Comment by alwa

18 hours ago

It’s also OK to like what you like. She likes Suno jams. Great!

I feel like this trope is strongest amongst musicians-feeling-underappreciated, but that the idea seeps in to all manners of creative work: that, because you’re rightfully proud of what you do, the audience is wronging you (or “lazy,” or “sad,” or “cheap,” or “tasteless”) by not appreciating it. It doesn’t make me feel a lot of sympathy.

It is, but also it's ok to silently judge people.

If somebody told me "I choose to only read AI-generated books" I would also silently judge them.

  • What about the long tail of romance novels, fanfiction, etc though? 50 shades was an outlier in that it was popular but it's absolute drivel, and there is a lot of that kind of low quality writing out there.

    • If we’re comparing bad quality to bad quality, human bad quality is infinitely more interesting. The fact someone wrote, directed, produced, acted in, etc, in something like Troll 2 or The Room is what makes those movies special. It’s the fact you can go “god damn, someone thought this was good” and be baffled at specific decisions they made. It’s the curiosity of “what was going on there”, “what drove those individuals to do this”, “how much of it were outside forces”, “who are these people”. It’s all the reasons which make it worth it to make a movie about a bad movie.

      With AI, even if you enjoy it as bad, as soon as you know it’s AI it loses all interest because there’s zero story behind it. The answer to all those questions becomes “a statistical algorithm made it that way”, and that’s objectively a boring answer.

    • Imo, fanfiction crowd is overall much more actively creating then your average pop culture consumers. And their engagement with reading is also a fairly active. They are more likely to write themselves and even if dont, their reading tend to be and entry point for own fantasies. I feel like the only ones who have right to judge them are people who write full on books. And those seem to be aware this crowd is also simultaneously the last crowd of actual readers buying their books here and there.

      Romance readers got tired of being judged for decades and decades by people who dont read at all, people who read pure power fantasies or what not.

That might be OK if Suno had compensated everybody they needed to.

I feel sympathy for people who made something that was reappropriated by those without strong ethics.

  • Meanwhile you probably use Spotify or other streaming platforms without issue.

    • Artists have to agree to be featured on Spotify, and agree to the royalty fees they receive. AI just pillaged recorded human history with zero compensation. Big difference.

> It’s also OK to like what you like. She likes Suno jams. Great!

People like what they like, sure. And if someone was particularly into the idea of machines making music, or even take some cynical enjoyment out of this on the full understanding of what it is they are doing. Sure, whatever.

But someone acting like listening to AI generated music is their only choice due to their taste in music? Come on, that's a sci-fi nightmare right there. Not even going full-on ecologist here, but the resource expenditure alone is so out of whack for something only a single person will listen to.

I don't even consider myself a musician, just a human being baffled at the total lack of humanity and how that lack of humanity is being normalized. Talk about sympathy.

  • Is it though? Do you have calculation how much one suno song does? I work with databases, and I sometimes wonder how much energy those full table scans of the world consume, comparing to ai.

  • What resource expenditure? Inference is dirt cheap, especially for a single person's prompt.