Current speculation is that it's a novel object type, unlike the conglomerate iceballs we call "comets," with a different origin and history.
Unfortunately we did not make the heroic effort it would have taken to get a close look, so as with 1I/ʻOUMUAMUA we'll be left with enigmas and uncertainty.
Unless of course it brakes hard into a parking orbit. :)
Maybe it was cooking away like a sealed food container in a microwave, internal pressure building, then the seal is breached and the internal pressure is released in a single event.
I also use AI to do discrete, well-defined tasks so I can keep an eye on things before they go astray.
But I thought there are lots of agentic systems that loop back and ask for approval every few steps, or after every agent does its piece. Is that not the case?
If you're too lazy to put effort into learning how to create an art so you can adequately express yourself, why should some technology do all the work for you, and why should anyone want to hear what "you" (ie: the machine) have to say?
This is exactly how we end up with endless slop, which doesn't provide a unique perspective, just a homogenized regurgitation of inputs.
Yeah and it worked great until industrial agriculture let lots of people eat who had no skill at agriculture. In fact, our entire history as a species is a long history of replacing Skill with machines to enable more people to access the skill. If it gives you sad feelings that people without skill can suddenly do more cool things, thats entirely a you problem.
Again, I wholly reject the idea that there's a line between 'tech people' and 'art people'. You can have an interest in both art and tech. You can do both 'traditional art' and AI art. I also reject the idea that AI tools require no skill, that's clearly not the case.
>nature
This can so easily be thrown back at you.
>why should anyone want to hear what "you" (ie: the machine) have to say?
So why are we having this discussion in the first place? Right, hundreds of millions are interested in exploring and creating with AI. You are not fighting against a small contingent who are trying to covet the meaning of "artist" or whatever. No, it's a mass movement of people being creative in a way that you don't like.
• I didn't say there's a line between "tech people" and "art people". Why would there be?
• We're having this discussion because people are trying to equate an auto-amalgamation/auto-generation machine with the artistic process, and in doing so, redefining what "art" means.
• Yes, you can "be creative" with AI, but don't fool yourself-- you're not creating art. I don't call myself a chef because I heated up a microwave dinner.
• The other guy certainly did. And your subsequent reply was an endorsement of his style of gatekeeping, so. I mean, just talk to some of the the more active people in AI art. Many of them have been involved in art for decades.
• If throwing paint at a canvas is art (sure, why not?) then so is typing a few words into a 'machine'. Of course many people spend a considerable amount more effort than that. No different than learning Ableton Live or Blender.
Suno is moving toward becoming a browser-based DAW that happens to use AI. There are already more capable and established DAWs, and I see no reason they can't implement AI into their workflows-- in a more precise manner, where it's actually useful, instead of wholesale as a gimmick. Many are already doing this. So I don't understand where Suno is going with any of this.
It either needs to be:
1. So easy anyone can press a button and magically get exactly what they want with perfect accuracy and quality.
2. So robust and powerful it enables new kinds of music production and super-charges human producers.
This is neither. And I don't buy Suno's argument that they're solving a real problem here. Creative people don't hate the process of creating art-- it's the process itself and the personal expression that make it worthwhile. And listeners/consumers can tell the difference between art created with intent and soul, and a pale imitation of that.
> It either needs to be: 1. So easy anyone can press a button and magically get exactly what they want with perfect accuracy and quality. 2. So robust and powerful it enables new kinds of music production and super-charges human producers.
Don't forget the secret third option - facilitate a tidal wave of empty-calorie content which saturates every avenue for discovery and "wins" purely by drowning everything else out through sheer volume. We're at the point where some genAI companies are all but admitting that's their goal.
I gave up on synthwave which was a genre I loved because there's so much AI it just not worth the effort to find new music. I'll listen to old songs but I have zero interest in new songs. I moved to a more niche genre where there's no AI yet.
same, I listen to a synthwave playlist on spotify, and once it ends spotify starts playing 'similar' music and at that point I just start feeling gross.
That seems to be the purpose. It doesn’t have to sound that good to the listener. It’s just made to extract dollars from Spotify when you flood the platform with so much slop that some of it starts getting played by users who just let the machine pick the next song.
This tidal wave has already destroyed the gaming industry, lot's of low quality AI slop games have flooded App Stores, STEAM etc leaving both gamers and creators frustrated.
Yes I'm already doing this manually with Reason. I'll compose something that's quite bare bones, export the audio and run it through Suno, asking it to cover and improvise with a specific style, then when I have something I like, I split that into stems, import some or all of these to Reason and then reconstruct and enhance the sound using instruments in Reason, mostly by replaying the parts I like on keyboard and tweaking it in the piano roll. Often I get additional inspiration just by doing that. Eventually I delete all the tracks that came from Suno stems when I've finished this process.
