[visarga]

> My 8 year old nephew was cranking out "songs" in Suno within an hour of being introduced to it. Reminds me of when parents were super impressed that their 3-year old could use an iPad.

You imply "it is Prompt -> Song" but in reality it is "Prompt -> Song -> Reflection -> New Prompt -> New Song.." It is a dialogue. And in a dialogue you can get some places where neither of you could go alone.

As software developers we know that multiple people contribute to a project, inside a git repo, and if you take one's work out it does nothing useful by itself. Only when they come together they make sense. What one dev writes builds on what other devs write. It's recursive dependency.

The interaction between human and AI can take a similar path. It's not a push-button vending machine for content. It is like a story writing itself, discovering where it will end up along the way. The credit goes to the process, not any one in isolation.

[j4coh]

It’s really not. It’s like having interdimensional Spotify where you can describe any song and they will pull it up from whatever dimension made it and play it for you. It may empower you as a consumer but it does not make you a creator.

[radley]

I dunno, based on Spotify's recommendation engine, AI is absolutely sufficient to make anyone a creator ;P

Almost all naturally-generated music is derivative to one degree or another. And new tools like AI provide new ways to produce music, just like all new instruments have done in the past.

Take drum and bass. Omni Trio made a few tracks in the early 90s. It was interesting at the time, but it wasn't suddenly a genre. It only became so because other artists copied them, then copied other copies, and more and more kept doing it because they all enjoyed doing so.

Suno ain't gonna invent drum and bass, just like drum machines didn't invent house music. But drum machines did expand the kinds of music we could make, which lead to house music, drum and bass, and many other new genres. Clever artists will use AI to make something fun and new, which will eventually grow into popular genres of music, because that's how it's always been done.

[j4coh]

You can do exactly what you describe with interdimensional Spotify. People can describe all kinds of fun and interesting things that can be statistically generated for them, but they still didn’t make anything themselves unlike in your other examples of using new tools.

Japanese oldies became a trend for a while - the people who found and repopularised the music dont get to say they created it and how it’s so awesome to have mastered the musical instrument of describing or searching for things. Well, of course they can, but forgive me if I don’t buy it.

Maybe when there is actual AGI then the AI will get the creative credit, but that’s not what we have and I still wouldn’t transfer the creative credit to the person who asked the AGI to write a song.

[radley]

> Maybe when there is actual AGI then the AI will get the creative credit, but that’s not what we have and I still wouldn’t transfer the creative credit to the person who asked the AGI to write a song.

When artists made trance, the creative credit didn't go to Roland for the JP-8000 and 909, even though Roland was directly responsible for the fundamental sounds. Instead, the trance artists were revered. That's good.

> Japanese oldies became a trend for a while - the people who found and repopularised the music dont get to say they created it and how it’s so awesome

I'd bet there are modern artists who sampled that music and edited it into very-common rhythm patterns, resulting in a few hit songs (i.e. The Manual by The KLF).

[codedokode]

> Take drum and bass. Omni Trio made a few tracks in the early 90s. It was interesting at the time, but it wasn't suddenly a genre. It only became so because other artists copied them, then copied other copies, and more and more kept doing it because they all enjoyed doing so.

Musicians not just copy but everyone adds something new; it's like programmers taking some existing algorithm (like sorting) and improving it. The question is, can Suno user add something new to the drum-and-bass pattern? Or they can just copy? Also as it uses a text prompt, I cannot imagine how do you even edit anything? "Make note number 3 longer by a half"? It must be a pain to edit the melody this way.

[radley]

> Musicians not just copy but everyone adds something new

Not everyone. I've followed electronic music for decades, and even in a paid-music store like Beatport, most artist reproduce what they've heard, and are often just a pale imitation because they have no idea of how to make something better. That's the fundamental struggle of most creatives, regardless of tool or instrument.

I haven't tried Suno, but I imagine it's doing something similar to modern software: start with a pre-made music kit and hit the "Randomize" button for the sequencer & arpeggiator. It just happens to be an "infinite" bundle kit.

[bobxmax]

And so sampling, dj'ing, these aren't skills? This isn't music?

