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PaperclipPerfector  20hr ago (text post)   826 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 9, 2026

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I got oneshot by AI music recently. Probably not the right term for music, but anyway:

The Strokes released their 7th album a few months ago and I, having always pirated music, duly grabbed the first option I saw on Soulseek when it came out, and for months listened happily. I'd heard their first single from the album already, and it was no different on the files I downloaded.

Last week I headed to see the Strokes in concert in London. Literally a day before the show, I was on the band's subreddit when I saw a meme talking about the album, except that one of the titles was completely different from what I knew. Did they change the title at some point? Hopping on to Youtube and, no, it's an entirely different track, and I can't find any evidence of the one I knew. And so it goes as I listen to the rest of the album, every single track is different.

Turns out someone had taken the initial track list and the first single and generated an AI version to put onto Spotify when it was first announced. It's still up there in fact, if you want to check how it sounds:

https://open.spotify.com/album/6jvDu7nHvR8nI9b22cE3Ic

I guess it's somewhat fortunate I found out a bit before the live show, otherwise I probably would have been confused as hell.

But none of that is particularly interesting: AI music is already very good, and I knew already that there were charting AI songs and what not. It's not too surprising that they could make an entire album good enough to fool a fan.

I think what really surprised me in the end is that now I still prefer the AI album. Not just that, but as I said in a Motte comment about the album when it released, I would probably rank the AI version as better than anything else the Strokes have done.

I was a bit scornful of those comments which said that we were already at the point were people would abandon real musicians and just generate an endless stream of personalised music with AI, but looks like I'm already there.

This is not the only AI killing art story I wanted to bring to your attention. While music may have been solved, video games are still a ways away (so, 6 months at a guess). Over on our sister/cousin/arch-rival site Datasecretslox, AI skeptic* Conrad has been experimenting with the ability to build an equivalent to 1992 JRPG Lunar: The Silver Star using only AI.

https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,16631.0.html

The code has proved no barrier at all, but pixel art appears to be one of the great challenges for current AI models, unable to output character sprites or maps without constant hand-holding and dozens if not hundreds of iterations. They've at least reached a point of finishing the starting village (and also all of the underlying code for the game systems) but will they give up before they can output a finished game?

*yes, I did mostly want to point out how idiotic his argument is without having to register there. Conrad is enraged that AI cannot replicate a 1992 JRPG in one go, apparently completely ignorant that no human could come close to that given that the original Luna was built by a team of ~50 people over more than a year, or 100s of thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars. Even accounting for advances in game engines, Conrad working part-time for a few weeks is still 100x more efficient than the original.

+1 on the AI music. I've being doing a bunch of work in the evenings to this playlist, particularly the third track, cockpit lights. It's not complicated, it's not some revelatory masterpiece. It just works for me, I groove to it.

More and more of my regular music listening is AI generated now, to the point that I think it's probably been 90%+ in the last two months.

Link doesn't work for me, but I'd love to hear it. Saw them a few weeks back, it was a great show.

There's a certain kind of American who calls himself "Irish" because he has a single Irish great-great-great-grandparent. He likes nothing more than donning a green scarf, drinking "Guinness"* on "St. Patty's Day" and greeting his friends with a cheery "Top o' the morning to ye!". Some Irish musicians have realised how potentially lucrative this demographic is, and started recording trad-infused folk music with lyrics about drinkin', fightin' and ridin' (delivered in a comically thick Irish brogue which bears no resemblance to the singer's actual speaking voice), intended to pop up in "Irish"-Americans' Spotify playlists alongside the Dropkick Murphys and other purveyors of plastic Paddyism. I find the tradslop produced by acts like The Scratch, Kingfishr and Amble uniformly execrable, and their whole approach rather cynical. I mean, there's a museum in Dublin whose entire marketing schtick is based on the idea that there's more to Irish people than whiskey and spuds, and they're so aggressive about it that it goes full circle and becomes full-blown oikophobic – and yet, listening to these bands sort of makes me feel how black Americans supposedly felt about Louis Armstrong appealing to white audiences by puttin' on and deliberately playing up negative black stereotypes.

