https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHQevuohJH8
my music tastes are pretty mainstream, and this just does absolutely nothing for me. it's exactly what i'd expect AI music to sound like - completely forgettable, with nothing interesting about it.
i'd be willing to believe that this music was legitimately charting if it had at least some redeeming qualities, but i can't imagine how this could honestly get eleven spots on the iTunes chart without gaming it in some way.
> completely forgettable, with nothing interesting about it
You just described 90% of young country for decades now. I keep waiting for its fans to get tired of being pandered to with formulaic lyrics, but they seem to be an endless well.
I’ve heard lots of music like this over the years. It’s catchy, the lyrics are very relatable to the audience of people who like this music. It might not be your thing, but it is certainly enjoyed by many, and there are albums written around this subject. Folk/blues are made of this subject.
Is it over all flat and boring? Somewhat. You can only hear the same thing so many times before it gets tiring.
I'd say the same thing about two thirds of the iTunes top 100. Different people love different songs I guess.
The lyrics of the one you linked are fairly strong compared to other songs on the top 100 list.
I listen to a lot of music of all different genres depending on mood, and I can honestly I don't think anyone could peg this as AI just by listening to it. It's soulless and devoid of emotion, but so are a lot of real artists. That wouldn't even be so obvious if they just added some background something, anything, like Wall of Sound style. If I played this for anyone and they said "it sounds like AI", I'd confidently tell them they are full of shit.
> If I played this for anyone and they said "it sounds like AI", I'd confidently tell them they are full of shit.
Even though they'd be right? Interesting.
>honestly I don't think anyone could peg this as AI just by listening to it. It's soulless and devoid of emotion
i agree. as far as ai slop goes, it's pretty good. it could be made by a human who wasn't very artistic. i'm not saying it's obviously AI generated, just that it's not very good music. but that's not because i dislike popular music - i think most of the hot 100 is usually pretty good, and contains significant artistic value even if it isn't to my taste.
if somebody was claiming this was created by a human, i'd believe them but i'd have the same objection: this isn't going to hit 11 positions on the itunes music chart without gaming the chart in some way.
"ai generated music creator manipulates the itunes chart to occupy 11 positions" is a much less interesting story than "ai generated music is so popular it occupies 11 spots on the itunes charts"
For a reasonable comparison to a minor hit of yore, where do people stand on the Flying Lizard's cover of Money (that's what I want)?
Soulless and devoid of emotion, or an inspired end run about the minor issue of a (self confessed) inability to conventionly sing.
> where do people stand on the Flying Lizard's cover of Money (that's what I want)?
It's fine precisely because it provokes emotion that AI stuff doesn't. You may love or hate what the Flying Lizards did, but it's very memorable and you will have an opinion about it (My wife loves it; I think it's stupid--C'est la vie.)
The AI generated music just sounds like every other average artist. I'm definitely not even convinced it's AI. It could very well be somebody claiming "AI" in order to game the system or get people talking about it.
As for occupying iTunes spots, why not? Is there much difference between Max Martin and his ilk shitting out yet more generic glop or AI doing it?
It genuinely warms my heart that the Flying LIzards did what they did .. but I also think it kind of stupid in a fun way and don't got out of my way to listen to it.
I feel much the same about a lot of the early AI music I've heard, I have a couple of channels on a lesser rank of RSS notifications but more and more there's less and less that's remarkable and it's feeling like the worst kinds of elevator music .. you know, not the Brian Eno stuff . . .
So yeah, we're sitting about like two Yorkshiremen giving a real Thomas Beecham "Shostakovich? I think I stepped in some once" vibe here. Probably deservedly.
It’s slop for sure, but you’re right, it’s hard to label it AI slop because the model has pretty much mastered the human slop sound.
it's unmistakably AI as soon as the vocals come in. maybe your ears are full of shit?
> If I played this for anyone and they said "it sounds like AI"
It sounds like AI.
> I'd confidently tell them they are full of shit.
Why are you getting offended on behalf of a computer? Or is there a deeper reasoning for this logic?
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It feels... commercial. I feel like I have to read a EULA and hit I Agree before I can listen to that.
Pre-video ad served by YT was quite literally a scam.
Which says all you need to know about where all this is headed, I guess.
This channel is not even the official channel.
Wow, this song is horribly mastered.
It's not great in that way. The mastering -- if there is any -- is definitely kind of shit.
But that's a relatively easy thing for a human with the right combination of toolchain, ears, and experience to fix. It tends to be a slow process that takes a good bit of time, but lots of actual-mixdowns start off way worse than this before they get polished up by a skilled mastering engineer.
(Maybe in a year or three we'll have the mastering process automated into an uncanny mush of soullessness, as well.)