[codedokode]

Sampling is not just cutting a fragment from a song and calling it a day. Usually (if you look at Prodigy's tracks for example) it includes transformation so that the result doesn't sound much like the original. For example, you can sample a single note and make a melody from it. Or turn a soft violin note into a monster's roar.

As for DJ'ing I would say it is pretty limited form of art and it requires lot of skill to create something new this way.

[bobxmax]

Yes, that's what people are doing with AI music as well. Acting like there's some obvious "line" of what constitutes meaningful transformation is silly.

[sirtaj]

I see DJing as more akin to being a skillful curator than being an artist. They are related but not equivalent.

[j4coh]

I was a trance and dnb DJ, I definitely never claimed I was writing the songs I played and I think it would have been dishonest to do so.

[jewelry]

Well I made songs with my lyrics that brings tears and memories to my audience. Don’t know what other creator things you are talking about, but this to me is creating.

[j4coh]

Well, at least you asked a computer over a series of requests to statistically generate a work based on it having previously ingested lots of works by actual creators and your audience liked it, and I won't take that from you.

[poulpy123]

clicking on a button until you like what you hear is not "making music". I have nothing against these tools, but the hubris of the people using them is insane

[visarga]

What button? Again with the vending machine idea. No, it's language prompting, language has unbounded semantic space. It's not one choice out of 20, it's one choice out of countless possibilities.

I give my idea to the model, the model gives me new ideas, I iterate. After enough rounds I get some place where I would never have gotten on my own, or the model gotten there without me.

I am not the sole creator, neither is the model, credit belongs to the Process.

[codedokode]

> language has unbounded semantic space

So if I have a melody in my head, how do I make AI render it using language? Even simpler, if I can beatbox a beat (like "pts-ts-ks-ts"), how do I describe it using language? I don't feel like I can make anything useful by prompting.

[GenerocUsername]

You record yourself whistling it and out it in as an input.

I've been recording myself on guitar and using suno to turn it into professional quality recordings with full backing band.

And I'm not trying to sell it, I just like hearing the ideas in my head turned into fully fleshed music of higher quality than I could produce with 100x more time to invest into it

[codedokode]

This is more closer to actually creating rather than generating music. However this cannot be done with a text prompt, which the comment above claimed, is expressive enough.

Actually having an "autotune" AI that turns out-of-key poor singing into a beautiful melody while keeping the voice timbre, would be not bad.

[GenerocUsername]

Well then I have news for you... That's what Suno is. You can generate from simple text prompt, you can describe timings and chord progressions and song structure. You can get very detailed, even providing recordings

Yes the barrier for entry is low, but there is a very high ceiling as well

[httpsoverdns]

I just tried it out because of the discussions on this thread, and I got to say I land squarely on the side of this is neat, but it is not artistry. Every little thing I generated sounded like things I've heard before. I was trying hard to get it to create something unique, using obscure language or ideas. It didn't even get close to something interesting in my opinion, every single output was like if you combined every top 40 song ever made and then only distilled out the parts relevant to certain keywords in a prompt.

These tools will probably be great for making music for commercials. But if you want to make something interesting, unique, or experimental, I don't think these are quite suited for it.

It seems to be a very similar limitation to text-based llms. They are great at synthesizing the most likely response to your input. But never very good at coming up with something unique or unlikely.

[protocolture]

Refining a request that generates music, is "making music" however you slice it.

[otabdeveloper4]

If so, then twiddling the radio knob is also "making music".

[visarga]

You probably never prompted an AI model until you got something good from it.

[protocolture]

Not really. The output of the radio knob has far less opportunity to create an original work.

[otabdeveloper4]

Literally nothing the AI outputs is an original work.

[protocolture]

That's a testable hypothesis. Go sample every AI output until you find one that doesn't have a previously created 1:1 analogue.

Unless of course you mean "original" as in, some kind of wishy washy untargetable goal that's really some appeal to humanity, where any piece of information that disagrees with your hypothesis is discarded because it is unfalsifiable. Original might as well mean "Made by a human and that's it" which isn't useful at all.

Whereas I use it to mean new or different.

[throwaway422432]

I messed around with Udio when it first cam out, and it wasn't just writing a prompt, and there's your song.

You got 30 seconds, of which there might have been a hook that was interesting. So you would crop the hook and re-generate to get another 30 seconds before or after that, and so on.

