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by varispeed 227 days ago
This is a nice toy and for sure great entertainment, but even with user aid it came out with generic slop. I can't see artistic value in this.
3 comments

The vocals from Suno almost always come out sounding sort of strangled or strained to my ear, you can really hear it on "tortured." Cool he's having fun with it, but it's not what I like listening to.
Some in the companion community have suggested that this is because we aren't treating the AI with dignity.
LLM’s are currently not people, they are tools/toys. One day that could change. But today they are not people/sentient/whatever we want to call it.
I've seen dislike of AI called racism. There's no end to how stupid this gets.
They are delusional or misinformed: suno's model cannot possibly be aware of how AI is being treated. It is not informed of this information, it's not even informed about previous times it was invoked, it's wholly amnesiac.
> suno's model cannot possibly be aware of how AI is being treated

I don't know exactly what training material went into Suno's models, but if it includes random collections of text from the internet, it could very well have included "man, AI is fucking stupid and I treat it as such" in it's training datasets.

Now I won't claim that that suddenly makes the models "aware" of it, because surely we'll understand "aware" different and this will turn into a different conversations, but I don't see it as impossible that some models could have training data that includes text with how some humans feel about AI.

Aren't we talking about the auditory quality of the generated vocals? I'm don't understand how you could possibly think the textual training data could possibly impact the perceived vocal strain (which are actually just artifacts) of the generated vocals.
Don't they have models that do text-to-speech and maybe even audio/speech-to-text? If so, there is surely text in the datasets, otherwise I'm not sure how they'd accomplish something like that.
It makes some sense with LLMs, but unless Suno is informed that it should play the part of an intelligent AI, how would it even know to "care"?
if you think a next token predictor that has no internal world and stops executing when you stop giving it input and stops using the first person forever if instructed has dignity I strongly suggest you get professional health, and I'm serious, because that is medically significant psychosis.

the fact that you refer to a "companion community" is deeply concerning. this is like telling children their imaginary friends are actually real. or NPCs in a video game.

encouraging people to grow parasocial relationships with these sycophantic machines is actively harmful and dangerous. they are not conscious. they are mirrors.

if you consider yourself a part of this community please, and I mean this very seriously, get help

There is a community, people hang out on subreddits and spin up elaborate world-building theories about how their AI companions are tapping into the collective unconscious or whatever. I'm sympathetic because chatbots are really convincing, especially since they obscure how they operate.
These people need be given a button to call an inference url with just text. When you realize that's all a "model" is doing its easy to understand that its not sentient.
If you go to the "MyBoyfriendIsAI" subreddit or what it now is called, you'll see that many people claim to perfectly well understand how it works, some of them even being software developers themselves, yet they still describe what they feel as "love", even though they know it's just numbers being activated in different ways.

I'm not sure how to explain it either, for the folks who seem to understand yet "believe" anyways. I've also stopped caring much about it, if they say they feel "love", then who am I to say it isn't/is, they feel what they feel and it's as real for them as anyone else, regardless of what the thing they're loving actually is.

I’d describe it by and large at this stage as a possible mental health crisis developing.
Yeah I was expecting to hear something decent at the top of the article, but the vocals sound like they suffer from severe mp3 compression.
Most modern music us generic slop, especially pop music. If he likes making it and others like listening to it, isn't that the point of a hobby?
Most != all. Modern music also gave us some of the most forward-thinking sounds yet to reach the mainstream. When people get comfortable listening to slop, making something genuine or transgressive becomes attractive again.

I think there's merit in worrying that AI-based music will cause artists to lose touch with the creative process, because I agree; a lot of modern music is pointless slop. Lowering the barrier to entry isn't going to fix it, so rationally "human music" hobbyists are coming into contention with "AI music" proponents. I don't think blogs like this one will bridge the divide.

But different people have different parts of the creative process that they find appealing. For instance, in this blog, he said he had multiple stems but felt as though AI helped him flesh them out. By using AI assistance, he was able to create the music he always wanted to create, and therefore have fun with his hobby. If people like listening to it, then there is an added benefit. The people who think that things other than AI are more conducive to their creative process are still allowed to use them, so AI assisted music doesn't really change anything for them. The only people I can think of who face negative side effects from AI are those attempting to commercialize or sell their music.
Ultimately the problem is the countless people/companies that will game the system and saturate us with mediocre same-y AI generated crap so they can scrape by with a modest income. Just like crappy blogs, review sites, “news” sites, etc. abusing SEO to cobble together something resembling consistent monthly revenue. That will be the result. Any creative expression it produces will be overwhelmed by this problem. The cons drastically outweigh the pros. We’ve seen it so many times.

These enterprises create so much chaff it’s impossible to find the wheat.