Audio mastering is already automated to the level of a mediocre human:
https://github.com/sergree/matchering
(I haven't actually tried this, I just watched the linked Benn Jordan video.)
IMO, the ideal would be for all music to be supplied unmastered so the listener's playback software can apply this process to their own taste. Mastering is necessary for listening with garbage playback equipment (e.g. phone speakers) or noisy listening environments (e.g. cars, parties), but it makes things sound worse in good conditions. The best sounding music CDs I own are classical CDs on Telarc that have liner notes bragging about the complete lack of mastering.
> Mastering is necessary for listening with garbage playback equipment (e.g. phone speakers) or noisy listening environments (e.g. cars, parties), but it makes things sound worse in good conditions.
Eh? I listened to it on quite good nearfield gear, in a decent room, and the AI track linked above still sounds like it needs a good bit of help from a responsible adult to bring it up on this rig. :)
Good mastering helps everywhere -- on all systems. For instance: The sound of Steely Dan is pretty good on playback with about anything, I think, and that sound took a ton of work.
And while classical music is not my first preference, I do love me a good Telarc recording. I strongly suspect that the signal path that they use isn't necessarily quite as pure as they insist that it is. Everything is a tone control, including a microphone -- and money is money. They're not going to reschedule an orchestra to fix an untoward blip at 3KHz. They'll just fix it in post (hopefully, as minimally as possible) and send it.
But otherwise, I agree. The mastering process can be automated. Ultimately, it will be. And for sure, it will also be a customizable user preference.
Some of that work has already been in the bag for decades. Ford, for instance, has been using DSPs in their factory car audio systems to shape sounds in unconventional ways for over 30 years. This gives them a lot of knobs to turn, and to fix into constraints, to help shape a listener's chosen music to sound as good as it can on less-than-ideal built-down-to-price on-road audio systems.
Or at least: It sounds as good it can to a consensus of engineers, or of a focus group.
But the knobs exist. And they don't have to be fixed or constrained: They can (and will) be automatically twisted to suit a listener's preferences.
I'll try to make time to check out your link in a day or two.
the comments are very suspicious and very scary
A lot of them read like twitter bots with generic “wow beautiful <emojis>”
Wherever there is profit to be made on the internet, you have massive amounts of weird abuse and botting to game the system. Maybe not even literal bots, but paying a sweatshop in India to leave thousands of generic comments to boost your rankings on the algorithm.
People were responding with period-correct, insipid “wow beautiful <emojis>” replies for decades before we had bots to do it.
It was noise when it was only people; it's still just noise when it also includes bots.
What makes it noise is less the actual comment itself. If I showed someone a piece of art in person and they said this to me, it would be a genuine response. What makes this particular instance noise is it reeks of mass automated messaging with no thought behind it. These comments are generic because they aren't people commenting on the thing they saw, they are just templates being spammed out on mass so they make them generic to fit any context.
Perhaps.
To me, this present-day noise is indistinguishable from the pre-bot noise. It's the same noise, in that both things are just noise of that shape. "How beautiful!" "I really feel this one!" "I love this song!"
Sometimes, the signal-to-noise ratio is better. Sometimes it's pretty bad. It always has been this way in online discourse -- especially with things that appeal to old folks.
In a track where the protagonist primarily complains about feeling old, it makes sense that most of the comments are that of what old folks have always written online.
(Are these particular comments primarily bot spam? Maybe. I peered into the depths a bit, and accounts for the top comments I looked at had been around for years. That isn't evidence for or against a well-orchestrated long con, but orchestration is hard and people who write insipid comments are plentiful.)
If the comments are from humans, that's tragic and frightening.
frightening either way, probably part of an operation that makes this AI chart so high
The AI comment push on that video is certainly an interesting look into the future. Record labels have their work cut out for them in this brace new world.
At least what I’m seeing in dance music is online sales and streaming seem kind of dead, and everything is about events, personalities, and unreleased tracks that all the big names have but you can’t get for a year after if ever.
If you go on soundcloud/spotify/etc there is infinite EDM slop that isn’t worth listening to. But if you listen to real event recordings on YouTube, they are all playing mostly the same stuff by actual artists with new/unreleased music that people get hyped to hear since you can’t find it anywhere else.
I've been making all my own music lately with suno 5.5. It's pretty sweet, it allows me to explore concepts in a different way. This sucks though. Here's hyperpop version of https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646 -> https://suno.com/song/516c7e52-a03e-490d-ba26-8d9a332eeea7
Uh huh. If you didnt know it was AI you would be immediately fooled. My god the intellectual dishonesty in this thread is insane lol
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