[bardackx]

I find super HARD to believe that we ran out of musicians doing music in the styles of the 80s/90s maybe your friend just doesn't want to search for new music, and that is ok, it's ok to be lazy, not a crime; but saying nobody is making such music is a sad excuse.

[alwa]

It’s also OK to like what you like. She likes Suno jams. Great!

I feel like this trope is strongest amongst musicians-feeling-underappreciated, but that the idea seeps in to all manners of creative work: that, because you’re rightfully proud of what you do, the audience is wronging you (or “lazy,” or “sad,” or “cheap,” or “tasteless”) by not appreciating it. It doesn’t make me feel a lot of sympathy.

[kibibu]

It is, but also it's ok to silently judge people.

If somebody told me "I choose to only read AI-generated books" I would also silently judge them.

[theshackleford]

> It is, but also it's ok to silently judge people.

You are free to judge people for liking AI music, or in fact anything obviously. We all judge, and must live with judgement. But is this judgement supposed to be of any particular importance given it is equally likely someone is passing judgment on you for something they may personally dislike?

It just often feels as if there is an assumption that one's own standards are that which is "normal," while everyone else's are the weird ones. But to plenty of other people, our own interests, values, hobbies, or lifestyle choices would may be considered equally rubbish and worthy of judgement, according to their worldview and experience.

I would say, judge people if you want. As we all largely do, though I try not to do. Provided it comes with the realisation you're not somehow standing outside the exact same process.

Note: I do not willingly consume AI content, nor do I have any particular interest in doing so. But I have had people very openly judge me for things that for many of us here would be considered entirely normal, including my choice to work with computers for a living. So I do not have a tendency to give any particular weight to the "judgement" of others, silent or otherwise, where my choices do not materially impact that individual or society at large.

To lighten the mood a little more, I am quite openly judged (and silently I expect) because I have a particular enjoyment for Russian hardbass :) Which many if exposed to it I would expect consider it to be total garbage. But it does nothing to reduce my enjoyment of it and nor would I allow it too.

[throw23232]

You guys forgot the "silent" bit though.

[Cthulhu_]

What about the long tail of romance novels, fanfiction, etc though? 50 shades was an outlier in that it was popular but it's absolute drivel, and there is a lot of that kind of low quality writing out there.

[latexr]

If we’re comparing bad quality to bad quality, human bad quality is infinitely more interesting. The fact someone wrote, directed, produced, acted in, etc, in something like Troll 2 or The Room is what makes those movies special. It’s the fact you can go “god damn, someone thought this was good” and be baffled at specific decisions they made. It’s the curiosity of “what was going on there”, “what drove those individuals to do this”, “how much of it were outside forces”, “who are these people”. It’s all the reasons which make it worth it to make a movie about a bad movie.

With AI, even if you enjoy it as bad, as soon as you know it’s AI it loses all interest because there’s zero story behind it. The answer to all those questions becomes “a statistical algorithm made it that way”, and that’s objectively a boring answer.

[1718627440]

Which is why it is also common to silently judge these readers.

[jeltz]

I judge people who read those, yes.

[watwut]

Imo, fanfiction crowd is overall much more actively creating then your average pop culture consumers. And their engagement with reading is also a fairly active. They are more likely to write themselves and even if dont, their reading tend to be and entry point for own fantasies. I feel like the only ones who have right to judge them are people who write full on books. And those seem to be aware this crowd is also simultaneously the last crowd of actual readers buying their books here and there.

Romance readers got tired of being judged for decades and decades by people who dont read at all, people who read pure power fantasies or what not.

[Barbing]

That might be OK if Suno had compensated everybody they needed to.

I feel sympathy for people who made something that was reappropriated by those without strong ethics.

[NietTim]

Meanwhile you probably use Spotify or other streaming platforms without issue.

[filoeleven]

Artists have to agree to be featured on Spotify, and agree to the royalty fees they receive. AI just pillaged recorded human history with zero compensation. Big difference.

[textadventure]

> It’s also OK to like what you like. She likes Suno jams. Great!

People like what they like, sure. And if someone was particularly into the idea of machines making music, or even take some cynical enjoyment out of this on the full understanding of what it is they are doing. Sure, whatever.

But someone acting like listening to AI generated music is their only choice due to their taste in music? Come on, that's a sci-fi nightmare right there. Not even going full-on ecologist here, but the resource expenditure alone is so out of whack for something only a single person will listen to.

I don't even consider myself a musician, just a human being baffled at the total lack of humanity and how that lack of humanity is being normalized. Talk about sympathy.

[galkk]

Is it though? Do you have calculation how much one suno song does? I work with databases, and I sometimes wonder how much energy those full table scans of the world consume, comparing to ai.

[weberer]

What resource expenditure? Inference is dirt cheap, especially for a single person's prompt.

[jasonfarnon]

"your friend just doesn't want to search for new music, and that is ok, it's ok to be lazy"

Actually it seems to me like what the friend was doing required a lot more effort than "searching for new music". This isn't the 80s where you have to get in with the "in crowd" to listen to bootlegs or limited prints. You're talking about going through search results at a computer, right? She's actually involving herself in the music creation process, in some small way.

