I always remember of the infamous Steve Jobs quote "Ideas are cheap". If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution, then ideas are the gateway to abundance now, but abundance alone does not guarantee "stickiness".
What I think is often overlooked is the human "Willingness" and "Care" of staying with the thing for the lack of a better term. What I mean by that is that a lot of people just don't care enough, or don't want to, build, maintain, and own things. Sure you can ship V1 faster, but will you remain on the grind?
I think a great example of what probably will happen is found in Suno, the AI Music thing. I don't know if y'all have tried it, but it now produces really good stuff. What's happening there? A lot of people play with their own little universe and get tired quickly, move away from it, and only a few prolific creators stay and turn it into a "job like" environment.
We may have shifted the scale and the economics of "delegation" and "execution" but I think there are still a lot of other factors to consider.
> Suno, the AI Music thing. I don't know if y'all have tried it, but it now produces really good stuff
I played with it a bit, and no, it doesn't! And I am talking as someone with limited music culture, musicians are likely to be even more critical.
For the first few tries, it sounds impressive and the tunes are catchy. It used to sound wrong in the background but they mostly (but not completely) fixed that. However, after a few dozen songs, it starts to always sound the same. It is all generic stuff, the songs tell no story, it is a bit like the kind of music that accompany corporate advertisement. You can try to be more precise in your prompt, but I never had any success, it will just ignore most of the details that could make your song interesting.
The most interesting result I had was actually when I managed to get it off rails, a bug more or less. I asked it to mix two very different genres together, and it made something unsettling in a way I don't remember hearing before. But as always, further working on it proved extremely difficult, as it always tried to go back to making generic stuff, ignoring the details you give it.
Suno can do remixes though. And it is a bit like with code. LLMs are very good at porting, when you already have something that works, it can make it work in another language. But if you just have an idea, it will screw up at anything original. If you want a LLM to implement your idea properly, you have to give it so much guidance that it amounts to writing the code yourself, while struggling with the ambiguousness of natural languages.
i actually was discussing that with a guy i met the other day, an old school producer, did succesful stuff 30 years ago. He used SUNO to reinterpret old and ideas of his, in his judgement it did an excellent job and lets him create many songs daily if he want.
Sounds familliar? the good old "let AI be steered by experienced X and boost productivity".
All in all, gun to the head, i think i am so critical because to use these tools is surrendering to big corpos. It is not a democratic tool. If it was i would probably be using it. I have finally given up and started messing with local models (well, i did already with images) but general local models are useless.
OR maybe it's me? i cannot for one moment let go and converse with the machine. I can give order to the machine.
The tech is fantastic, but the fact that it's in the hand of corpos with all interests in never letting us be able to do shit without them, makes me one hundred and one percent against it.
Have you tried the open weight models, but not locally? Like, using it from a provider. That way, you get access to better models while still not using private closed models, anyone with enough compute can host them, not just the big AI corps.
Suno is completely incapable of producing heavy metal. I can't speak for other genres bc I don't listen to them, but what it produces is completely hollow and devoid of what makes metal metal. I also think most metal fans will categorically reject AI-made metal on principle.
Suno's incapable of making psytrance, which is mind-boggling as that is an intensely repetitive, machine-like genre that should be water off a duck's back to produce.
The problem is that it's doing it by diffusion techniques, so all its high percussion is totally vague and indistinct. Hell, it can't even do a decent psy kick because that too is unspecific and you can't have a psy track that is vague and blunted.
Turns out you can have a production that is hollow, weak and devoid of what makes purely synth machine tracks. It can't get trancey in a serious way because it's not capable of being sharp enough.
That is an illustrative failure. It might be absurdly simple 4/4 pattern progressions which a calculator should be able to automate. But inducing a trance requires consciousness; electrical activity in a meat brain. They will never understand such things.
just verified, it cant make a decent techno track, nor a drone track nor anything experimental. Its creativity is subpar, it feels like listening to a producer that knows where things go but is tired of playing, zero interest in creating/ performing, it gives off that kind of vibe
I mean, even if could produce generic metal would it produce Igorrr? Meshugga? Tim Henson? Baby Metal? All of these are driven by other things then just producing metal. I agree pure AI music would properly rejected unless there was some point to it. I could see it have some part, but then as a weird instrument. Take a model for music, randomly mutate internal weights and then let it produce a drum beat. Keep doing that unless you hit some limit and perhaps that is interesting.
