I'm not sure if this would be better for ~music, ~tech, or what, but after messing around with Udio for a bit, I made some stuff I liked and wanted to get folks' thoughts. Imo, it's incredible to be able to get music from a text prompt - it means I, as someone who is mostly ignorant to music production, can have my musical idea and actually render that out as music for someone to hear. I can think "damn that would be cool" and then in kind of a fuzzy way, make it happen then and there. Whether it's good, I don't know. That's not up to me, really, but it is the kind of sound I wanted to happen, so I'm left conflicted on how to feel about it. Figured it would be worthwhile to show folks some of it, and see what they think.

I do enjoy synth and metal, so there's a lot of that in these. Feel free to be as critical as you like. If I can apply your criticism I will try to do it, and if you want to see how that works out, I'll share.

1. Cosmoterrestrial
2. A Floyd, Pinkly
3. Empire's Demise, Foretold
4. Metal for Ghosts Bedsheet Edition (the very end of this one is hilariously appropriate)
5. Multi-3DS Drifting

And here's a link to my profile, if you would like to browse. It will update too when I put more up.

They're all instrumental. Lyrical music is less appealing to me in general and Udio's voices do sound kinda weird to me more often than not. The way I made the tracks, I would start with a clip combining some genres/moods, and then add to either end of the clip until I had a complete song. Along the way, I could introduce new elements/transitions by using more text/tweaking various settings and flipping "manual mode" on and off. The results were fuzzy; I didn't always get what I wanted, but I could keep trying until I did, or until I got something that sounded "better". I wrote all the titles after the song was finished. The album art is from a text prompt.

I'm not sure what I think, to be honest. On the one hand, a lot of the creative decision-making wasn't mine. On the other, the song would not be what it is without me making decisions about how it came about and what feelings/moods/genres were focused upon/utilized. I think the best I can say is "use the tool and see whether it's enough to count". To me it feels almost 50/50, like I've "collaborated with my computer" rather than "made music". Does it matter? If the sound is the intended sound, the sound I hoped to make and wanted to share, is that enough to say it is "my music"? Is this perhaps just what it looks like to be a beginner in a different paradigm?

When I used Suno, I had a much more rigid opinion. What it produced, I called "computer spit". Because, all I could actually control was telling it to continue, changing the prompt, and giving it structure/genre tags that felt like a coin flip in terms of effectiveness. I had a really hard time trying to get it to keep/recall melody, and my attempts to guide it along felt more like gambling than deliberate decisions. It also couldn't keep enough in context to make the overall song consistent with respect to instrumentation. It's different with Udio, both because you have a lot of additional tools, and because it feels like those tools work more consistently at making the model do what you want. I still call the results "computer spit" where I've shown them off, but I'm unsure now whether the production has enough of myself in it to be something more. Perhaps not on the same level as something someone produced by playing an instrument, or choosing samples/arranging things in software, but also not quite the same as the computer just rolling along, with me going "thumbs up" or "thumbs down". Maybe these distinctions don't actually matter, but I'd be curious if anyone has thoughts along these lines.

I'm intentionally trying to avoid a discussion about the morality of the thing or what political/social ramifications it has, not because I don't care about that but because I'm in the middle of trying to understand the tool and what its results mean. Would you consider what I've posted here work I could claim as my own, or do you think the computer has enough of a role to say it's not? Is my role in the production large enough? Or perhaps you have a stronger position, that nothing the computer can possibly do in this way counts as original music. Does any of this change that position for you? I ask because I've gone through a lot of opinions myself as I've been following things, and one interesting bit is that I have not gotten any copyright notices when I've uploaded the music to Youtube (I did get notices with Suno's music). As far as I can tell, with what is available to me, this is all original.

And of course, the most important one: Did you like it? Is there something you think would make them better? Do they all suffer from something I'm not seeing/hearing? I'm not an expert technician nor a music producer, so perhaps my ignorant ears are leading me astray. Either way, I've had a ton of fun doing this, and the results to my ear are fun to listen to while I'm doing stuff. I wouldn't call any of it the best music I've ever heard, but I can also think of a lot that is worse. I think what I wonder the most is whether it comes off bland/plain. Most of the folks I show things to are a bit too caught up in being astounded/disturbed to really give me much feedback, so perhaps putting the request in this form will work out a bit better - ya'll have time to think on it.

As always, your time and attention is greatly appreciated

Edit: I should clarify. I am not attempting to be a musician. Hence calling it "computer spit" with anything public, and the lack of any effort to pitch it as something I did only on my own. Rather, I recognize the limit of my own understanding, and felt I'd hit a point where my ignorance of production meant I could not judge the results as well as I'd like. That means it's time to engage some folks because folks out there are likely to know what I do not and see things I can't. From that angle, a lot of the discussion is very interesting, and I'll be responding to those in a bit. But there's no need to argue for doing the work - I recognize that. I'm trying to see past my own horizons with a medium I don't put the work into. I'm a consumer of music, not a creator, so getting some perspective from folks more acquainted with creating and with the technology is really what I'm after in sharing the experience.

