The longer I live in 2025, the more I think that AI has ruined the world and made everything so much worse. Can we go back to the days of NFTs and delusional tech-bros promoting web3 as the next...
The longer I live in 2025, the more I think that AI has ruined the world and made everything so much worse.
Can we go back to the days of NFTs and delusional tech-bros promoting web3 as the next big thing? That was far more preferable to mass layoffs and billionaires getting richer off of human misery.
Everything I see it in, its a layer between me and what I want to use the computer to do. Blocking my way The sales people all have this idea that no one will want to use computer interfaces any...
Everything I see it in, its a layer between me and what I want to use the computer to do. Blocking my way
The sales people all have this idea that no one will want to use computer interfaces any more, they’ll just want to log in and tell the computer in plain English or whatever language what they want to do.
Thats fair, but it removes all troubleshooting ability and makes it such that you need an internet connection to use the device at all which is already a reality with many devices and a reality I hated.
I don't really see this as "music getting worse" because there was always drek out there and diversity doesn't bother me. I have no trouble finding music I like, even though it's not very popular....
I don't really see this as "music getting worse" because there was always drek out there and diversity doesn't bother me. I have no trouble finding music I like, even though it's not very popular.
Meanwhile there are a lot of other scary things going on in the world, some of them AI-related.
Boy is that an understatement. I've messed around with making music on Suno and an issue that the lyrics generator (and this is true for all AI lyric generators like ChatGPT or Google Gemini) they...
The popularity of A.I. music notwithstanding, A.I. is not, by most metrics, a very good songwriter.
Boy is that an understatement. I've messed around with making music on Suno and an issue that the lyrics generator (and this is true for all AI lyric generators like ChatGPT or Google Gemini) they are incredibly repetitive. Imagery and words often used: velvet, glass, shadows, ghosts. It took me a while to be able to get things to be more specific and feel less computery.
I didn't have the intention of doing this as a job. As that idea depresses me, and that this:
On the side, he generates novelty songs for clients’ birthdays or weddings at five hundred dollars a pop (half price if you supply your own lyrics)
Makes no sense to me since you can create your own songs by paying 20 dollars to Suno for a month.
I went ahead and published two of the songs "I" created to share them here. 90 min and after hours. Both are inspired by Ariana Grande's 34 + 35. I didn't just go "make me a song like 34 + 35." I created a whole story. Created this reality where Grande dated this guy, gave the guy specific physical features, emotional characteristics, and a highly specific career. And that seemed to give me better results than anything I had done before when I would just go "make me a song that's like x meets y."
Just adding some clarification for the number 1 country song by AI. It's from a digital sales billboard, with a total count of 3000 sales. It's essentially a billboard where you can outright...
Just adding some clarification for the number 1 country song by AI. It's from a digital sales billboard, with a total count of 3000 sales. It's essentially a billboard where you can outright purchase the top spot, and articles like this just serve as an ad for them. Who is purchasing individual song digital downloads in 2025?
Me, but usually it's niche/small artists on Bandcamp releasing a single or a re-recording of an older song that I like. I also just don't use most streaming services in favor of owning my music...
Who is purchasing individual song digital downloads in 2025?
Me, but usually it's niche/small artists on Bandcamp releasing a single or a re-recording of an older song that I like. I also just don't use most streaming services in favor of owning my music collection, so I'm an outlier here.
This technology has “opened up a new realm of creative possibility,” Arter said. He had never been a skilled singer; now he could dabble in the old-school R. & B. he grew up with. Suddenly, he could craft ageless personae to represent his music, complete with fictional backstories, in lieu of his aging millennial self. Arter has produced about a hundred and forty songs in the past year alone, and he doesn’t hide the fact that his music is made with A.I., though the unsuspecting listener may not notice the name of his YouTube account, “AI for the Culture.” [...] He has never done marketing or promotion for his A.I. music, yet word of mouth and algorithmic recommendations, such as Spotify’s Radio function, have propelled his work to a level of popularity that he could only dream of as a rapping teen-ager. Justin Bieber has used Arter’s songs to soundtrack Instagram posts, and 50 Cent posted a video of himself singing along to a Nick Hustles track in his car. The rapper Young Thug adopted the chorus of Arter’s “all my dogs got that dog in ’em” for his hit track “Miss My Dogs” and gave Arter credit as a lyricist. Arter was able to quit his job in consulting and embark on a full-time career as a semiautomated musician. He now works with the music distributor UnitedMasters and makes money from more than fifty different streaming platforms. On the side, he generates novelty songs for clients’ birthdays or weddings at five hundred dollars a pop (half price if you supply your own lyrics). Arter has no doubt that what he’s doing is just a new way of being an artist: If your music “changes someone’s life,” he said, “does it really matter if it was A.I.?”