Just tested google's (lyria, integrated into gemini), and it made an honestly not bad progressive death metal song with female vocals alternating growling and melodic (though I accidentally used gemini pro to forward the prompt to the actual music gen model, so I assume it augmented with something to make it not "generic heavy metal").
>will categorically reject AI-made metal on principle.
I think this is a huge part of the reason people sometimes find AI criticism so dismissible; there is always some factor other than the actual product it seems that AI-made assets are judged on. With Suno, the biggest ones I've seen are 1) hating AI-created music by virtue of it being AI-created, and 2) the hate is from people who attempt to generate income from their music production, and Suno made music cuts into that pie.
This is obviously "hating AI music on principle". Your last sentence means that there is literally nothing Suno can produce to change your mind.
Not hating it on principle would be something like "Suno-produced music I've listened to is derivative/soulless and has that annoying AI quality that makes me want to turn it off immediately. Maybe one day it could produce something genuinely moving and beautiful, but I'm skeptical."
They didn't say "genuinely moving and beautiful", they said their favorite music is about "the human element / someone / I know they mean it / I can tell it’s genuine / who they are as a human".
They didn't even say they "hate" other music, either, just that it's not their favorite.
If someone says "I only like green paintings", that excludes red paintings, even ones that have the word "green" written on them. Nothing to "fix" there, if anything, the question is why some people just won't accept that. They are acting oddly, not the people who know what they like and why.
I didn't say there was anything to fix (I didn't use that word). The poster I replied to is free to dislike AI on principle. I'm just pointing out that his dislike of AI is in fact based on principle.
I don't see much point in continuing this thread. You're fixated on defending the poster's level-headed criticism of AI in music. I'm addressing a much more specific point- that despite the poster's claim, his distaste for AI in music is based on principle. No matter how many advances AI makes in music, he will be unmoved because his preference for human-made music is exactly that it is not made by AI.
Metal, punk, hardcore - any type of heavy music, really, should reject AI-made slop. If you’re a fan and/or maker of them and are not just wearing the genres as an aesthetic, you fully know they are a rejection of corporate and governmental control.
This is really true for most music genres outside the pop mainstream. The idea of AI free jazz is just as absurd as AI punk.
More generally, we think that music (and art in general) is a form of human expression and communication. The very idea of AI music just seems absurd, as it completely misses the point of what constitutes music as an artform. Why should I listen to something that has been produced entirely without human intent? Why should I prefer a cheap simulacrum over the original?
follow the money, they wont be selling vinyl but generating streaming revenue, just type in what you know are paying niches and off you go to fill the hard drives with slop to be paid by advertisers on streaming platforms.
I think this is a question of how much control the user is able to have over the end product. Music creation in particular is very difficult... I've produced music for 4-5 years, and the granularity with which one has to control the finest pieces is often mindblowingly frustrating. It takes years to develope a decent ear for mixing.
By giving up that control, you do get to a quality end result sooner, but that end result can only be an approximation to your original vision, since you're giving up the control required to shape the sound to that granular level.
Additionally, without the knowledge of how you got from A to B, you don't know what else is possible (or impossible.) In the process of doing something manually, you may stumble across a particular setting or effect that creates something you never even considered. And now, that is knowledge you can use on the next project.
Yeah I have played with Suno a lot and I find that no matter how I change the genre, lyrics, etc. there's some underlying quality I can't quite name that my brain recognizes and quickly gets tired of. It's fun in a novelty sense, for now.
> But as always, further working on it proved extremely difficult, as it always tried to go back to making generic stuff, ignoring the details you give it.
It's like any LLM, it's not a tool for if you know exactly what you want with all these knobs and fine grained controls.
