[wincy]

I made my wife a song about how we met using Suno. It took me about 4 hours to get the lyrics just right, rewriting them (without AI help, it’s terrible with lyrics), plugging them in, seeing how they sounded, fixing them some more to get the verse so it sounded right.

She thought it was really special and she cried as we listened to it while holding hands in the car. I can’t play guitar, and I can’t hit some notes with my low singing voice, but I wrote every word and it felt like something really special to the both of us. I don’t really care if people think I “cheated”. To torture the analogy, it’s like cheating in a two player game since I’m not publishing this song to anyone else.

[pton_xd]

> 4 hours

That made me imagine -- in the future when AI is much more advanced, maybe I could just prompt it with say "something sentimental to make my wife cry." I mean, I still came up with the idea and ultimately it's the thought that counts right. What's the limit here? Is this some sort of human emotion exploit, or a legitimate bonding experience?

[josephg]

It’s rarely the thought that counts. It’s the committed effort. Presents aren’t just nice because they needed those socks. More importantly, they’re a signifier that you consider the person to be worth thinking about. You value them enough to spend time and effort thinking about them. Then you followed through. This is why we don’t just give people money as a present.

The effort that you put in is often what people like most about a gift. Don’t try too hard to hack around that.

[stickfigure]

I'm going to draw this example out to make it more realistic.

"Say something sentimental to make my wife cry" you prompt. The computer comes back:

Ok, tell me a few things about your wife. How did you meet? What are her favorite things? Tell me about some great moments in your relationship. Tell me about some difficult moments in your relationship.

Ok, tell me a few things about you. What do you love about your wife? What have you struggled with?

Ten minutes of this kind of conversation and I'll bet the LLM can generate a pretty good hallmark card. It might not make your wife cry but she'll recognize it as something personal and special.

Four hours of this kind of conversation and you might very well get some output that would make your wife cry. It might even make you cry.

The work is adding context. And getting people to add meaningful, soul-touching context is not easy - just ask any therapist.

[Paracompact]

Biggest blockers:

1. Wives aren't a monolith. The prompt is underspecified, or else individual taste and preciousness is dead.

2. No matter how good the tech today is (or isn't) getting, the responses are very low temperature. The reason it takes a human 4 hours to write the poem is because that is time spent exploring profoundly new structures and effects. Compare this to AI which is purpose-built to hone in on local optima of medians and clichés wherever possible.

> I mean, I still came up with the idea and ultimately it's the thought that counts right. What's the limit here?

Sociologically, devoid of AI discussion, I imagine the limit is the extent to which the ideas expressed in the poem aren't outright fabrications (e.g. complimenting their eyes when really you couldn't care less). As well, it does not sit right with humans if you attempt to induce profound feelings in them by your own less-than-profound feelings; it's not "just the thought," it's also the effort that socially signals the profundity of the thought.

[anal_reactor]

> Wives aren't a monolith

Usually they are. Most people are surprisingly similar and predictable, which is why basic manipulation tactics are so successful. Sure, you have 10% of people who truly are special, but the other 90% has a collective orgasm while listening to whatever is the hottest pop star.

> The reason it takes a human 4 hours to write the poem is because that is time spent exploring profoundly new structures and effects.

Most likely dude spent 4 hours doing exactly the same things that everyone else does when making their first song. It's not like within these 4 hours he discovered a truly new technique of writing lyrics. Each instance of human life that wants to write songs needs to go through exactly the same learning steps, while AI does it just once and then can endlessly apply the results.

> it's not "just the thought," it's also the effort that socially signals the profundity of the thought.

In close relationships yes. When dealing with those you less care about, it's the result that matters.

[hecanjog]

That would indeed make it meaningless.

[mlyle]

I think expended effort is what counts here for these types of interactions, and how much of that effort is tailored to the specific person.

I mean, we're almost always standing on the shoulders of other people, and we're almost always using tools. But if the output is fully mechanical and automatic without being tailored for the specific person, it's hard to see it as personal in any way.

[gchamonlive]

It's more like going into a video game and tuning the difficulty all the way down so you are virtually invincible. It's taking the fun out of the game for some, but for others that's the only way to play it.