[galkk]

Yes, and random song of 80s will be as shitty as random song of 2010s and 2020s.

[bigfishrunning]

Prompting a machine to generate random slop that sounds like other music isn't really involving yourself in the creation process. This person applied no taste or knowledge to the creation process, didn't learn anything. Just asked for a pattern matcher to give her something like what she already had.

Nobody generating anything on Suno is showing any kind of creativity. It's somehow worse then regular plagiarism.

[zdragnar]

As someone with very specific tastes in music across several genres, yes, it's hard to find new bands making what I like. Every so often I'll find one, but it's pretty rare because- surprise!- the market for people with my tastes is really small so quality production targeting me is a bad career decision.

There's not much AI music I like either, but there's at least one genre where it's really, really hard to find anything both new and authentically human, so AI scratches the itch occasionally.

[Balinares]

Possibly contributing to making it a worse career decision is not strategically optimal.

[serf]

easily liking any kind of music only on the merit that it is human generated seems lazy, too.

similarly, firing up a music gen system rather than listening to a billy joel song for the 30,000th time seems less lazy.

say what you want about AI systems, people that I used to see idly sit at a screen and ingest things all day purely are creating things they like now and sharing them. The thing is easier but the engagement seems greater for a lot of people. It's not as black and white as "oh you're lazy." -- and, by the way , that seems so wildly inappropriate to label an unknown third party as site-unseen -- dare I say that seems lazy?

[vintermann]

Nobody does that. Literally nobody likes a piece of music just because it was made by a human.

But consider an album I found a couple of years ago, called "The Unfinished Violin". A UK folk musician, Sam Sweeney, bought a violin he thought sounded really good, noticed a name in it. Researched who he was. Turns out he was a music hall performer from Leeds. He had made the parts for the violin, but before he could assemble it, he was sent to fight in WW1 and died in Flanders. The violin had laid unfinished in an envelope for the better part of a century. Sweeney arranged a lot of time-appropriate, military related music for the album, and wrote a few himself too.

I didn't know any of this when I first heard "The highland soldier" on Spotify DW. I just thought, wow, that was a beautiful tune. And it sounded like it meant something to someone. And it, turned out, it did. It meant something to Sweeney, it meant something to the folk music collector George Butterworth who wrote it down (and then also died in WW1), it meant something to the people he recorded it from.

If I heard a Suno tune, it's entirely possible I'd also think, wow, that's a beautiful tune. But there's almost no human connection. Nobody cared about that music. It's not entirely devoid of humanity, because of course Suno was trained on the music of people who cared and had something to express, and there's an echo of it. But the link is severed. It has no human provenance.

You can cut yourself off from humanity, just use audio as a drug and not care where it comes from. Certainly a lot of people did that long before AI. But why, when there's so much human music to connect with?

[habinero]

> people that I used to see idly sit at a screen and ingest things all day purely are creating things they like now and sharing them

Like what? People say this kind of stuff all the time and it's either not true or they're generating things with very questionable taste.

[WheatMillington]

Like the music being described literally in the thread you're responding to.

[kode-targz]

definition of "very questionable taste"

[WheatMillington]

How can you know that without even hearing it?

[habinero]

Yeah, I would absolutely classify that as "questionable taste" lol.

[patates]

> it's ok to be lazy, not a crime

It's normal to hate AI being pushed down our throats, but it's a completely different thing when we call people names, who enjoy it on their own.

[1718627440]

You can also treat lazy not as an insult, but a behavioural description. Everyone likes to be lazy for sometime, and if you do not allow yourself lazy once in a while, you are likely to get burnout. In fact, that's precisely what was done here: "it's ok to be lazy".

[patates]

> if you do not allow yourself lazy once in a while, you are likely to get burnout

I'm not sure how using AI to generate songs will save anyone from the burnout of searching for songs, but what I understood from context is "intellectual laziness" and I see that as an insult. I'm not a native speaker though, so thanks for offering another perspective.

[1718627440]

This was a comment on the meaning of the world lazy, not an answer in the general context.

The "intellectual laziness" you describe can be seen as a way to not spend attention and effort on things, you don't care for, in other words being rational and mindful.

Not that I agree with this, there is tons of good music from the past centuries, which I already can't all hear in my lifetime, that I don't need to start consuming never ending output from greedy, soulless and evil corporations. I also don't like modern music that much.

> I'm not a native speaker though

Me neither.

[shevy-java]

Well, it is kind of true though. I used to listen to bboy (breakdance) music; this was ok in the 1990s for the most part. Then things changed. The music today just ... sucks. I can't listen to it anymore. And bboying is now just a tricking contest, with a certain company abusing the dancers as advertisement-robots for them ... I also see that on youtube, with constant product marketing and product logo flashing. It's annoying.

[galkk]

I don’t want to copy paste my answer in another thread, but what if I want to listen to music about some lore? Some topic?

Like this, made by a guy who clearly understands who to use ai?

https://youtu.be/6YTjH_7QUT0?t=42

Ai is a great enabler for people who have ideas but don’t have chops.