Comment by neom
2 days ago
I've been having fun making stuff in Suno, I'm not a musician but I've always enjoyed "producing tracks" using Abelton and find the Suno + Abelton combo to be real magic on the weekends. I think some of the stuff I made isn't too bad and I'd love feedback on it. For a few weeks I went back and forth about uploading them to my soundcloud and resolve with this: I wouldn't have insisted we only allowed art made with MS paint on deviantART, we didn't even enforce quality (tho we highlighted) - we enforced the type of kindness that leads to learning and growth. I hope we can have places for professionals and places for people to display and play with creativity and art irrespective of the tooling. :)
Whenever I see defences of AI "art" people very often reduce the arguments to these analogies of using tools, but it's ineffective. Whether you use MS Paint, Photoshop, pencil, watercolor etc. That all requires skill, practice, and is this great intersection of intent and ability. It's authentic. Generating media with AI requires no skill, no intent, and very minimal labor. It is an approximation of the words you typed in and reduces you to a commissioner. You created nothing. You commissioned a work from a machine and are claiming creative authorship.
You are correct. I wouldn’t waste your time arguing with people who don’t get it.
Those people don’t tend to have a good understanding of what most humans like and why they like stuff like music.
Sure, but you also just disregarded a whole swath of people who use the tools/abstractions as a component of the composition of a final work. If I download a free vector of a premade sun to put into my final multimodal image, how is that any less authentic to me and my work? You feel like I cheated? Not how you would do it? This reminds me of when the film industry moved to digital and the pro associations said for contest submissions, first no digital at all, then it was ok for you to use digital post production but not a digital camera.
Obviously it's a sliding scale, but suno is allllll the way on one end. It's no more work than me contacting an artist and just asking him to write and produce me a song. I didn't do anything, I commissioned it.
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> a whole swath of people who use the tools/abstractions as a component of the composition of a final work.
But that is allowed on bandcamp? It's not allowed if it's mostly done with AI.
A: This post is part of an eternal debate about art: Do we appreciate the finished work, or the artist? This post is firmly in the latter camp. There are also solid arguments for the other extreme.
B: Having spent some time trying to make songs with Suno, I can assure you it takes more skills than I have...
We humans use machines to make art. Robots may use a machine but that imagio deo component is missing.
I used to sing dumb songs like when changing my kids diaper I’d sing “you got a STINKY DIAPER, you got a stinky diaper and it smelled like pee, oh don’t you knoooow what I mean” sung to Deo’s Holy Diver. Just dumb stuff like that.
I still sing songs like that, only now I’ve got almost an hour of dumb songs that Suno has made, like my kid asked “what if we just put in gibberish and the word poop a lot?” As kids do, and we got this absolutely bizarre Europop song where a dude sings his heart out about poopy poop, and my kids now sing this tune. It’s been nonstop laughs. My daughter is into Harry Potter and we made a song together just about her turning her hair green in potions class, with harpsichord and a theremin. We’re having a great time. I’m never going to be an artist and never going to try to make money off this stuff. I’m just making weird little bespoke memories with me and my kids.
I don't think they're arguing about personal use of AI to make something silly shared between family and friends. It's when those songs you made in an instant start to flood platforms where people took weeks, months or years to release an album they crafted by traditional methods. I don't want to discredit the joy you have in making fun songs with your family. I'm curious what is also gained if you made the songs by making instruments out of strings and pans, and performing / improving your own song from scratch. I'm sure the end result is the same, lots of joy and laughs. But something is definitely lost when the slow process of humble hand made creativity is exchanged for polished instant results. But maybe instant gratification is just the new mode of consumption. Ai promises that with a "good enough" button and my fear is that it will be extended to every facet of life.
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Would you trade your livelihood to continue to make such music? Would you trade someone else’s livelihood?
Because ultimately that is what is being marketed/sold right.
You are assuming a very specific form of generation. There are plenty of levels in between. Simply saying "AI" isn't sufficient to make an argument.
Well said. The credit is with the model; you commissioned it but did not create it.
With AI art... there is no passion, there is no pain, there is no emotion, there is no sex, there is no feeling, there is no reason. When Blaze Foley sang If I Could Only Fly or Nina Simone sang Stars or Bardot sang Je t'aime or Morricone wrote Se telefonando or Vermeer painted Zicht op Delft or Orozco painted his Epic of American Civilization or Maugham wrote Of Human Bondage or Stoppard wrote Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead or Cheever wrote The Swimmer there was a magnificent concentration of real feeling and a real reason that each of these things were made.
