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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.
At least to the extent that the examples trigger my ctrl-w reflex in exactly the same way and for the same reasons as modern human created music does. I suppose that could be considered "progress".
It can emulate just about any time period, and REALLY traditional stuff too.
I'm not even trying to argue that its not AI slop at the end of the day, just like I think most pop music is human-made slop, but its a leap in capabilities.
I can't really put my finger on what's wrong with it but I wouldn't want to listen to any of this again despite liking some of the genres it's aping.
I guess I agree that it's succeeded in producing replacement-level slop and to the extent that people thought this was impossible they should probably eat crow. But I see no indications of SOVL.
The question of the hour: Is that really different than most songs produced by human artists?
I admit that I keep falling back to the same ~1000 songs that I enjoy listening to, very few of which are less than 5 years old, many of which are older than I am. And most 'new' songs I'll play like a dozen times and then they sit in an unused playlist for months or years.
I don't think I've heard a SINGLE pop song in the last year that I consider 'memorable' (not entirely true: Chappel Roan's "HOT TO GO!" sometimes pops into my brain unbidden).
I truly do enjoy Kendrick Lamar's music, but after listening to GNX on repeat for a couple weeks I've not felt any desire to add it to my main playlist. Humble is on there though.
And I lamented before that there's really no such thing as a new 'genre' anymore. So the AI does have the advantage of letting me play around with combining genres to see if anything neat falls out or is worth pursuing.
I am going to agree there's no actual replacement for having a talented live performer in front of you.
Possible, hence why I called it replacement level slop.
I do find Spotify's algorithm shows me recent songs that I like with some regularity (and no, these aren't from the Spotify ghost artists/ais), so I'm not as negative as you about today's music.
Music is perhaps not the point of pop music, it's the admiration and parasocial relationship with the artist. It's not clear to me if people will be willing to do this with an AI, but perhaps.
I do think there's an issue where with AI you can't really make the AI itself the 'object' of your obsessions because there's nothing 'there.' And making the person prompting the AI the object seems extremely odd.
But I feel pretty similar about people who seem obsessed with certain DJs, when there is certainly an argument that all they're doing is pressing "Play" on the computer and then fiddling with some knobs. They still have 'fans.'
But, uh, we see that (some) people are readily accepting AI boyfriends and girlfriends.
And Hatsune Miku has a large following, even does concerts. Granted, the Japanese can anthropomorphize ANYTHING.
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