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Friday Fun Thread for October 9, 2026

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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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.