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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3638 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.

Loved "Moonshot Rider". "Fight" isn't bad, either. You are correct; Suno 5 smashes the Turing Test.

But I was a fan of AI music even before this release. AI music didn't have to be as good as human music to be competitive; it just needed to be good enough to allow someone with creativity to create things that could have never existed otherwise. For example, demonflyingfox's parodies of Family Guy and Game of Thrones, or corridos like "Luigi Magione" and "Nariz Grande".

Just two months ago I played through a visual novel called Stains of Blue. It's still in development, but when you reach the end of the prologue, you get hit with the theme song and a montage of images from the game's various cutscenes. And even though the music is clearly AI generated, the way it was presented and tied up perfectly with the game's themes and story was so beautiful that I almost cried.

From Quarantine by Greg Egan:

I flop onto my bed, and switch on the room’s audio system. The controlling ROM I’ve been playing lately, “Paradise” by Angela Renfield, is one of hundreds of thousands of identical copies, but each piece it creates is guaranteed unique. Renfield has set certain parameters for the music, but others are provided by pseudorandom functions, seeded with the date, the time, and the audio system’s serial number.

Tonight, I seem to have chanced upon an excessive weighting for minimalist influence. After several minutes of nothing but the same (admittedly, impressively resonant) chord, repeated at five-second intervals, I hit the RECOMPOSE button. The music stops, there’s a brief pause, then a new variation begins, a distinct improvement.

I’ve run “Paradise” about a hundred times. At first, I could hardly believe that the separate performances had anything in common, but over the months I’ve begun to apprehend the underlying structure. I see it as resembling a family tree, or a phylogenetic classification of species. The metaphor is imprecise, though; one piece can be judged to be a near or a distant cousin of another, but the concept of ancestry doesn’t really translate. I think of the simplest pieces as being primordial, as “giving rise to” more complex variations, but beyond a certain point it’s an arbitrary decision as to who begat, or evolved into, whom.

I’ve heard some reviewers assert that, after a dozen playings, anyone who is musically literate should fully understand the rules that Renfield has chosen, making further actual performances unbearably redundant. If that’s the case, I’m glad of my ignorance. Tonight’s second piece is like a brilliant scalpel blade, prising away layer after layer of dead skin. I close my eyes as a trumpet line builds, rising in pitch, then mutates, impossibly, effortlessly, into the liquid sound of metaharps. Flutes join in, with an ornate, mannered theme – but already I think I can discern in it, hidden beneath the fussiness and decoration, hints of a perfect silver needle which will recur in a hundred guises; which will be honed, muted, then honed again; which will be held up for my admiration, one last time, then plunged into my heart.

Suddenly, four lines of glowing text appear at the bottom of my visual field:

[Backroom Worker:

Natural memory association.

Casey, Joseph Patrick.

Head of Security as of 12th June, 2066.]

I’d forgotten that I’d asked for staff records, too – or I would have excluded them. I think about waiting for the music to finish, but there’s no point; I know full well that I’d be unable to enjoy it. I hit the STOP button, and one more unique incarnation of “Paradise” disappears forever.

Yeah.

To add to the shock, OpenAI just put out Sora 2, which is also gobsmacking me with how good it is.

https://sora.chatgpt.com/p/s_68dc49d67ce0819194ea5d9f24bdb28e

This video is completely 'convincing' to me, between the reflections, the dog, and the traffic in the background and road noises. I can still reason out that it's AI, but my natural intuition is not picking it up automatically anymore.

It is also pretty damn good at quality-looking animation and voice-acting. albeit in very short bursts.

Basically, as these tools improve, the amount of actual creative skill and free time needed to create 'passably decent' media drops by like 50% every 6 months.

Someone's going to figure out how to hook Suno, Veo and/or Sora, together with a 'director' LLM and make full on music videos or contiguous scenes with soundtracks and everything.

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