AI has gotten good at making forgettable art
Which is not very exciting, because humans already excel at that anyway
The latest “jfc what has AI made now” moment is this sad-girl rendition of the MIT License Text. Unlike previous pieces of AI-generated music which, as recently as a few years ago, were bad enough to be ignorable, the remarkable thing about this one is that it’s, well, actually pretty good in terms of passing as music.
As good as the average piece of forgettable pop music, anyway. Slap together a nondescript 1-3-5 chord progression, someone with decently in-key vocals (or autotuned to such), and some generic words about love and nostalgia and whatever, and you get the typical piece of pop nonsense. Granted, it was made by an algorithm. As opposed to being the whitebread result of stunted talent, warped by commercial pressure to satisfy whatever bland flavours of tune-cum the masses would like to swallow this week. This is either the bellwether of a mind-blowing, industry-upending sea change - or it’s completely beside the point, depending on who you are asking.
For music executives, it’s probably something to fret about (and hire McKinsey to soothe your nerves over). What Suno.ai has done is dramatically decrease the lift and cost associated with creating flavourless mass-market radio stuff. This probably changes the unit economics of businesses such as, say, shitty nightclubs. The ones that play top 40 hits sped up to 135bpm with some prepackaged drops thrown in, because everyone is too drunk too care anyway. I guess we don’t need a human to help us run away from our lives and emotions anymore.
Anybody who’s ever actually tried to make art, on the other hand, is probably staring at the whole thing with a combination of muted disappointment, and a complete lack of surprise. There’s a musical uncanny valley thing going on: it sounds like music, it sounds like alot of the stuff that gets tends to wrapped around emotions in music, but it’s also blindingly, obviously not emotions at all.
And I don’t think this is just due to the lyrics being the literal MIT License text. Suno creates things that kind of sound like sad girl music, and contain alot of words that tend to appear in sad girl music, but simply aren’t sad girl music.
This song by Sara Bareilles came on Spotify when I was brushing my teeth this morning, probably because I listened to it a bajillion times last year:
Call me a basic bitch, but I think this is a genuine and beautiful piece of art. Someone with more musical training than me can probably slam it for using all manner of standard music industry tricks. (I’m sure this is some vanilla chord progression in D minor or something - I wouldn’t know.) And someone with more song-writing experience can probably find ways to dismiss these lyrics as the most generic of generic “wahhhh my boyfriend broke up with me but I still love him” metaphors. (I can’t even breathe without you! How dramatic.)
And yet when I asked Suno to try and create something similar (“A sad piano song with a female singer that expresses the pain of reflecting on a breakup”) it just…couldn’t:
https://suno.com/song/ffae336c-060a-4bf3-a646-d72c7d3aece4
[Verse]
In the silence of this room
I'm haunted by our memories
The echoes of our love
Are fading away
Slowly
[Verse 2]
The keys on this old piano
Play a melancholic melody
Each note brings back the pain
Of what we used to be
[Chorus]
And now I'm left here all alone
With the echoes of our love
They're haunting me
I'm drowning in the tears I've cried
As I reflect on our goodbye
-some nonsense generated by Suno.ai
There’s no way around it: this is meaningless garbage. I started thinking that it reads and sounds like a high schooler writing poetry for the very first time, after they got dumped on the night of junior prom or whatever. But the truth is that even such a poor kid would be able to create infinitely better art than this, awkward shitty metaphors and all. They would do better simply by virtue of trying to express some pain that they’ve actually felt as a human being.
Anybody who wasn’t listening too closely and had this on as background noise could mistake it for an actual song. Anybody who is actually paying attention knows that this song contains less emotive expression than a packet of paper plates.1
I don’t know what it is about AI-generated content (music, writing, art, whatever) that marks it as so obviously non-human, but you can sniff it out from miles away.2 It’s fundamentally incapable of stepping outside of the subspace on which it was trained.3 I doubt that AI will ever generate a meaningful piece of art because it’s always, at the end of the day, trained on human outputs. And any human who makes art will tell you that it’s really, really fucking hard to create anything good in the first place.4
God help the algorithms training themselves on blog posts like this. No wonder they can’t come up with anything meaningful to say. Heck, I can barely do it myself.
#143
Presumably you’re going to bring the paper plates to a picnic with some friends or something, and you’re looking forward to that at least a little bit.
Miraculously we have human institutions that also create completely non-human output, which is almost impressive if not for the fact that it’s also really fucking sad. Just read the average LinkedIn post, or blog, or copy on the website of a generic corporation. They’re like the friggin’ saltine crackers of human expression.
At least, I’ve yet to see a counterexample
I sit here tapping out these blog posts by the dozen and only ever once in a blue moon manage to come out with a sentence that I actually kind of like.