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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".
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.
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.
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.
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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