The popularity of A.I. music notwithstanding, A.I. is not, by most metrics, a very good songwriter. [...] Seeing an opportunity in the technology’s shortcomings, Kordofani has forged a burgeoning career helping aspiring musicians “humanize” songs that they have made using the likes of Suno and Udio. One of his clients is Ray Sabbagh, a photographer in Montreal who makes Latin-inflected rap and dance music. Sabbagh generates his songs, sometimes using A.I.-generated lyrics, then uses an A.I. model of his voice which Kordofani trained using IRL recordings that Sabbagh had made. (When friends hear the fake him, they can’t tell the difference, Sabbagh said, adding, “It can get scary sometimes.”) If there are spots where the A.I. voice fails, Kordofani patches in recordings of Sabbagh’s actual voice—an arduous process, but still faster than recording from scratch. The resulting music is pleasant and relatively more human than the songs of Arter or Breaking Rust, though it’s also much less popular.
So while AI is a problem in a lot of ways, I think music might be one of the creative fields where there's some good leeway for it. Mainly because of songwriters. I left a comment on a now-deleted...
So while AI is a problem in a lot of ways, I think music might be one of the creative fields where there's some good leeway for it. Mainly because of songwriters.
I left a comment on a now-deleted post linking a music video for an AI singer named Xania Monet, which uses lyrics written by a person. A comment on the video about how the songwriter didn't write for real, very famous singers stuck out to me as out of touch with reality, and . So I'll just paste the majority of that comment here:
With music, people tend to often pay attention to the singer more than the songwriter. Most of the songwriters I know who merit mention, even when they're not the singer, gained fame through their own music first. Lin Manuel Miranda is a famous example. Toby Fox is known more as a composer than a songwriter, but he's made some notable collaborations. Sia's music career led to her becoming songwriter for several famous singers in the US before finally achieving mainstream fame.
If you can't sing though, it's hard to build up that recognition even within the industry. You need a voice, but that voice will be the name attached to the song. It's different from other creative fields being poached by AI like voice acting, because usually voice acting isn't the primary focus of the work. But with music, the voice is everything. You can't really just hire freelance singers for an entire album's worth of songs because people look for singers more than the songwriter.
And that makes me think of Vocaloid.
Vocaloid producers still do the majority of work on a song themselves—composing the instrumentals, tuning those instruments, tuning the voice banks, sound mixing, etc.—but ultimately, they use virtual voice banks rather than their own voices. Many producers CAN sing and are incredible, but they first gained recognition from their Vocaloid songs. So many musicians in Japan have gotten their start through Vocaloid in some way, either by being a producer or covering popular songs originally made with Vocaloid voice banks.
The comparison keeps popping into my head as I see people discuss the use of AI in music. While AI is encroaching on way too much in the creative sphere, when it comes to vocals in music... Well, there aren't many options for songwriters who don't sing. Like I said, the vocals basically become the "face" of the song.
That said, I'm not a fan of people using AI for everything in music. One fun thing about composers is picking up on little trends and "trademarks" to their musical style. That's a big part of why Vocaloid producers get so big; the fact they all use the same voice banks put more focus on the music rather than the voice. It's awesome to see how someone's style evolves over time, especially when they remake songs as they get more experienced, and to have callbacks to their older songs. If you make all of the song through AI, even if a human writes the lyrics, the music loses that personal touch.
But AI vocals feel fairly similar to Vocaloid to me in the sense they're a substitute for the songwriter. So to that end, I think AI vocals may actually be good by allowing more songwriters and composers to gain the recognition needed to open up business opportunities to work with actual singers, just as Vocaloid does to this day.
If the AI made song is popular, who is getting money from it? If AI makes somebody murder someone or drives them to suicide, who is going jail? My guess is that if it's the former then "Gimme,...
If the AI made song is popular, who is getting money from it?
If AI makes somebody murder someone or drives them to suicide, who is going jail?
My guess is that if it's the former then "Gimme, gimme" and if the latter then "AI can't be responsible for such acts". And this is all I need to know about AI and people who run it.
Honestly, this doesn't surprise me. A lot of (human generated) popular music nowadays is also lacking soul. I just listened to Taylor Swift's latest album: overproduced, sterile, boring,...
