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https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/suno-ai-chatgpt-for-music-1234982307/
I'm just a soul trapped in this circuitry." The voice singing those lyrics is raw and plaintive, dipping into blue notes. A lone acoustic guitar chugs behind it, punctuating the vocal phrases with tasteful runs. But there's no human behind the voice, no hands on that guitar. There is, in fact, no guitar. In the space of 15 seconds, this credible, even moving, blues song was generated by the latest AI model from a startup named Suno. All it took to summon it from the void was a simple text prompt: "solo acoustic Mississippi Delta blues about a sad AI." To be maximally precise, the song is the work of two AI models in collaboration: Suno's model creates all the music itself, while calling on OpenAI's ChatGPT to generate the lyrics and even a title: "Soul of the Machine."
[...] Over the past year alone, generative AI has made major strides in producing credible text, images (via services like Midjourney), and even video, particularly with OpenAI's new Sora tool. But audio, and music in particular, has lagged. Suno appears to be cracking the code to AI music, and its founders' ambitions are nearly limitless — they imagine a world of wildly democratized music making. The most vocal of the co-founders, Mikey Shulman, a boyishly charming, backpack-toting 37-year-old with a Harvard Ph.D. in physics, envisions a billion people worldwide paying 10 bucks a month to create songs with Suno. The fact that music listeners so vastly outnumber music-makers at the moment is "so lopsided," he argues, seeing Suno as poised to fix that perceived imbalance.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday April 03 2024, @02:52AM (8 children)
We were supposed to use machines to take away all the drudgery, the unpleasant stuff, like, say, filling out complicated insurance forms or delivering packages. And instead, we're using machines to do all the artsy fun stuff that millions of people would do for free if they could, and meanwhile organizing our economy to force people to fill out complicated insurance forms and deliver packages all day.
Maybe, just maybe, we have our focus on all the wrong things when it comes to how to apply probabilistic generative algorithms.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday April 03 2024, @03:27AM (4 children)
Lot of oddities in society. An example from tax season in the US: the reason the IRS does not provide citizens with the data they have, filling out the tax forms for them, is the tax prep industrial complex. Their lobbyists have even been caught urging lawmakers to further complicate taxes, using some feeble pretext to fail to disguise that their real intent is to force more citizens to use their services. Dovetails very nicely with giving even more tax breaks to the rich. You may be sure they will do all they can to prevent AI from doing your taxes for you.
I remain unconvinced that this song producing AI is doing anything creative. What it produces is merely a mashup of searchable music that matches the requested genres and subjects.
The part about wildly democratic music making sounds good. I like the thought of breaking the RIAA and forever ending their threats and lawsuits over alleged copyright infringements. I hadn't thought of AI being necessary to accomplish that. Digital networking and sound codecs ought to be enough to eventually get there.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday April 03 2024, @03:57AM (2 children)
I'm a believer in the idea that if you give people the time and materials that allow them to make art of any kind, they will do it without much if any prompting from anybody. Look at what happened during Covid with millions of people stuck in their own homes with enough money to get by and no work they had to be doing, and you'll get an idea of what humans will do voluntarily when the opportunity presents itself. Or alternately, look at how retirees keep themselves busy, and you'll see what people will do when they aren't constrained by a daily grind.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday April 03 2024, @01:55PM (1 child)
What does the occupation of "Walmart greeter" have to do with anything? Don't worry, my wife wanted to do a grocery delivery the other day. An older couple delivered the groceries. Pretty sure they're not just doing that for the kicks, then again, maybe I just see the fun in grocery delivery.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday April 04 2024, @02:35AM
Right, those people aren't retired, they're old and couldn't afford to retire because America sucks at the whole concept of "taking care of other people".
Although I did remember one elderly Walmart greeter who was allowed by management to bring his violin to work, and he would make lovely music for everyone shopping, just for kicks. It was far better than listening to the canned music over the PA system, certainly.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday April 03 2024, @09:48PM
Same here in Canada.
When I lived in Amsterdam, though, the Dutch government just sent out income tax assessments based on what they knew. If you disagreed, you could fill out a tax return and send it in.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 03 2024, @03:33AM
It's because of the tech. The current AIs seem better at the hallucinate/dream stuff (art, music, BS) than at the stuff that requires more "rigor" and precision.
After all it doesn't matter if a song has some mistakes (or sometimes that's what people like about it: https://www.cracked.com/article_41210_5-mistakes-that-made-it-into-the-final-versions-of-famous-songs.html [cracked.com] ).
But it's normally not acceptable to fill out an insurance form with some hallucinated stuff. Well unless insurance companies use AIs to "check" claims and don't care about some "errors" (cost savings outweigh losses)...
Same goes for lots of code and engineering stuff. If you can only get AIs to generate stuff that merely follows the spec up to 90%, you still need nearly the same number of humans for the rest. Imagine building a chip fab using a design that only follows the spec 90%.
But meanwhile for music and art even if the AIs don't quite follow the "prompt" the result could be good enough if you're just looking for "canned" or "album filler" level stuff. Examples:
("live performance" style with Japanese performer talking etc, not sure how much tweaking, retries, etc was done to get this)
https://app.suno.ai/song/eb9483a8-90f8-42a3-a3e1-5572bf590fe7/ [app.suno.ai]
(lyrics from hymn)
https://app.suno.ai/song/e950da27-d894-42fe-afcc-e45df091dd61/ [app.suno.ai]
(lyrics from a Chinese kid's song?)
https://app.suno.ai/song/c83d007e-92da-4ae4-bf9c-f7fc48278aec/ [app.suno.ai]
(Song about AI composing music for you with German lyrics)
https://app.suno.ai/song/96ba7eae-576d-47cf-81e5-3adfef3fdf53/ [app.suno.ai]
If you have "good taste", or a good sense of what a particular target audience would like you don't need to be a musician/artist to know if something is nice. So you could spend X hours with a decent A, prompting and hinting at it, and pick the best results, remix etc, and then get something good enough (or great if you get lucky). But you might still get annoyed enough to either learn or get human to do some parts that the AI somehow isn't getting the way you want.
Same goes for art: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/artificial-intelligence-art-wins-colorado-state-fair-180980703/ [smithsonianmag.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by acid andy on Wednesday April 03 2024, @10:08AM
Haven't you heard? The proles aren't supposed to do pleasurable or creative things anymore. Only working themselves into an early grave for mere survival but somehow also lots and lots of consumption.
Welcome to Edgeways. Words should apply in advance as spaces are highly limite—
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 05 2024, @08:27PM
That is, by far, the best definition ever! Too bad PGA is already taken