I would liken it more as being the producer stitching together the sessions a band have recorded to produce a song.

[_DeadFred_]

When I commission a painting and tell the artist what I want painted, am I in fact the artist?

[protocolture]

Depends.

This is a very old argument within artistic communities.

In cinema, authorship has resoundingly been awarded to the director. A lot of film directors go deep in many creative silos, but at its core the process is commissioning a lot of artists to do art at the same time. You dont have to be able to do those things. Famously some anime directors have just been hired off the street.

In comics things went the other way. Editors have been trying to extract credit for creative work for a long time. A lot of them have significant input in the creative process, but have no contractual basis for demanding credit for that input. It frustrates them. They can also just commission work, or they can have various levels of input in to the creative process, up to and including defining characters entirely.

Really then, in your example, theres clearly a point where you have had enough of a creative input in the creation to be part of the artistic endeavor. One judge in china ruled in favour of the artist after they proved that they had completed 20 odd revisions of the artwork, before watermarking it.

That is of course, assuming we only follow your strict, reductionist argument. Even for AI art, most generators these days take more than text input. You can mask areas, provide hand drawn precursor art and a lot of other things. And that also assumes no post processing.

Not all AI generated items will be art. But what I find offensive, is the judgement that as a class nothing touched by AI could be considered art. Mostly because I lived through "Digital Art is not Art" and "Computer Games are not Art" proponents of both got overtaken by history and rightly shamed.

[_DeadFred_]

I never claimed you can't use AI tools. I never claimed Digital art is not art. Don't imply I should feel shame for questioning the world around me. You can stop with the trying to silence your critics and position yourself as superior.

If I ask a comics guy their favorite comic artist they aren't giving me back editors names. They will have favorite editors, or even editor artist pairs, but the artist remains distinct from that.

I simply posited that commissioning a piece of work does not make you an artist. Having art generated for you to your taste is not 'making art'. Hiring an interior decorator to decorate my house does not mean I decorated. Ordering off a menu and requesting extra cheese does not make you part chef.

A better blurring for your argument would be the use of session musicians. If I say I love The Beach Boys, how much of what I love is session musicians work versus Brian Wilson's? Is he the artist that I enjoy? But that gets back to it, doesn't it. We as humans want to connect art with it's creator. Why? Because art is some reflection of something. Art is 'life is a shared experience'. AI 'art' is not part of that shared experience. I want to connect with Brian Wilson. But I don't connect with some music critic who writes about Brian Wilson's music even though we both connected with the same artistic work, even if I learned about the work though the critic making my relationship to them just as important (I wouldn't know it without them). There being an artist in the middle improves/transforms it/means something (what it means is what is up for discussion).

A pretty crystal is just as pretty as a piece of art, but it is not a piece of art. AI art might be more like the crystal. It might contain beauty/interest/capture attention. But it's not connecting with someone's creation, with intention. I have a local museum and I love exhibits that a specific curator there has focused on more than ones they didn't touch. But that doesn't make them an artist. AI 'artists' fall into that category.

[protocolture]

> I never claimed Digital art is not art.

No but its the same genetic fallacy. Some digital works arent art. Therefore all Digital art is not art. These people were rightly ridiculed.

Suggesting that because some people put no effort into AI Art, that AI art as a category cannot be art is also a silly genetic fallacy.

>If I ask a comics guy their favorite comic artist they aren't giving me back editors names. They will have favorite editors, or even editor artist pairs, but the artist remains distinct from that.

Correct. Because the authorship debate in that space settled in the opposite direction. If Comic Editors succeeded and were treated like film directors, they would have headline billing on comics and they would be a household name. But it went the other way, and instead Editors who try to claim credit for artistic works, even with receipts, get laughed at.

>I simply posited that commissioning a piece of work does not make you an artist.

Right, but the implication there is that is all people using AI generators do.

>Hiring an interior decorator to decorate my house does not mean I decorated.

Right, but if you are giving the interior decorator creative input, like, "No that sucks this should be red" and revising their output hundreds of times, you are actually involved in the decoration process. And if that decorator is just, hanging up exactly what you tell them to, then they might just be a dogsbody and you the interior decorator.