Honestly, this doesn't surprise me. A lot of (human generated) popular music nowadays is also lacking soul. I just listened to Taylor Swift's latest album: overproduced, sterile, boring, unoriginal. Yet part of my friend group think it's great.
Now compare that to how they made music in the 70s, 80s, 90s. A lot of this can be blamed on the record labels I think.
And before you state that I'm a boomer and should stop yelling at the sky: I'm not.
I mean, the only stuff that we go back to from those decades is stuff that was popular because it was at least semi-decent. All those eras had their own slop that's been forgotten. How many...
Now compare that to how they made music in the 70s, 80s, 90s. A lot of this can be blamed on the record labels I think.
I mean, the only stuff that we go back to from those decades is stuff that was popular because it was at least semi-decent. All those eras had their own slop that's been forgotten. How many generic Hair Metal bands were there in the mid 80s to the early 90s? Pantera started as a Hair Metal band for example, but no one is going back to Metal Magic.
100% agreed about all the other slop that existed then too. But again, look at the top-charts right now, a lot of stuff sounds like it was made by AI already (lyrics, sound), compare that to The...
100% agreed about all the other slop that existed then too.
But again, look at the top-charts right now, a lot of stuff sounds like it was made by AI already (lyrics, sound), compare that to The Beatles which were the pop icons of their time.
I’ve heard an interesting take on this. F.D. Signifier, in one of his videos analyzing rap (I apologize for not having the source), argues that record labels were actually helpful in how good...
Now compare that to how they made music in the 70s, 80s, 90s. A lot of this can be blamed on the record labels I think.
I’ve heard an interesting take on this. F.D. Signifier, in one of his videos analyzing rap (I apologize for not having the source), argues that record labels were actually helpful in how good music was back then.
His argument goes as follows: because production and distribution was gatekept, artists needed to impress those with control over the production in order to have a shot at stardom. Now, artists and labels must compete with everyone in their bedroom making music. Production has been democratized. If one assumes that record executives have better taste than your average consumer, one can conclude that the democratization of production has actually decreased quality by virtue of competition. If they don’t make music that appeals to the lowest common denominator of the masses, someone else will, and they will win on the Spotify charts. F.D. Signifier argues that this is true of rap.
I just listened to Taylor Swift's latest album: overproduced, sterile, boring, unoriginal. Yet part of my friend group think it's great.
I’m not sure it’d be that hard to convince you that assumption is true.
The longer I live in 2025, the more I think that AI has ruined the world and made everything so much worse.
Can we go back to the days of NFTs and delusional tech-bros promoting web3 as the next big thing? That was far more preferable to mass layoffs and billionaires getting richer off of human misery.
Everything I see it in, its a layer between me and what I want to use the computer to do. Blocking my way
The sales people all have this idea that no one will want to use computer interfaces any more, they’ll just want to log in and tell the computer in plain English or whatever language what they want to do.
Thats fair, but it removes all troubleshooting ability and makes it such that you need an internet connection to use the device at all which is already a reality with many devices and a reality I hated.
I don't really see this as "music getting worse" because there was always drek out there and diversity doesn't bother me. I have no trouble finding music I like, even though it's not very popular.
Meanwhile there are a lot of other scary things going on in the world, some of them AI-related.
Boy is that an understatement. I've messed around with making music on Suno and an issue that the lyrics generator (and this is true for all AI lyric generators like ChatGPT or Google Gemini) they are incredibly repetitive. Imagery and words often used: velvet, glass, shadows, ghosts. It took me a while to be able to get things to be more specific and feel less computery.
I didn't have the intention of doing this as a job. As that idea depresses me, and that this:
Makes no sense to me since you can create your own songs by paying 20 dollars to Suno for a month.
I went ahead and published two of the songs "I" created to share them here. 90 min and after hours. Both are inspired by Ariana Grande's 34 + 35. I didn't just go "make me a song like 34 + 35." I created a whole story. Created this reality where Grande dated this guy, gave the guy specific physical features, emotional characteristics, and a highly specific career. And that seemed to give me better results than anything I had done before when I would just go "make me a song that's like x meets y."
Just adding some clarification for the number 1 country song by AI. It's from a digital sales billboard, with a total count of 3000 sales. It's essentially a billboard where you can outright purchase the top spot, and articles like this just serve as an ad for them. Who is purchasing individual song digital downloads in 2025?
Me, but usually it's niche/small artists on Bandcamp releasing a single or a re-recording of an older song that I like. I also just don't use most streaming services in favor of owning my music collection, so I'm an outlier here.
