to offe…

> Perhaps it finds niche there, because -let's be honest- most of the music in that category is made on the automatic pilot anyway. Can you give some examples? In my experience, most music, even music we think of as banal or boring, had a pretty significant amount of effort, and creativity, put into its creation.

It takes some effort to learn, but once you know, it's not that hard. Musicians under time pressure to produce (and that's most of them) don't try to be very original and take all the shortcuts they can. Make a bar with a simple beat, pick some sounds, a standard chord progression, and then imitate whatever the current trend is. Art music is different. That won't budge so easily.

What's worrying is that even e.g. amateur film makers can now access something like Suno, and won't be offering their amateur musician friends an opportunity to learn. And once the incentive to learn and improve has gone, people will stop and music will wither.

Re: Suno, an AI music generator

#157
post #79

Being a musical artist isn't about knowing how to use tools to make a sound, it's about having the taste to know which sounds out of many are the right ones to express what you're trying to say. It's about having an idea you want to create to put out into the world. People without ideas and taste will play with this stuff for a while because it feels like it gives them a shortcut to talent, but after a while the nove…

Any thoughts on the part you missed out, actually talented people using these tools to either accelerate their production or even perform as a different type of/genre of performer outside the constraints of their physicality. Think those lines of discussion are far more interesting than the well trodden "low talents will use it, then fail" path.

I made no comment on whether talented people should explore AI tools. I’m a musician and they’re pretty interesting. But they’re not a shortcut to talent, which is what I think some people treat them as.

Re: Suno, an AI music generator

#158
post #79

Being a musical artist isn't about knowing how to use tools to make a sound, it's about having the taste to know which sounds out of many are the right ones to express what you're trying to say. It's about having an idea you want to create to put out into the world. People without ideas and taste will play with this stuff for a while because it feels like it gives them a shortcut to talent, but after a while the nove…

What percentage of the artists that are currently earning a living by making music have taste?

Not really my concern; I don’t listen to mindless garbage. I’m aware there’s a lot of it. (And about to be a lot more!)

Re: Suno, an AI music generator

#159
post #102

The AI hype articles and people subsequently hyping up how good ${thing} will eventually be are, themselves, starting to feel like a type of grey sludge, like a more potent form of semantic satiation which washes over the entire brain. I just can't get enough of that grey, training-data flavoured content. In years to come many of the top creators of this type of content will be creating content with this. This will d…

Don't forget "It's time to change laws to accommodate this groundbreaking technology in a way that will benefit the company that created ${content machine} and absolutely no one else."

Re: Suno, an AI music generator

#160
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

suno v3 actually generates some really good music. most genres are more formulaic than people want to believe.

The real question is who is going to make the next new genre if there's no money in being a musician. You can't tell suno v3 to make a "grunge" song if "grunge" doesn't exist yet.

This is actually my favorite thing to do in suno. "lowfi, chill, accordion" "breakbeat, doom, xylophone"

You can literally invent 4 genres in parallel in 10 seconds.

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