>I have a local museum and I love exhibits that a specific curator there has focused on more than ones they didn't touch. But that doesn't make them an artist. AI 'artists' fall into that category.

Some do. But the vast majority put a lot more effort in than simple curation. I remember seeing people, when Midjourney first became viable, simply generating 12 images with a single prompt, and sharing all 12 on facebook to pages that wanted nothing to do with them. Thats not art. But its also not the done thing anymore.

[southernplaces7]

Trying to convince some tech people about how artistic creation works, and why it's more than just the right amount of "optimization" of bits for rapid results, is about as pointless as trying to make a chimpanzee understand the intricacies of Bach. The reductiveness of some of you is amusing, but also grotesque in the context of what art should mean for human experience.

[frozenseven]

There's no magical line between "tech people" and "art people". The gatekeeping here is getting desperate as hell when you're now forced to cite Bach.

[southernplaces7]

I don't think you really understood what I was saying, or what you're even talking about. I've got nothing to "gatekeep" and a defense of skill over automated regurgitation in creating things certainly isn't gatekeeping. People can use whatever tools they like, but they should keep in mind what distinguishes knowing how to create something from having it done for you at the metaphorical push of a button.

[frozenseven]

No, I understand the insults and ad hoc requirements just fine. And I can point you back to the decades and decades of literature about how anyone can be an artist and how anything can be art. The stuff that was openly and readily said until the second people started making art with AI. As for "push of a button", Visarga has already done a decent job of explaining how that's not actually the case. Not that I have any issue with people doing the metaphorical button push either.

[tummler]

Skill is nature's way of gatekeeping.

If you're too lazy to put effort into learning how to create an art so you can adequately express yourself, why should some technology do all the work for you, and why should anyone want to hear what "you" (ie: the machine) have to say?

This is exactly how we end up with endless slop, which doesn't provide a unique perspective, just a homogenized regurgitation of inputs.

[protocolture]

>Skill is nature's way of gatekeeping.

Yeah and it worked great until industrial agriculture let lots of people eat who had no skill at agriculture. In fact, our entire history as a species is a long history of replacing Skill with machines to enable more people to access the skill. If it gives you sad feelings that people without skill can suddenly do more cool things, thats entirely a you problem.

[frozenseven]

>skill

>too lazy

Again, I wholly reject the idea that there's a line between 'tech people' and 'art people'. You can have an interest in both art and tech. You can do both 'traditional art' and AI art. I also reject the idea that AI tools require no skill, that's clearly not the case.

>nature

This can so easily be thrown back at you.

>why should anyone want to hear what "you" (ie: the machine) have to say?

So why are we having this discussion in the first place? Right, hundreds of millions are interested in exploring and creating with AI. You are not fighting against a small contingent who are trying to covet the meaning of "artist" or whatever. No, it's a mass movement of people being creative in a way that you don't like.

[XenophileJKO]

You are really going to dislike my "code is art" opinion.

[bobxmax]

No, the hubris of people deciding they can define what music is is insane

Banging two sticks together is music. Get off your high horse.

[Applejinx]

I have claves, which are literally two sticks. I've also got a couple egg shakers, a couple tambourines.

Do you have ANY IDEA how hard these things are to play well.

I don't care if haphazard bashing of sticks with intent to make noise counts as 'music'. I do care if this whole line of discussion fundamentally equates any such bashing with, say, Jack Ashford.

I would be surprised if the name meant anything to you, as he's more obscure than he should be: the percussionist and tambourine player for the great days of Motown. Some of you folks don't know why that is special.

[visarga]

Maybe you need to refresh the context - 99.99% of AI generated music, images or text is seen/heard only Once, by the AI user. It's a private affair. The rest of the world are not invited.

If I write a song about my kid and cat it's funny for me and my wife. I don't expect anyone else to hear or like it. It has value to me because I set the topic. It doesn't even need to be perfect musically to be fun for a few minutes.

[bobxmax]

You seem to be the one who doesn't understand how special it is if you think good music is so simple that AI can zero shot it.

People are mixing and matching these songs and layering their own vocals etc to create novel music. This is barely different from sampling or papier mache or making collages.

People made the same reductionist arguments you're making about electronic music in the early days. Or digital art.