Could you imagine someone prompting a model, receiving the result, and then saying, as Cheever did about The Swimmer:
>It was a terribly difficult story to write. I couldn't ever show my hand. Night was falling, the year was dying. It wasn't a question of technical problems, but one of imponderables. When he finds it dark and cold, it has to have happened. And by God, it did happen. I felt dark and cold for some time after I finished that story.
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To me, the reason for art is feeling, and the problem is that most things don't really provide feeling - if they do, it is a cheap and one-dimensional feeling. Almost all art and music and literature (and food, wine, architecture, poetry, photography, theatre, dance) that people consume today is _good enough_. It is correct, it satisfies. You listen to some hours of good-enough music on Spotify and the music is all correct and you come across "Chill77"'s AI-generated Papaoutai cover and you think that it is good. After all, it seems to have fooled a number of genuine Stromae fans. But the real function of art is not to satisfy. It is to reduce you to tears or silence or lust or anger or some beautiful cocktail of feeling. Of course, in the right context, with enough supporting factors, anything can produce emotion, but the best art needs little or nothing to make you feel. Bad art and good art are all around us, but the great is rare. That rarity is why people enjoy AI art: they forget the last time they felt, the AI is good, and that is enough.
The sad thing, of course, is that to make the great you must make a hell of a lot of bad and a fair amount of simply good art. And then there are those who have no delusions of grandeur but just make art for the sake of it. AI art cheapens those things; it makes them a trivial undertaking. The architect who would have become great on the completion of his two hundred and seventh building can now generate the first two hundred and six with the push of a button. The woman making fliers for her dance club - each one no great work of art, but certainly made with care and love, sees now that her work is useless and stops. We all lose.
Your comment made me read "The Swimmer" for the first time. Thanks.
I'm a professional artist. I don't use AI as it's just not there yet.
But I don't consider using AI all that different to using a camera. A photographer still has plenty of work to do with composition and framing, the lighting, the subject mater, even timing. I still consider a photographer an artist.
I think an AI artist will have a lot to consider as well. To distinguish themselves from other AI artists.
Update: When I say the AI tools are not there yet, its precisely because I can't seem to get the AI to take feedback or instructions. I can't adjust the lighting to create the mood I want, I can't tweak the framing.
That argument is pretty close to what people used to say about photography.
In reality its more about the candler maker seeing gaslighting down the road. You are not going to compete.
If it were so easy to create good AI music, I'd be able to do it all myself instead of following so many artists. But it takes a lot of skill.
You're barking up the wrong tree. You're trying to tell artists about "skill", when they've spent lots of time (potentially thousands of hours!) getting good at their craft.
Your snobbery will be short-lived as tools eclipse our "art", and creativity is revealed as nothing inherently unique to humans.
Creativity, fundamentally, is overlapping memories of what you have seen already. Literally no different than any diffusion or transformer model.
You painting a piece of art or composing a song was really the functional output of billions of cells coordinating in unison, 100% subconsciously, and the thoughts that arose out of your subconscious were entirely (or mostly, to avoid free will debate) out of your control. Your output was the product of billions of years of stellar and biological evolution on top of millennia of human history and influence. You created nothing.
Soon you will have to grapple with the reality of what really drives your enjoyment of media, and part of that will be realizing that the human-ness never mattered at all.
Is beautiful nature scenery not beautiful because it wasnt hand-crafted painstakingly by a creative human? Of course it is. There is no intuition for the vast swaths of time it took to form, that is a modern human conceptualization that came long after we already found nature to be beautiful.
We have a biological pattern recognition tuned for beauty regardless of its origin. And there is nothing inherently unbeautiful about elegant software that can produce beautiful "art". Nor is there any justifiable, defensible, or intellectually honest way to argue that the human/effort element in art matters in any way besides perhaps portraying and conveying social status.
I really disagree with the level of glee you display in predicting that artists will be replaced - that said, this:
>Soon you will have to grapple with the reality of what really drives your enjoyment of media, and part of that will be realizing that the human-ness never mattered at all.
is a good point that many media consumers will at some point have to come to grips with. There is a sense, almost accelerationist, in which the machine-generation of vast amounts of enjoyable media (let's not pretend none of it will be enjoyable) forces people to reconsider what drives their engagement with art/entertainment, what value there really is in sitting still for 2 hours to watch a movie or listen to music no matter how good. (As you can see all over this comment section most people have staggeringly naive ideas about art)
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> Creativity, fundamentally, is overlapping memories of what you have seen already. Literally no different than any diffusion or transformer model.
Every individual has a unique experience, and assimilates different things from their experiences depending on their personal tastes and culture. That is profoundly different from a model which assimilates the output of hundreds of thousands of individuals. A model has no creative, or artistic voice. Your argument is anti-humanistic, nihilistic nonsense, and also trivially verifiably wrong given no model today has produced music or art of any value.