> The most interesting result I had was actually when I managed to get it off rails, a bug more or less. I asked it to mix two very different genres together, and it made something unsettling in a way I don't remember hearing before.
I don't think that's a bug or unexpected, it's what AI is good for. I do these (very) old Blues covers of modern songs and it's terrific at that sort of conversion thing.
In this particular case, it really gave some "uncanny valley" feeling. That is, on the surface, it sounds like something familiar, but something is off. The wrongness was completely unintended, not prompted for, but interesting, in the same way that eldritch horror is interesting.
I wanted to mix heavy metal and hardstyle, the idea I had in mind was to imagine a battle, one side being represented by one style, and the other, by another style, each side responding to the other. It didn't give that much thought to it, but it sounded fun. And instead of getting the back and forth I expected, I got... weirdness.
I then tried to add some matching lyrics, that is, something similarly uncanny, also using AI. It also turned out to be somewhat difficult and not all LLMs managed to pull it off (ended up with GPT-5.5). That is, for many LLMs, especially the small, self-hosted ones, I couldn't get the effect I wanted, even after trying different prompt strategies. Scary words, spooky scenes, etc... no problem, but that's the opposite of what I wanted. I wanted something subtly wrong, not an B movie horror scene. Also, by adding the lyrics to the song, Suno lost a bit of an edge to the song.
I definitely come from the angle of appreciating the novelty and newness of sound from this generated music, especially when tasked with mashups. I'd not use if I had a strong vision around refining a particular song though, maybe that's the challenge with the "battle" inspiration you were after.
FYI though you can give some hints to the generation about what you want, if you look at the 'lyrics' for the two instrumental songs above you'll see them in the brackets.
A big threat for illustrators is not LLMs per se but slop acceptance. We've seen the same with machine translation - it was (and to some extent still is) worse than human translation but people accepted it because it's free. I recently seen and ad on a street which caught my attention - it was a photorealistic image of a taking off plane. It looked off and when I looked at details it's become clear it's AI generated - the 1st giveaway - stationary turbines on a flying plane, an angle relative to the runway is wrong, small details, especially in the background are off. Someone prompted LLM, seen the result and decided it's OK to print this advert. IMHO they would be better off with buying a stock image.
> If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution, then ideas are the gateway to abundance now, but abundance alone does not guarantee "stickiness".
They don't "solve" execution.
If you're willing to push them enough, and put in place the system that they can actually get working code, they can solve execution - but that IS engineering!!
They are far from doing that by default now (replacing engineering).
Maybe in 3 years. They're moving fast.
But you can't ask them to build you a better Rust compiler, sit back and watch, and get a result today.
Execution has just moved up the conceptual stack. We once wrote assembly, and then changed to higher order languages. Same is happening with lexical work generally.
Totally, I meant that more in the lenses of how folks are perceiving it. They solve the execution part of the "one shot" aspect mentioned in the post. You still need to do a lot of plumbing, orchestration, supervision, etc. I think it will get cheaper and cheaper over time, though not magical enough to one shot a Rust compiler from "write a Rust compiler make no mistakes" haha.
Suno is a good example. I've written lyrics for a lot of songs and then "produced" them with Suno, a process that involves dozens to hundreds of remix/cover/extend revisions or a lot of time in their editor to get it sounding the way I want it to. The songs are songs that I like and will listen to in my playlist but they haven't gotten much traction on Suno's algorithm. I haven't tried to promote them much elsewhere either but when I have posted them they get a few likes at best. I'm not disappointed because I was creating the music for myself and just sharing it as a side effect but what I take away from this is that getting people to pay attention to and enjoy something that you've created takes a lot of work. You have to market it, get it in front of them, get them to pay attention to it and I'm convinced you also need to give them a reason to like it by associating it with something whether that's a video, a story, a persona or some other vibe. If you want it to "stick" you need to do all of that over and over again for the same audience so that they learn it.
That is what takes determination and why you have to really care about the thing you are trying to sell to people. You have to stick to it before they will stick to it.