[wincy]

And you know what? I’ve got a medically complicated kid with a million doctor’s appointments and a full time job. I often switch the games down to the easiest mode. Then sometimes a new Dark Souls comes out and I relish every moment, if I’ve got the time.

I’ve been having Suno make random instrumental chiptunes, too, and it’s got me interested in buying a MIDI keyboard to play around with. Which 40 years ago people were saying that wasn’t real music, either.

[virgil_disgr4ce]

>a MIDI keyboard to play around with. Which 40 years ago people were saying that wasn’t real music, either.

Citation needed

[savanaly]

Cozy games where you basically can't lose are a booming industry in the last decade, so that outlook is certainly bullish for AI creative tools!

[hecanjog]

It was special and you didn't cheat: you wrote the lyrics and they meant something to you and your wife, which is what matters. If you asked someone else to set the music for you, it would still be music about something meaningful to you both. The AI part of this is pretty meaningless, but you made it meaningful by putting something real into it and sharing that with another person.

[wincy]

I do like the idea that another person commented of exporting the stems and actually singing the vocal portion of the song. It’d be fun to sing again (I sang some in high school), but I feel I never would have been able to come up with the tune in the first place if I’d started from zero.

[dsubburam]

Maybe we can distinguish craftmanship from creativity. This case can then be cast as one of deploying creativity without embodying the traditional craftmanship (ability to play guitar, sing low notes). I don't see that as illegitimate, so long as no false credit is taken about the said guitar playing, low note singing.

Can an artist be good if they can't draw a good circle by hand? Yes. Except they can't take credit for the goodness of circles that appear in their work, if not drawn by them.

[Edit: "responsibility" -> "credit"]

[wincy]

I think it’s also potentially a sense of taste, like being a music producer vs a music creator.

When AI art was nascent and stable diffusion came out, I put probably 1000 hours into really getting good at using it. I like to compare it to picking up pretty seashells on the sand. When working with those old models where many results were terrible, the prompt was akin to driving to a beach you know has seashells, then generating 100-200 pictures on an A100 was like combing through the beach to see if you find any good ones. Finally you could clean up the couple few that were real gems and get something that looked nice. It may not be artistry, but that doesn’t mean it has zero value at all.

Although let’s be real, most people aren’t going to make a living being a beach comber looking for pretty things that washed up on the shore, when even a kid can do it.

[noumenon1111]

I've been doing this. I've been a poet/songwriter for a while, but I'm no musician. This lowers the bar and provides a great deal of relief from the "creative boilerplate" necessary when booting up a song from zero using a DAW, especially for me, a non-musician.

So, I get a good song by throwing spaghetti at the wall until something sticks. Then I can export the stems to the DAW and replace the AI vocals with my own. A little audio processing and mixing later and the whole song is mine.

[wincy]

That’s a good idea actually! The AI did a fantastic job of making a tune that sounded good and matched the style I was going for, then a lot of the iteration was changing the verses because I discovered there’s a lot of lyrics that sound extremely “cringe” when you listen back. Like nails on a chalkboard, a “you know it when you hear it” situation.

My wife wrote a song for a story she’s been working on, and honestly her sense of verse and timing gave an output with me writing a simple style prompt that sounded absolutely fantastic. But she’d spent hours writing and refining that song as it’s important to the story.

Replacing the AI vocals with my own would likely work, although there’s a certain note in the chorus that’s beyond my vocal range. I bet if I practiced it and recorded myself singing the chorus 50 times I could get one result that sounded right, though. Thanks for sharing.

[tjr]

As a semi-professional musician, sounds fair to me.

You wrote the lyrics. There are professional songwriters with many hit songs who only write lyrics. Some can't even play an instrument, much less compose music. So what do they do? They work with a music composer. They hire a music arranger. They hire a band.

So in this case, you still did the foundational songwriting part yourself, but instead of hiring humans to help you finish it, you hired AI.

[rcbdev]

Grand Theft Auto V launched with auto-aim ('aimbot') as default in 2013. It is one of the most successful games in history, bringing joy to many people.

Are you arguing that's not a real game because of this?

[uoaei]

Yours is a bad faith argument based on an overly narrow pedantic acontextual definitional gripe. Not worth engaging.

[rcbdev]

You say this, and yet you did. Not by actually explaining why you think my argument is bad mind you, but instead by just throwing big words around.

Bravo.