Yesterday I discovered that this business model is so lucrative that even the bots are getting in on it. A colleague of mine showed me this very bawdy song which came up on her TikTok, and something about it seemed extremely off: the "fiddle" is clearly a synthesised instrument, it's billed as a "live" recording but sounds impossibly crisp and clear (and doesn't specify in what venue, or even city, it was performed in), no videos or photos of the band are anywhere to be found, and the artwork for the single is blatantly AI-generated (note that the word "the" appears twice at the top of the image, a howler I thought would have been stamped out a few generations of LLM ago – and what does "The Foxhole" have to do with anything?). There is no way this band actually exists.

People sometimes derisively refer to Irish trad as "diddly-eye" music. We've now reached the era of diddly-AI. If it puts The Scratch and co. out of business, I'll consider it a blessing.

*If it wasn't brewed with water from the Liffey, it's not Guinness.

I mean, there's a museum in Dublin whose entire marketing schtick is based on the idea that there's more to Irish people than whiskey and spuds, and they're so aggressive about it that it goes full circle and becomes full-blown oikophobic – and yet, listening to these bands sort of makes me feel how black Americans supposedly felt about Louis Armstrong appealing to white audiences by puttin' on and deliberately playing up negative black stereotypes.

Well, the Irish are the blacks of Europe, and Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland, and the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin, soooo... say it once, say it loud?

Completely agree about the Guinness, btw, it's just not the same.

I agree, some of the newer AI music video efforts have been genuinely good. I think the best results are when a human with some music knowledge is able to offer specific enough prompting to get something that captures a vibe.

The Upping my p(doom) song is well-produced. But my favorite so far is Close All Your Windows featuring an AI character Cluadia that has been in several other videos by the same..."creator" for lack of a better word. It really hits in a lot of ways - a heavy dose of Windows XP nostalgia, a vision of 2003-era futurism, a surprisingly sensitive vocal creation, and lyrics that are heavy with double meaning and some commentary about the human condition.

I'm not completely surprised - music theory has done a lot to systematize the qualities of "decent" music and so much music is digitally produced already. Much like with visual art, machines might still struggle to produce truly transcendental works, but appear to be great at producing "good enough" music that people will find enjoyable with little to no real effort.

If you haven't seen em,
LGTM is a pop banger.
An AI Took Over This Music Video - more of a polemic, but I find it haunting.

That second one, Youtube served me after listening to the first one a bunch of times. The first one was sent to me by a buddy who's strongly anti-AI. And while passing it to another friend, he passed me back a third one by a completely different artist. This stuff's everywhere it seems.

IMO (having been seeking them out) the best video for I'm Upping My P(Doom) is Pleometric's. The song in general is the first piece of AI-generated music I've ever had stuck in my head.

Joining it since:

Unless somehow only these 2 people are especially good at eliciting these, my suspicion is that AI music generation may have actually arrived for me, I just have yet to dive into it.

This reminds me of Scott Alexander's is this a classic piece of art thing. It would be one thing if AI could produce art of a sort that was truly original and groundbreaking in terms of composition, how it was made (though with AI it's all pixels, sound samples, etc.) But AI copies what's already around. It mimics, it tweaks, it alters, but it isn't original. To me there is no question it will certainly be able to (if it isn't already) produce facsimiles of great art of all kinds (at least visual/aural art, sculpture may take longer). But that is because it is standing on the shoulders of the humans who already created it. This argument has no doubt already been made and more convincingly a hundred times by smarter people but I haven't read it.

Those music videos look OK...but I only spent a few seconds listening to those songs, I can't bear the AI lyrics.

Just tested creative writing with Claude, and... I got something about as good as any generic professional fiction I've ever read. Natural cadences, lively flow, variegated and colorful phrasing, appropriate to the material I fed in and strategically observant of the overall going ons of the plot, genre, and so forth that were implied. Gone were the bland, circuitous repetitions, the relentless abstractions, and passionless smooth gloss or mechanically deployed effects I associated with most previous AI writing. I think Claude got a bunch of new updates recently, and this explains the major quality leap I observe with this test.

So at this point I'd say most creative fields are probably on their last legs as viable enterprises, or at least specialization in the craft techniques behind them are. There will still be personalities who build real connections with their fans, but the works will increasingly be autonomously produced by AI with minimal human involvement, save to direct AI efforts, and not even in a creative sense but more in regards to commercial impetuses. This test plus the music videos largely prove it for me, and furthermore I cannot say what I think the limit will be.

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