Edit again: Thank you all for a very interesting discussion. I had a spare evening/morning and this was a good use of it. For the sake of tying a bow on the whole thing, I'll share my takeaways as succinctly as I can manage.

It seems, at present, and at best, the role these tools can play is of a sort of personal noise generator. The output is not of sufficient interest, quality, complexity, etc., to really be regarded the same as human-produced music, is the overall impression I have been left with. And for other reasons, it may be that the fuzziness of it all is a permanent feature, and thus a permanent constraint on how far toward "authentic" the results can ever get. I was trying to avoid a discussion about my own creativity, the value of doing work, societal ramifications, etc., so I'll work on how to present things better. For what it's worth, this has all been part of what I do creatively - my area of study was philosophy, and the goal of that to my mind has always been "achieving clarity". So I am attempting to achieve clarity with things as they develop, as a hobby sort of interest while I'm busy doing completely different stuff and to better protect my own mind against dumb marketing and hype. So once again, I appreciate you all taking the time, and I wish you all well in all the things you do.

So I came across this new dudesy video titled "George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead" and it put me down a weird rabbit hole. I'm not a Carlin super fan but I know some of his famous bits and respect his work and maybe that's the perfect setup for watching this because... I'm honestly blown away. I planned on listening to 3 minutes of it to make fun of stupid AI but ended up letting it run for the entire hour and actually laughed quite a bit. It all makes sense. It does sound like him. I don't know how much editing went into it, how much prompting and discarded material. I especially don't know if it just dug up old jokes somewhere else and copied them. But still.

It feels like we just had awkward AI-wordsalad experiments and things like the infinite Seinfeld stream which was fun in a so-bad-it's-good kinda way but... I mean, it obviously was bad. The funny part was that it was unpredictably bad.

But only a year later we're having some uncanny valley shit. I looked it up and apparently this started with a comedy podcast with an AI co-host which produced a clip for a fictional Tom Brady standup routine which turned out popular enough to get them sued, apparently.

There's this part in the fake Carlin special where he talks about the future of entertainment being 24-hour streams where an AI comedian comments on daily news events in real time or something and I can't say I wouldn't watch that. Just to see what it's like. But I also get people calling it disgusting. It kinda is. I get [his daughter says "machine will ever replace his genius"](machine will ever replace his genius), she's right of course. But that video got close IMO.

You can still point at little flaws here and there with AI generated content but with this trend, it will be 3 or 5 years before we get perfectly polished content machines that don't trip over any of the easy and obvious stuff. What place would such content have in the entertainment industry?

What do you guys think?

Almost 6 months ago Corridor Crew released an AI-drawn anime short (ANIME ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS) with an accomppanying making-of video ( Did We Just Change Animation Forever?). It got... mixed reception. Some loved the new era of "democratizing animation" (meaning you don't anymore need a team of hundreds of animators which in turn means it's possible for smaller creative teams to make their visions come to life), others really hated it for blatantly just ripping off an existing anime (Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, 2000) and general disrespect over animation as a job and art form -- or at least that's how (some) animators felt. Having heard them talking about drawing each frame with such a passion (on Corridor's show!), I can understand the ire.

Now, almost half a year later, comes the sequel (ANIME ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS 2) also with an accomppanying making-of (Did We Just Change Animation Forever... Again?). Things... have changed. Basically Corridor realized that stealing art is bad, so they hired a real artist to draw a model sheet as a base for the AI to draw from (instead of stealing others' work). They also hired a person to write a theme song and a team of online artists to touch up every frame of the anime (watch the making-of if you're interested in the details, they go through them very well).

Next, some personal opinions of mine, starting with the first anime. I liked it. It was a nice and funny short with an interesting, smooth style that comes with the territory when there are more frames crammed into a second. Overall, it was the goofy concept of rock paper scissors combined with the over-the-top life and death drama that was fun. Visual style on the other hand, nowhere near ready. The warping and "worming" between each frame were really distracting and it wasn't ready for more than a tech demo (or for some relatively out-there story where that stuff ties into the film, not as a distraction). But I was able to look past those problems because it was a pretty good video.

Most of all, I didn't like them using artists' work without permission (and not saying anything about it).

Now to the sequel. It's... basically same? Same problems, less warping but for example king's crown was changing its color like it was having some sort of multistage chemical burn, and the visual style wasn't as strong and at times more clunky than on the first one. Maybe that's due the fact that the AI style guidebook was a lot smaller or that they were only willing to spent X amount of hours and money working on this while aiming for the anime episode lenght -- I don't know. But the story and the writing were still the best parts. Interestingly also I think direction was a bit weaker and they used too many "cool moment" tricks which made it visually messy. It basically got in the way of the story.

(Also I really dislike that Niko still wasn't taking responsibility for stealing art from others, bit of a bummer since most of us knew better six months ago already.)

What they proved with the second anime is that AI is still not close to replacing actual artists and it's a lot of work to make them even this way -- even if the AI part worked smoothly! But most of all what matters is the content, the creativity and how it's translated to the screen. Not the AI. It's a tool, not a revolution.

Edit. For clarity and some additional thoughts.