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Here's Udio, a new AI music generator that has emerged as a competitor to Suno. There's less of the audio "artifacting" that exists in a lot of AI music tools, and it can actually do some pretty decent generation from keywords. It's early days and there are limitations and still identifiable signs of AI-ness, but it's quite a large step forward from the previous iterations.
The emergence of all these musical AIs as of late has been quite validating, especially since I've had a good amount of arguments with art people I know about the ability of AI to create music - as someone who makes music as a hobbyist I've come at it from the perspective of "these are all just patterns and systems of rules, and can be imitated easily by an agent familiar enough with those rules". In similar fashion to those who predicted that visual art would be difficult to achieve via AI, those who were predicting that this ability was not generalisable to music were wrong.
To some extent, it's understandable - it must be a pretty big blow to one's ego for the art one prides themselves on to be so easily recreated and automated by the equivalent of a Chinese Room, especially when the field is still in its infancy and hasn't even come close to anything we would consider agentic - but I can't help but see many of the naysayers about the ability of AI to achieve supposedly uniquely "human" tasks as being clearly myopic and wrong.
The people I know that work in music (I've done so a bit myself too) don't really give a shit.
Composition was already a winner takes it all kind of thing and the vast majority of money is made through live performances. To the extent that this replaces anything I don't know anyone that has gotten paid anything meaningful for creating equivalent (or adjacent) audio slop.
We've talked about this previously but these kinds of jobs are not handed out on a merit or cost basis, and there is already an extreme oversupply of people capable of doing them.
I don't think this changes anything at all, but it is certainly interesting.
I think we're discussing different music crowds here. There's probably a difference in mindset between people who work professionally in music for a wage and "art people" - the young, generally progressive music fanatics who are extremely interested in music as an artform, who really care about cultivating the image and mindset of what they perceive artists are like, and believe that the value of music is in communication between individuals. These people find that AI art devalues artforms and believe it is meaningless due to the lack of human involvement. I will not debate the validity of that position (though I disagree), but it leads them to be disturbed by the idea of AI art and they as a result have a very strong incentive to downplay the capabilities of AI.
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