From the article:
Mirror: https://archive.is/S0vsR
So while AI is a problem in a lot of ways, I think music might be one of the creative fields where there's some good leeway for it. Mainly because of songwriters.
I left a comment on a now-deleted post linking a music video for an AI singer named Xania Monet, which uses lyrics written by a person. A comment on the video about how the songwriter didn't write for real, very famous singers stuck out to me as out of touch with reality, and . So I'll just paste the majority of that comment here:
With music, people tend to often pay attention to the singer more than the songwriter. Most of the songwriters I know who merit mention, even when they're not the singer, gained fame through their own music first. Lin Manuel Miranda is a famous example. Toby Fox is known more as a composer than a songwriter, but he's made some notable collaborations. Sia's music career led to her becoming songwriter for several famous singers in the US before finally achieving mainstream fame.
If you can't sing though, it's hard to build up that recognition even within the industry. You need a voice, but that voice will be the name attached to the song. It's different from other creative fields being poached by AI like voice acting, because usually voice acting isn't the primary focus of the work. But with music, the voice is everything. You can't really just hire freelance singers for an entire album's worth of songs because people look for singers more than the songwriter.
And that makes me think of Vocaloid.
Vocaloid producers still do the majority of work on a song themselves—composing the instrumentals, tuning those instruments, tuning the voice banks, sound mixing, etc.—but ultimately, they use virtual voice banks rather than their own voices. Many producers CAN sing and are incredible, but they first gained recognition from their Vocaloid songs. So many musicians in Japan have gotten their start through Vocaloid in some way, either by being a producer or covering popular songs originally made with Vocaloid voice banks.
The comparison keeps popping into my head as I see people discuss the use of AI in music. While AI is encroaching on way too much in the creative sphere, when it comes to vocals in music... Well, there aren't many options for songwriters who don't sing. Like I said, the vocals basically become the "face" of the song.
That said, I'm not a fan of people using AI for everything in music. One fun thing about composers is picking up on little trends and "trademarks" to their musical style. That's a big part of why Vocaloid producers get so big; the fact they all use the same voice banks put more focus on the music rather than the voice. It's awesome to see how someone's style evolves over time, especially when they remake songs as they get more experienced, and to have callbacks to their older songs. If you make all of the song through AI, even if a human writes the lyrics, the music loses that personal touch.
But AI vocals feel fairly similar to Vocaloid to me in the sense they're a substitute for the songwriter. So to that end, I think AI vocals may actually be good by allowing more songwriters and composers to gain the recognition needed to open up business opportunities to work with actual singers, just as Vocaloid does to this day.
If the AI made song is popular, who is getting money from it?
If AI makes somebody murder someone or drives them to suicide, who is going jail?
My guess is that if it's the former then "Gimme, gimme" and if the latter then "AI can't be responsible for such acts". And this is all I need to know about AI and people who run it.
Honestly, this doesn't surprise me. A lot of (human generated) popular music nowadays is also lacking soul. I just listened to Taylor Swift's latest album: overproduced, sterile, boring, unoriginal. Yet part of my friend group think it's great.
Now compare that to how they made music in the 70s, 80s, 90s. A lot of this can be blamed on the record labels I think.
And before you state that I'm a boomer and should stop yelling at the sky: I'm not.
I mean, the only stuff that we go back to from those decades is stuff that was popular because it was at least semi-decent. All those eras had their own slop that's been forgotten. How many generic Hair Metal bands were there in the mid 80s to the early 90s? Pantera started as a Hair Metal band for example, but no one is going back to Metal Magic.
100% agreed about all the other slop that existed then too.
But again, look at the top-charts right now, a lot of stuff sounds like it was made by AI already (lyrics, sound), compare that to The Beatles which were the pop icons of their time.
I’ve heard an interesting take on this. F.D. Signifier, in one of his videos analyzing rap (I apologize for not having the source), argues that record labels were actually helpful in how good music was back then.
His argument goes as follows: because production and distribution was gatekept, artists needed to impress those with control over the production in order to have a shot at stardom. Now, artists and labels must compete with everyone in their bedroom making music. Production has been democratized. If one assumes that record executives have better taste than your average consumer, one can conclude that the democratization of production has actually decreased quality by virtue of competition. If they don’t make music that appeals to the lowest common denominator of the masses, someone else will, and they will win on the Spotify charts. F.D. Signifier argues that this is true of rap.
I’m not sure it’d be that hard to convince you that assumption is true.
Interesting take!
https://media1.tenor.com/m/fW6KOfqgqSQAAAAd/amma-cat-ts-js-pmo-icl.gif
I don't get it :)