Same here, I vibe coded my perfect alarm & reminders & productivity app for Android, (Promptly AI link below) that does TTS and Gemini calls and other things that rapacious alarm-clock marketing masters charge dozens of bucks per month for, but at some point the day job and dislike of the marketing grind is just too much, summer is here and yeah...
"getting people to pay attention to and enjoy something that you've created" is a lot harder still if you didn't really create the thing. I'm not trying to be snide, but the tools that allow you to produce that kind of output being available to everyone else kind of makes the point. That's why statistics show that barely anyone on Suno listens to anything but their own stuff.
And of course, especially for music, the human element is pretty much the entire point, so while a lot of people enjoy it for a while as a toy to play around, I don't think many people would seriously consider listening to AI music as being worth their time. It would be like knowingly and deliberately reading fake news.
> I always remember of the infamous Steve Jobs quote "Ideas are cheap". If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution, then ideas are the gateway to abundance now, but abundance alone does not guarantee "stickiness".
> I think a great example of what probably will happen is found in Suno, the AI Music thing. I don't know if y'all have tried it, but it now produces really good stuff. What's happening there? A lot of people play with their own little universe and get tired quickly, move away from it, and only a few prolific creators stay and turn it into a "job like" environment.
Sturgeon's law states, "Ninety percent of everything is crap". The adage was coined by American science fiction author and critic Theodore Sturgeon while defending the merits of the genre. Sturgeon observed that most works in any field were low quality. Therefore, science fiction was not uniquely inferior.
Sumo produces plausible cheesy stuff that is otherwise sonically awful, ringing alongside the full spectrum due to how it works. As a musician I would not use it - I like to keep some creative power. Some people use it around me for samples… and then their tracks ring. But it works for them as they be advertising producers. Mind u - I’ve used paid version and I know one or two about music production.
As an information architect I find it amazing it works so good, but is useless to me except being a great think to play with… a toy really. I’m much more fascinated by Strudel.cc and LLMs do a great job to educate me into it, myself being mostly an autodidact.
As a dev I struggle to maintain coherence with Claude Code even though I’ve piped more than 10b tokens since Jan. Certain trivial stuff is easily remedied but even more devil lives in abundance of details now. So the task moves one level above in terms of abstraction, but is not solved.
If guys were good at typing one and the same thing in one and the same lang, which is nothing wrong about given how crafts went for ages, then they will be struggling to compete with the GPTs. But if they are in the architectural and operational perspective … well - work and demand just increased, so please stop whining.
Could you elaborate on the AI Music tool? My impression was that it's used as a one-shot generation tool. I don't know much about music but I imagine artists need intermediary steps, track separation, instrument customization and other stuff I'm oblivious about. Without these, it's hard for me to imagine it being used for professional work.
The frontier music models, the paid/pro Opus 4.8 equivalent ones, are more capable now, and Suno has a "harness" like Claude Code on their Studio tool that lets you iterate on the generation by doing stem splitting, track separation, edits that stay within the tempo, rhythmic structure, etc.
> If execution is everything, and frontier LLMs solve execution
Steve Jobs didn't mean "writing good code" as "execution", he meant "making things that align with how people want to use the product". Frontier LLMs are not solving Steve Jobs-level execution (even in the near future) because what that would mean understanding human nature – something that Steve Jobs or Henry Ford were much better than most in the industry today, so at best we're going to see LLMs making things that are as good as the majority of products. Because AI does not see whether something is perfect-according-to-Steve-Jobs or merely good-code-according-to-engineering-practices.
This starts from a false premise. Ideas aren't cheap.
Good ideas are expensive. They're expensive because you have to weed through all the bad ones to identify them, find a market, and turn them into a product. You don't know that from the start, which is why the landscape is littered with millions of dead projects from thousands of dead companies.
Even if the execution were cheap and implementation were perfect, if the starting idea was bad, it's all been a waste.
Ideas aren't cheap, because bad ideas are expensive and good ideas cost money to vet.
