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Friday Fun Thread for September 26, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Suno, the AI song generator, just released version 5. And now I think we are 100% past the uncanny audio valley. Version 4/4.5 was at the level of "Convincing, occasionally incredible, but still flawed enough to notice." Version 5 is 'tricking' my ear 9 times out of 10. Studio quality. We have a fully functional infinite music machine available for the monthly cost of a cheeseburger.

A few examples:

https://suno.com/s/N86w28eQjBWbI6fA

https://suno.com/s/BsKe5OnQpUhPj2Zx

https://suno.com/s/voPPxtsXxRjFRF93

https://suno.com/s/Yqe3pzUQHIPAQ4g4

I think people get too focused on the apparent 'slowing' of progress in the LLM space and think its proof that Machine Learning itself is not living up to the hype.

Meanwhile stuff like Video generation, Music, and Protein Folding/Drug Discovery are still improving rapidly.

Arguably LLMs are just the interface by which we can access these other powerful Djinns to provide us with the particular services we want, as we await the "one true superintelligence" that can do anything to arise.

There's probably a small window right now to write a Sci-Fi novel that features humanity invoking individual AI patrons that specialize in particular aspects of the world, in the same vein as 'old gods' (Stockfish God of Chess, Suno God of Music, Midjourney God of Aesthetics).

Anyway, if there was ONE arena you would want AI to reach superhuman capability, one particular application that would improve your life even if AI progress stalled out otherwise, what would that be?

For our purposes, lets just grant "customized pornography" as the killer app.

Me, I think I want the ability to produce bespoke episodes of older TV shows that I enjoyed but were cancelled or went off the rails and/or had horrible conclusions. GoT and Firefly are obvious examples there. But I have several others in mind.

It'd be cool to live in a world where the "Canon" of a given series was not defined by any particular "official" source, but instead you had a whole library of 'forks' in the plot and character development that fans can choose from, or generate their own as they like, with maybe some curation done by the rights holder to identify the entries they deem 'high quality' and consistent with the original vision.

You don't notice the very clear artifacts in the sound?

I don't really understand why these exist and would have assumed that would have been easy to fix but seeing as they haven't been perhaps it's much harder than I imagine.

Beyond that the music itself is bland and the audiomixing poor, but perhaps these are prompting issues with these particular tracks.

If the technical issues can be ironed out this seems fine for stuff like background music in shops and receptions. Given that a Spotify subscription costs as much why would anyone switch though?

What is the use case here? I'm not being facetious, I think this is cool as hell but what is the use case? Composing and recording music is already dirt cheap. Extremely quick prototyping? Perhaps as a way to create temp music?

Judging from YouTube, I think it's primarily useful for creating infinite quantities of music in genres that contain a lot of fuzz and vagueness already.

I suppose background music for YouTube channels that are very small or even solo operations could be a good use case. These people want to pay nothing (and licenses for use in videos is not cheap), might not want to use the same audio library as everyone else and the music itself isn't the focus.

And perhaps more importantly, using Suno or other service might be quite a bit faster than trying to find a suitable backing track from collections of free tracks.

Maybe, but people seem to reuse the same tracks from every video so the actual time to find a track might not matter much if at all. I guess the question becomes, what do you care more about? The $10 for a month of suno + whatever time it takes to generate a song you're satisfied with, or spending ~1 hour in the free audio library?