That way I get new musical ideas from Suno but without any trace of Suno in the final output. Suno's output, even with the v5 model, is never quite what I want anyway so this way makes most sense to me. Also it means there's no Suno audio watermarking in the final product.
This is similar to what I do. There are all kinds of useful ways to incorporate AI into the music production process. It should be treated like a collaborative partner, or any other tool/plugin.
It shouldn't be a magic button that does everything for you, removing the human element. A human consciously making decisions with intent, informed by life experience, to share a particular perspective, is what makes art art.
We use AI assisted coding to be more productive or to do boring stuff. If the 'making the music' part is what you are getting away from, why make music? You're basically a shitty 'producer' (decent producers are amazing at those boring parts you are skipping and can fill out a track without hitting up a robot) at that point.
Music is math. Art is patterns. Like how we're using AI to iterate through design and code, musicians could use it for generating musical patterns including chords, harmonies, melodies, and rhythms. In theory, it can pull up and manipulate instruments and effects based on description rather than rifling through file names and parameters (i.e. the boring stuff).
Most success as a musician stems from developing a unique style, having a unique timbre, and/or writing creative lyrics. Whether a coder, designer, artist, or musician, the best creatives start by practicing the patterns of those who came before. But most will never stand out and just follow existing patterns.
AI is nothing more than mixing together existing patterns, so it's not necessarily bad. Some people just want to play around and get a result. Others will want to learn from it to find their own thing. Either way works.
With art and AI, people seem to enjoy the part where they say they made something and get credit for it, but didn’t actually have to bother. People used to find art of people on the internet and claim it as their own, now an AI can statistically generate it for you and it maybe feels a bit less icky. Though I have to agree it all seems sort of pointless, like buying trophies for sports you didn’t play.
"Creative people don't hate the process of creating art"
Yep. I was a professional music producer before the pandemics, and I couldn't agree more.
Honestly, I'm glad we are destroying every way possible to earn money with music, so we find another profession for that purpose and then we can make music for fun and love again.
> And listeners/consumers can tell the difference between art created with intent and soul, and a pale imitation of that.
Strong disagree there. I think that's true of a very small % of consumers nowadays. I mean, total honesty, I think that Suno is not worse than a large fraction of the commercial pop made by humans (maybe) that tops the charts regularly. It's already extremely formula based artificial music made by professional hit makers from Sweden or Korea.
The objective was never to grab discerning listeners but the mass of people. It would work even if they grab 50% but honestly I think it's going to be higher.
But then you look at image gen. The established one, namely Adobe, are surprisingly not winning the AI race.
Then you look at code gen. The established IDEs are doing even worse.
I don't rule out the possibility of music being truly special, but the idea of "established tools can just easily integrate AI right" isn't universally true.
Agreed. The problem with being an incumbent in this era is that much of the existing UI/UX assumptions are based on the idea of manual manipulation. We're so early that foundational assumptions are still up for debate, and for large companies like Adobe, there's just no way they'd be able to move at the required pace to keep up. Heck I'm at a company that's less than 2 years old, with less than 20 people, solely devoted to AI, and it's still hard for us to keep up.
What Adobe and others ought to be doing is setting up internal labs that have free reign to explore whatever ideas they want, with no barriers or formality. I doubt any of them will do that.
The innovator's dilemma is real. IMO none of the big DAWs are well-positioned to capitalize on AI, but that doesn't mean they couldn't.
I'd argue music generation is different from image or code generation. It's closer to being purely art. Take image generation for example. Most of the disruption is coming from competition with graphic design, marketing, creative/production processes, etc. The art world isn't up in arms about AI "art" competing with human art.
It does mean. The switch from writing “applicable” software to creating cutting edge AI is almost impossible. The parent comment makes great examples, we can add to that list JetBrains (amazing IDEs, zero ability to catch up with ML), for example. It’s a very different fast-paced scientific driven domain.
> And listeners/consumers can tell the difference between art created with intent and soul, and a pale imitation of that.
Respectfully I disagree. We have had curated, manufactured pop, built by committee and sung by pretty mouthpieces with no emotional connection, for a long time now, and they make big money.
It’s soulless by definition, designed by committee and sung by a machine. Entirely manufactured. But people like it.
It’s a counterpoint to the above argument that listeners will be dismissive of AI-produced music because it is a pale imitation of art created with intent and soul. On the contrary, such music thrives and is very popular already.
People love to be snobs about pop music, but it's music.
A particular piece of art isn't "soulless" just because it didn't move you. There were still plenty of humans involved in making it, who made specific artistic decisions. In pop music, the creative decisions are often driven by a desire to be as broadly appealing as possible. That's not a good or bad thing unless you judge it as such. It's still art.