[survirtual]

Dumping money into a company until desired results is not "building a company". I have nothing against capital, but the hubris of the people investing is insane. /s

Look, sarcasm aside, for you and the many people who agree with you, I would encourage opening your minds a bit. There was a time where even eating food was an intense struggle of intellect, skill, and patience. Now you walk into a building and grab anything you desire in exchange for money.

You can model this as a sort of "manifestation delta." The delta time & effort for acquiring food was once large, now it is small.

This was once true for nearly everything. Many things are now much much easier.

I know it is difficult to cope with, because many held a false belief that the arts were some kind of untouchable holy grail of pure humanness, never to be remotely approached by technology. But here we are, it didn't actually take much to make even that easier. The idea that this was somehow "the thing" that so many pegged their souls to, I would actually call THAT hubris.

Turns out, everyone needs to dig a bit deeper to learn who we really are.

This generative AI stuff is just another phase of a long line of evolution via technology for humanity. It means that more people can get what they want easier. They can go from thought to manifestation faster. This is a good thing.

The artists will still make art, just like blacksmiths still exist, or bow hunters still exist, or all the myriad of "old ways" still exist. They just won't be needed. They will be wanted, but they won't be needed.

The less middlemen to creation, the better. And when someone desires a thing created, and they put in the money, compute time, and prompting to thusly do so, then they ARE the creator. Without them, the manifestation would stay in a realm of unrealized dreams. The act itself of shifting idea to reality is the act of creation. It doesn't matter how easy it is or becomes.

Your struggle to create is irrelevant to the energy of creation.

[j4coh]

It doesn’t even have to be art. If someone told me they were a chef and cooked some food but in reality had ordered it I’d think they were a bit of a moron for equating these things or thinking that by giving someone money or a request for something they were a creator, not a consumer.

It may be nice for society that ordering food is possible, but it doesn’t make one a chef to have done so.

[survirtual]

In ordering a meal from someone else who makes it, I think that the relationship is rather well defined. One person is asking another person to use their skills to make a meal.

With AI, there is a vision and there is a tool executing it. This has a recursive loop involving articulation, refinement, repetition. It is one person using a tool to get a result. At a minimum, it is characteristically different than your comparison, no?

To add, my original statement was concerning going into a grocery store and buying ingredients. That was once a much more difficult process.

As an aside it reminds me of a food cart I would go to regularly in Portland. Sometimes the chefs would go mushroom foraging and cook a lunch using those fresh mushrooms. It was divine. If we ever reach a time when I can send a robot out to forage for mushrooms and actually survive the meal, I would celebrate that occasion, because it would mean we all made it through some troubling times.

[samdafi]

I enjoy this take. Funding something is not the same as creating it. The Medicis were not artists, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Raphael, etc were.

You might not be a creator, but you could make an argument for being an executive producer.

But then, if working with an artist is reduced to talking at a computer, people seem to forget that whatever output they get is equally obtainable to everyone and therefore immediately uninteresting, unless the art is engaging the audience only in what could already be described using language, rather than the medium itself. In other words, you might ask for something different, but that ask is all you are expressing, nothing is expressed through the medium, which is the job of the artist you have replaced. It is simply generated to literally match the words. Want to stand out? Well, looks like you’ll have to find somebody to put in the work…

That being said, you can always construct from parts. Building a set of sounds from suno asks and using them like samples doesn’t seem that different from crate digging, and I’d never say Madlib isn’t an artist.

[survirtual]

Michelangelo had apprentices and assistants, many of which did a significant portion of the work. You could model him as the executive artist, directing the vision. Is this so different from prompting? Whose name is attached to all those works?

I will say Michelangelo was particularly controlling and distrusting of assistants, and uniquely did more work than other master artists of the time, but the point remains. The vision has always been the value.

[visarga]

Assuming that 1. food is free and instant to get, and 2. there are infinite possibilities for food - then yes, if you ordered such a food from an infinite catalog you would get the credit.

But if you ordered 100 dishes iterating between designing your order, tasting, refining your order, and so on - maybe you even discover something new that nobody has realized before.

The gen-AI process is a loop, not a prompt->output one step process.

[j4coh]

Am I a chef then because I tell my private chefs what to make on an ongoing basis?