One thing that occurs to me about music which makes it different from software or film is that it's a very impulsive art form. A human with semi-modern equipment can write, produce, mix, and master a song in less than a day. They can do this in a way that gives them full creative control over the thousands of tiny conscious and unconscious decisions that ultimately feed into what it is you like (but are probably unable to accurately articulate with words) about a song.
In this case, it's difficult for me to see what exactly is gained by offloading all of those decisions to a mean regression algorithm. I agree it's a fun toy, but I can't imagine actually listening to or deeply enjoying any song made with these music models.
I could imagine it being used successfully in some targeted part of the process. For example, manipulating drums or changing the timbre of some previously recorded instrument. In that case it's not much different than traditional music creation tools like sampling.
LLMs don't solve _all_ of the execution. Having distribution and clout is even more important to execution now. To win people must take you seriously when you ask for business partnerships or to give your product a try. The winners have a lot of clout with plenty of followers willing to try the product or integrate.
> I think a great example of what probably will happen is found in Suno, the AI Music thing. I don't know if y'all have tried it, but it now produces really good stuff.
Suno doesn't make music, it makes simulacra of music. Music is only made by humans.
To continue paraphrasing Steve Jobs, focus is the most important thing. When the cost to produce new features/implementations goes down, focus is even harder (and even more important).
I guess we have very different ideas around what makes good music. Every single Suno produced song sounds like a 60kbps extremely compressed mp3 while also having extremely generic, uninspiring structures and complete lack of interesting sonic/instrumental layers.
It's great that people find joy in it, but as someone that is critical of both music production and fidelity, the current offerings fall incredibly short of anything I would ever want to listen to.
The high watermark of what can be "solved" (read: one shotted) is rising, and will continue to rise. Look at the gig economy (Fiver etc) for simple programming/design tasks, LLMs have taken over completely with their execution.
I really like your core point. I don't know anything about Suno and that's what people are picking at, but I'll offer a supporting example from pre-LLM days: the number of people who were actually willing to dig through source code was nonexistent. I've worked in ML/AI since forever and I would say roughly 1 in 5 to 1 in 20 developers I've worked alongside were actually willing to just go to Github and look up why code might be failing and get to the bottom of it.
The same is true for LLMs. You can get Claude to spew 2,000 lines of garbage in 15 minutes, but the number of developers actually willing to sit there and reason over the output and make the tweaks--often very minimal tweaks--that make it go from 90% correct to 100% correct are vanishingly few. And it's typically just laziness and a lack of any kind of genuine interest in the field.
suno produces 7m "professional" songs per day. Can't think of a better example of a slop generator. Many songs that will never get more than a handful of listens if it all.
True of human-made things as well. Most video essays don't get more than a dozen views, most gameplay streams similarly. People playing their guitar and uploading, same. SoundCloud, YouTube, twitch. Human-made app store apps is the same story. Most are not downloaded by even 100 people. Most Github repos don't even get a handful of stars.
I've made songs on Suno that I actually like and have listened to tons of times, not to mention just having fun in general making music, seeing what comes out of the box.
The future is going to be different.
Right now, people effectively spend ~0% of their time entertaining themselves with their own music, art, writing, film, etc.
> Right now, people effectively spend ~0% of their time entertaining themselves with their own music, art, writing, film, etc.
First, the 0% figure is not true. People do write stories, play instruments or draw pictures.
Second, everybody who really feels a desire to express themselves creatively has akready been able to do so. Nothing was stopping you from writing poems, drawing pictures or picking up an instrument. Recording music has never been so easy. The "problem" is, of course, that it takes some effort. LLMs seem to provide a convenient shortcut, but you effectively skip the whole artistic process.
IMO it's better to either engage with existing great art or make an honest and humble attempt at creating your own art. You will learn so much more about music by trying to learn the piano or guitar than by prompting Suno.
You've claimed that "right now, people effectively spend ~0% of their time entertaining themselves with their own music, art, writing, film, etc."
