[criley2]

Modern music has done this to itself. When the human product is already pure corporate slop, it's not hard for AI to compete.

Hopefully AI outcompeting humans at slop sparks a renaissance of humans creating truly beautiful human artwork. And if it doesn't, then was anything of value truly lost?

[BigTTYGothGF]

> Modern music has done this to itself

I get my modern music from Bandcamp. If you can't find good stuff to listen to, that's a 'you' problem.

[criley2]

How much of your super-awesome bandcamp music is topping charts, selling millions, packing mega stadiums, and is penetrating the zeitgeist so deeply that people around the world are addicted to it?

Maybe, just maybe, I'm not talking about "my" music tastes, but offering commentary on the state of music at a global scale. Weird that this point was so hard to follow!

[animuchan]

So true. AI music gens like Suno can't do Paul Shapera works even remotely, but can recreate a lot of pop or EDM music very faithfully. There's just no distance to close, it's already mainstreamly bad.

[azan_]

> Modern music has done this to itself. When the human product is already pure corporate slop, it's not hard for AI to compete.

What are you talking about? There’s lots of modern music that’s not corporate slop and that’s absolutely great. Never in history was access to great music as easy as it is now.

[criley2]

I'm talking about modern music. Just because a couple of dweebs on hackernews have "totally amazing underground music" doesn't mean the overall zeitgeist agrees. Regardless of your esoteric music tastes, music by sales and music by charting tells a very different story. And that story is one of replaceable slop.

[voidUpdate]

So find music you like that isn't modern corporate slop. My music right now consists mainly of indie stuff I've found on youtube and daft punk. No plagiarism machine needed, just human-made music

[muzani]

"No plagiarism machine needed, just human-made music"

From wikipedia: Many Daft Punk songs feature vocals processed with effects and vocoders including Auto-Tune, a Roland SVC-350 and the Digitech Vocalist. Bangalter said: "A lot of people complain about musicians using Auto-Tune. It reminds me of the late '70s when musicians in France tried to ban the synthesiser. They said it was taking jobs away from musicians. What they didn't see was that you could use those tools in a new way instead of just for replacing the instruments that came before. People are often afraid of things that sound new."

[voidUpdate]

Did Daft Punk put in a lot of effort to remix existing sounds to make their own music? Yes. Did they type "pls make french house electronic music number 1 chart" into a text box? No. Did they also credit original authors? Yes. I've not gone through their whole library, but for example, Edwin Birdsong has songwriting credit for harder, better, faster, stronger

[criley2]

There's this fallacy with AI generation that people think that all you have to do is type "i lik musik pls remake favrite song but better" and you get amazing results.

This is patently untrue.

It's like how if a junior engineer and a principal engineer use claude opus 4.6 they get radically different results. The junior doesn't have the taste or knowledge to know good from bad so the AI oversteers and slop is made. The principal has finely tuned sense of taste and deep knowledge, so they aggressively steer the AI at every step. This is also true in other AI domains.

To be absolutely clear: you can't make good AI music. Try all you want. Try the prompt you just wrote. Show and tell. It's not something you're going to be able to do.