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I am a musician, in the “accomplished amateur” category. For me, music is a never-ending journey of learning and skill-building, and I’ve come to appreciate that journey as much or more than the destination (= recording or live performance). If you gave me a one-click button to improve my skills, I’m not sure I would click it— I’d rather get there myself.
I’d encourage you to dig deeper into why and how the music that is being created by those tools works.
> If you gave me a one-click button to improve my skills, I’m not sure I would click it— I’d rather get there myself.
And I would much prefer to hear your music over machine-generated music even if the generated music is technically better performed.
"If you gave me a one-click button to improve my skills, I’m not sure I would click it— I’d rather get there myself." - Me too! :) I use suno to gen vocals, I use my regular teenage engineering workflow + Abelton to mix and master, I'm WAY better in Abelton than I was even 6 months ago - people have always been able to download photoshop actions and filters etc, as you said, it's more about the creative journey.
The whole problem with this is that the people using generative AI tools are trying to co-opt what "art" is. They're barging into creative spaces and demanding that the real artists treat them as equals. I hope you understand that no group of people would treat you kindly for doing that.
Sure except half my classes in art school ended up in debates on what "art" even is/means - some people thought if it involved commerce at all it's not art, some people about the process, some people about the human, some people about the final work itself, is it high or low brow, fine art or emotive? So when you say "co-opt what "art is." - sure, but...not sure.
On barging into creative spaces and how that should be viewed, I suspect you and I would find we feel the same. I was personally involved in building and shaping deviantart and how we tackled these ideas, so what you see there today is influenced by my(and scott, eric angelo etc) thinking on this matter.
Most of the artists I know, including me, have kinda given up on DA after its pivot to AI.
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That’s what the sites that generate the music are for. Bandcamp is for musicians.
The community of AI "musicians" should absolutely have a place to share their "music". Just identify it as such so everyone else can avoid it. :)
Exactly! :) When I was going through my back and forth on if I should upload it to soundcloud I thought a few times "I should just build SlopART" - if I had more time I probably would, because it's a place I wouldn't mind hanging out. :)
An aside but https://sunoai-music.com/ seems incredibly broken on my desktop.
Typed a prompt and hit generate. No response after waiting some time. I scrolled down to existing sample music to get a sense of what it creates and hit play. Not one of the play buttons worked. Ok load up Chrome instead of Firefox, maybe they did some Chrome specific thing? Nope site's still broken and none of the samples under "Suno AI Music Gallery" actually work. There's a javascript error "invalid client" on clicking it. I'm not logged in i guess?
It did work on mobile but that seems like it presents a completely different site.
I think the URL should be suno.com, the link you posted is a different thing? Suno.com is the one I've used, I generally use it for DND type campaigns when I need custom music for scenes or background noises. It does pretty good sound effects and spoken word so sometimes I use it for that as well.
That worked. Thanks i just googled suno ai music to check it out and got the seemingly spammy link.
That's not the real Suno site.
...and now deviantart is deader than dead because overrun with slop.
Anyway I don't think your case is really so bad. As long as the creator at least has put in the effort to listen to their own stuff from beginning to end at least once (yes that's a low bar), you're already miles ahead of people who'd auto-gen 100s of albums and slap them on there in one go. Music is more inherently rate-limiting than image generation where only half a second or less is needed to take in an image superficially.
What workflow are you using with Ableton/Suno?
Mostly using it to gen vocals, sometimes stems, sometimes gen samples, then as you'd expect -> wav out -> lay it up in Abelton, add in my teenage engineering stuff - filters -> mix and master -> out
https://soundcloud.com/john/eager - I put over 16 hours into this track, I'm sure someone who knows about music can point to loads of errors in it, I'm sure it's sloppy in parts, but I put real effort into it and I'm proud of that effort.
So I've used Suno a bit in my own musical creations, but would never release something with any sound that was generated via AI. What I do is write and record a song (I'm also in Ableton), then when I'm unhappy with something or don't know where to go next, I throw it into Suno and have it generate some ideas. I use those ideas just as you would use ideas from a writing partner. If I like them, I transcribe them, play them on real instruments, and record them. So no actual sound from Suno ever makes it into my compositions - just some of the musical ideas here and there. That way it's still me playing and still sounds like me.
To me, this is the most legitimate way for music makers to use AI. If you go look at the credits for almost any professional recording artist, they all work with one or more writers and producers to get their music dialed in. Us normies can't really afford to have Max Martin come over and write with us, and I think using AI in the way I mentioned is a suitable alternative. I really fail to see the difference, honestly.
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