The contention that there is something so ethereal, uncapturable, so uniquely and indescribably human that is put into even the blandest piece of mass-market pop that an AI trained on all the music ever made couldn’t create a track that people would accept due to some intangible hollowness, some void where the inestimable quintessence of human existence should be…
That’s hilarious.
I’m not saying it’s not ‘art’ whatever that might mean, I am saying this idea that people won’t accept and enjoy an AI version is a fantasy.
AI "music" sounds like ass. The Temu of sonic products. It will sell, but only in niche markets. Traditionally manufactured pop "music" is a more upscale and widely applicable market position.
Honestly it sounds like AI generated music will just widen the bimodal distribution: those who care about craft and authenticity on one end, and a race to the bottom on the other. Everything in the middle will be squeezed.
> And listeners/consumers can tell the difference between art created with intent and soul, and a pale imitation of that.
Um, have you seen the pop charts at any time in the past... well, since forever, actually?
The majority of commercially produced music today is created with intent to take your money and nothing else, with performers little more than actors lip-syncing to the same tired beat. Because it sells.
> Creative people don't hate the process of creating art
I mean, I hate when it's difficult to get the medium to express my vision... not that AI especially would help with that when I'm actually attached to that vision in detail....
I simultaneously feel repulsed by AI music and "art" and yet am totally open to being captivated by AI music if I really feel something is musically better than almost any human-made music I've heard.
I just haven't heard anything that isn't "slopful" yet. If I do, I will still feel weird about it, but I'm a big believer in the value of "aesthetic objects in themselves", so I am eager to find something I do actually like.
Even just knowing something was drawn or composed by an AI will negatively taint my opinion from the start, but I'm still open.
I don't totally discount the position that the human "soul" is what makes art art and all that, but I still do think something can be very enjoyable and good without being created by a sentient entity, in theory.
Don't you need more focus and aggression to make even sell-out weak tea dubstep? I feel the generative process really severely fails to deliver anywhere near the correct sound, even for 'bad artificial lol dubstep' sounds.
Couldn't agree more. Instead of seeking out people making that art, we are now leaving "art" or human expressive emotion to random noise and paying for it.
Side note, but does anyone else have this thought process when faced with yearly subscription vs lifetime purchase?
1. If I buy a subscription and end up not using it, I've wasted money.
2. If I buy a subscription and end up using it, that means I should have just bought the lifetime purchase. So now I've wasted money.
3. If I buy a lifetime purchase and end up not using it, I've wasted money.
4. I don't want to waste money. I'll find a free alternative or build my own.
5. Exit app store, no sub or purchase made.
Thats why I like Rent-To-Own. Splice (a software for virtual instruments, music samples etc) supports this a lot and I've used it a lot. 150€ for a VST upfront is hard but if I can pay 10x15€ instalments and pause / cancel them anytime before, I have no risk if I never really use the instrument. If I otherwise use it the supplier gets their full price and I get to own the product because at the tenth instalment you get a lifetime product key.
I’ve found most “lifetime” subscriptions are actually just a couple of years. The standard way to cut them off, is deprecate the app, and come out with a new one, with a different bundle ID.
It's another version of how gym memberships get you. Everyone errs on the side of over-committment and they get to make more money.
I've found I'm better off paying extra for a shorter duration until I've validated that I'll be using my subscription in 3/6/12 months from now. E.g. recently with Duolingo I ended up only paying for it on a monthly rate for about 4 months, and that wasn't even because I'd quit learning, I'd just found a much better app.
I would group that kind of pricing with dark patterns, and I tend not no but anything when I see that. It's like designing the free shipping threshold to be a couple of dollars short of common purchases, buy 1 get the second for $5, etc. They all apply fake pressure hoping to upsell. I want a far exchange of money for goods/services, not a trick and if I feel I'm being tricked I leave.
While I agree with you almost universally, I think in this case, the pricing is meant to be part of the loss aversion technique the creator is employing.
My problem is there is no such thing as a lifetime subscription anymore. More like "until the company gets acquired and the new parent company gets bored or until I get bored, whichever comes first".
A project management layer is a huge missing piece in AI coding right now. Proper scoping, documentation, management, etc is essential to getting good results. The people who are having the most success with “vibe coding” have figured this out, but it should really be incorporated into the process.
Oh, to be new to Zen again. That lovely honeymoon phase. Give it a few weeks/months. Bugs, random UI changes, odd development priorities. I wanted to love it, I really did.
I've been using it for maybe 6 months now, and I'm still enjoying it. The only things that I couldn't get by properly configuring an up-to-date Firefox (with userChrome.css) are compact mode, workspaces, and peek, though, so it wouldn't take too many annoyances to send me back to Firefox.
Yep, I switched back to Firefox after loving Zen for a while. The latest UI change that tipped me over the edge was to remove the ability to use Firefox themes.
