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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3309 thread views

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.

The idea of relying on the feedback loop of remixed AI slop for entertainment and it drowning out genuine good stuff evokes in me disgust that is hard to convey.

This is the part where the whispering earring tells me "better for you that you take me off".

Why do you hate fun?

"Oh no, hundreds of millions of humans will be able to express themselves artistically in ways that were never possible before, resulting in an explosion of creativity and human expression"

You don't have to scroll the Facebook newsfeed or Tiktok brainrot. Both of which were absolute slop even before ChatGPT 3.5

It's not like HBO is going anywhere. In fact, I would assume AI lowering the cost of VFX, etc will result in more prestige TV, not less, as lower costs allow for increased scale and more risk taking. Plus lower barriers to playing with art may mean more people discover/develop latent artistic talent and get into the industry.

Low quality fan fiction has been available in infinite quantities for decades, and yet there are still high quality books being published. Low quality digital art exists, and there are still excellent artists. Quality art will always rise to the top (AI will probably help you discover it).

All I can think about when people get cranky about AI art is what portrait painters in the 1800s must have sounded like sneeding over how cameras aren't real art because it requires no skill as the camera does it for you.

I am not sneeding about no skill, I am sneeding about no expression - or at the very least, significantly less expression. How many prompters are going to painstakingly describe every detail they just don't have the painting skill to put on canvas, and how many are going to go "hot woman in cyberpunk armor, in the style of studio ghibli" or whatever? At least the photographer actually has to discover/set up the shot.

How many prompters are going to painstakingly describe every detail they just don't have the painting skill to put on canvas, and how many are going to go "hot woman in cyberpunk armor, in the style of studio ghibli" or whatever?

Very few, but who cares? The person who has the hot cyberpunk studio Ghibli waifu picture is now happier than they were before. Maybe 1 in a million will be so inspired (or so good) by this that they'll get super into prompting and become a legitimately good "chimera" artist who blends AI gen and human taste to make actually great art. That's a (tiny) win for the human race as a whole.

I have no interest in seeing their stupid waifu, but I also don't go on DeviantArt or whatever so this won't effect me at all. Maybe I'll see their great art 15 years later in an art exhibition on AI digital art.

I agree this will lead to massive explosion in slop, but human-generated slop was already at functionally infinite levels prior to AI, so I'm not sure if there's a net loss here.

human-generated slop was already at functionally infinite levels prior to AI, so I'm not sure if there's a net loss here.

I expect the ratio of slop:epic to rise by at least an order of magnitude and I do consider that a loss.

That's fair

The idea of relying on the feedback loop of remixed AI slop for entertainment and it drowning out genuine good stuff evokes in me disgust that is hard to convey.

I can't find myself caring one bit about it because the good stuff slowed to a teeny tiny dribble over two decades ago. As far as I'm concerned there is nothing left for AI to drown.

Tell me you haven't listened to The Alex Jones Prison Planet without telling me etc...

Meh. That just sounds like a collection of shitty djent cliches.

I can't find myself caring one bit about it because the good stuff slowed to a teeny tiny dribble over two decades ago. As far as I'm concerned there is nothing left for AI to drown.

My perspective is that this isn’t strictly true. It just seems that way because algorithmic media (Facebook to Netflix), instead of expanding the window of exposure, narrowed it and homogenised everything within it. Thirty years ago in my small town in Europe, I had more choice in my local video rental store (where there was a whole section of foreign language films, that was updated frequently) than I get on all my home screens and feeds now, no matter how far I drill down.

Edit: I believe the “good stuff” is still being made, but its audience and distribution network is not part of the great algorithm fork. It’s elsewhere, it’s curated, and it’s often offline. Interested in the new avant garde. I suspect it’s here, it’s just not where 50-98% of people spend their time.

Edit: I believe the “good stuff” is still being made, but its audience and distribution network is not part of the great algorithm fork. It’s elsewhere, it’s curated, and it’s often offline. Interested in the new avant garde. I suspect it’s here, it’s just not where 50-98% of people spend their time.

Yep. You have to be willing to dive beneath the surface, long enough to find the pockets of original and specifically high quality work that the indie scene is putting out.

You have to be willing to dive beneath the surface, long enough to find the pockets of original and specifically high quality work that the indie scene is putting out.

So, how many hundreds or thousands of hours would you say is it acceptable to use to find more than a tiny handful of such gems? Please give a serious answer with actual numbers.

I've spent a lot of time looking for good music. When I do find some I haven't run into before, it's almost inevitably tracks made 30+ years ago, some new tracks from legacy artists (who may be rich enough to keep doing much the same thing they did 40 years ago, nevermind commercial viability) or some very occasional niche stuff. The last time I found an entire new album worth of good material was when Loreena McKennitt released Lost Souls in 2018 (and she was in her 60s by then, so not exactly a "modern" artist). Finding new indie releases on the level of say Depeche Mode's Violator, Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 1 or Roxy Music's Avalon just isn't going to happen.

So, how many hundreds or thousands of hours would you say is it acceptable to use to find more than a tiny handful of such gems? Please give a serious answer with actual numbers.

You'd want it to be somewhere around a 1:1 ratio of [Time spent searching:Time spent enjoying] if you ask me, although the search can be rewarding in its own way, since you stumble upon curiosities and learn new things in the process, often.

And the most efficient way to find stuff is to to connect with people who have already done the searching and have dredged up gems, and are happy to share those findings. There's communities out there that like the things you like, and have more free time than you do, and thus there's gains from cooperation to be had, rather than trying to search everything up solo.

So think of it less in terms of the time spent finding the music you like, and more in terms of finding communities that spent time finding music you like, and can save you a lot of time and effort via combining efforts.

If I spend 10 hours to find a single album that I will then add to my collection and listen to sporadically going forward, I do think I'd consider that time well spent. Especially if I spread that 10 hours out over weeks or months.

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