I've been completely blown away by the quality that I'm getting from Suno.ai
Not all of it is good of course, maybe only 10%, but that 10% is of a higher quality than anything I could have produced myself.
Although the actual audio quality seems low on playback (a low bitrate MP3?) the structure and arrangement of the song seem fine.
Yet ... the irony of a song of worship created by an AI surely reverberates through the cosmos like a clap of thunder. Surely?
I'm less interested in the quality of the output and more the motivation of the creator. Was it you? Was it made it good faith? What was its purpose? Was it experimental or intended to inspire?
I was just messing around really and thought that it might be easier to find an audience with Christian music rather than if I tried targeting a more mainstream genre. Those mega churches need to play something, right?
I think the example is very impressive. Fully agree with your reasoning. Most music today already feels a bit cringe and interchangeable to me, and this song fits this genre perfectly. I agree that the Christian church would very much be able to use this. Just don't tell them it's done by an AI; that would kill the whole vibe when the target audience is all about being human :D.
Obviously, it's not perfect, and right now, for the best results, it would have to be re-recorded with a proper singer and instruments. But for some dude who has barely any experience in making music, I think it's amazing.
Also, I'm not a Christian; I just experimented in that area because I assumed that the quality bar would be lower in a more niche music genre. I made a custom gpt to generate the lyrics and structure and then just prompted it with, 'write me a song about jesus but don't use his name.'
If this is where it is now, where a person with no skills can make a song that wouldn't seem too out of place on a soundtrack for a Hallmark Channel movie, imagine where it's going to be in 5 years?
In my opinion, you could've written a better song yourself by learning three chords on a guitar and producing something more original. Maybe just a confidence thing?
I'm not sure what people are trying to get out of this process, I'm not judging it per se, but what drives people to sit with generative AI, prompt it, and find satisfaction out of the prompting, I don't really know? Is it just the convenience that is appealing? I do understand that it might be fun to explore with the prompting, but I'm genuinely curious about your perspective?
I studied music for a long time, and what I really really gain satisfaction from is actually understanding my instrument, understanding the theory, and then producing music from that knowledge, but in a way, forgetting all the theory and just being myself with my instruments, with little effort.
Like I cannot imagine getting much satisfaction out of having a computer generate a song for me?
Likewise when using Google translate, I've studied Japanese for a long time, and there is a huge level of satisfaction out of actually having a conversation with someone in their native tongue as opposed to hacking through it with GT.
> Like I cannot imagine getting much satisfaction out of having a computer generate a song for me?
Everybody is different, but also prompt engineering can be a highly creative process. I'm at the same place you are where I get a lot of satisfaction out of sitting down with my guitar and creating something, whereas I really don't like prompting AI. But especially for somebody who doesn't have the music skill (which is a lot harder to acquire than most of us remember) if they are heavily involved in prompting and iterating, they could get immense satisfaction out of the process. If it was just "write me a song about Jesus" and that was the end, I don't think anybody would be satisfied, but it's (at least currently) way more involved than that.
All the rap music I like is trying to convey some type of deeper message, or make some type of important social commentary, and rap often delivers that in a powerful, fun and beautiful way. It's not just the rhyming that is impressive, it's the culture that goes with it.
I get that it's kind of cute, and geeky to have the computer use statistics to produce rhyming sentences, but it just will never hit the same way as 2pac, Eminem, ODB, Marvin Gaye or Gill Scot Heron does, not matter how sophisticated it gets.
People can argue all they like about humans "just being LLMs" but humans also bring real life experience, failure, suffering and meaning to their art, which IMO is very important for the art to be interesting and develop connection.
Van Gough is like this, his work is interesting to me because I find his life and his story interesting.
So I don't find that rapping jarring, but I don't care for it either, it does absolutely nothing for me and I'd never listen it a second time, it just sounds like a rip off or approximation of many artists I've heard before.
The process was a little more involved than just using the raw output of suno.ai, I talked about it elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39188980