So I assumed that you don't spend your time with traditional creative pastimes or don't know any people who do. Otherwise I don't understand how you would come up with the ~0% figure.
> You seem to imply that you can't have created any art ever in your life if you ever did anything with AI.
I did not say that you can't use any AI tools in the creative process, but anyone who has ever tried to create their own art will not confuse the verbatim output of AI models like Suno or Midjourney with actual art.
> The human touch is not automatically genius,
I never claimed that. The nice thing is that there is so much existing art/music out there that you can easily choose the things you like.
I understand that prompting Suno can be a fun pastime for some people, just don't confuse it with actual music or art.
> Sorry, I've seen just as much thoughtless garbage from humans as from AI...
Yes, there is lots of thoughtless garbage music made by humans, but all AI generated music is thoughtless by definition. AI models do not have thoughts or intentions, they are developed to mimick human thought and intent.
> and the AI touch is not automatically derivative trash...
Generating whole songs with Suno very much is. These models are designed to be derivative. AI tools can be used effectively and responsibly in the creative process, but only as a tool among other tools. Prompting Suno is not a replacement for actual music making or production.
> I did not say that you can't use any AI tools in the creative process, but anyone who has ever tried to create their own art will not confuse the verbatim output of AI models like Suno or Midjourney with actual art.
LOL - so let me guess, 99% of people never create anything resembling art?
AI regularly spits out better derivative crap than 99% of the derivative crap humans spit out...
> It's not only derivative, it also lacks any thought, intent or communicative effort.
So does most "human" art...
> Why should I listen to AI slop when there is lots of great human made music to choose from?
Hmm, I dunno, maybe because if you play around with it you might generate something that's close enough to what you wanted to listen to. Maybe you won't. Maybe not everyone is you and some people have different tastes...
Almost nobody could generate a good enough song or story or video or graphic or whatever in the fraction of time it takes with Gen AI.
For some people (clearly you are not one of them) - that is good and fun and entertaining in a new way that simply was impossible to get in the same amount of time / effort.
> > It's not only derivative, it also lacks any thought, intent or communicative effort.
> So does most "human" art...
That's just not true. Everybody who tries to write their own songs, write their stories or draw their own pictures does it with at least some thought or intent.
> Hmm, I dunno, maybe because if you play around with it you might generate something that's close enough to what you wanted to listen to.
That might work for some music, if you only care about the surface. But even then, why not simply pick some good existing human art? By choose the simulacrum?
The things you generate with Suno are not really your art anyway. That's an illusion that these companies want to sell. It's like you invite your friend who plays the guitar and can sing, ask him/her to play a few songs and then pick the one you like. Would you claim that it's your music?
> Almost nobody could generate a good enough song or story or video or graphic or whatever in the fraction of time it takes with Gen AI.
There's a fundamental misunderstanding about creativity/art. It's just as much about the process as the end result. You shouldn't expect your output to match that of professional studios or masters of the craft without putting in the time, effort (and money). That's just hybris. There's a reason why things like the DIY movement, punk, indie games, B movies, etc. exist. Everybody can already create art within their means and limits. If you write and record your own song, you can be proud of that. You don't have to sound like a professional pop artist. By prompting Suno, on the other hand, you have accomplished nothing.
> that is good and fun and entertaining in a new way that simply was impossible to get in the same amount of time / effort.
As I said, I see how it can be fun and entertaining. I played around with Udio myself and I got some funny results. Just don't confuse it with actual art or music making.
What I think is often overlooked is the human "Willingness" and "Care" of staying with the thing for the lack of a better term. What I mean by that is that a lot of people just don't care enough, or don't want to, build, maintain, and own things. Sure you can ship V1 faster, but will you remain on the grind?
I think a great example of what probably will happen is found in Suno, the AI Music thing. I don't know if y'all have tried it, but it now produces really good stuff. What's happening there? A lot of people play with their own little universe and get tired quickly, move away from it, and only a few prolific creators stay and turn it into a "job like" environment.
We may have shifted the scale and the economics of "delegation" and "execution" but I think there are still a lot of other factors to consider.