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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.
Ego is one thing, basic self-interest is another, but more importantly, I'm not sure who's being myopic here. Technology was supposed to automate away the drudgery, so we can devote ourselves to higher pursuits like art, philosophy, and science. The way things are going, it looks like we're going to automate away the higher pursuits so we can send more people to the cobalt mines, because handing someone a pickaxe, and feeding them insects might be easier than figuring out and maintaining bipedal robots.
I think technology has done a lot of that, though, with things like dishwashers, washing machines, running water, elevators, cranes, cars, and such. These are all "dumb" tech, though, and they hit diminishing returns; we still have to load our dishwashers and steer our cars (for the most part) manually. I think this just speaks to how difficult the precise and fine manipulation of objects in the physical world really is. From what I heard, image generation AI was actually a consequence of trying to solve this problem; we needed AI to be able to perceive the world similar to humans, which meant identifying objects in images, which was able to be reversed in some way to create new images. And this happened much more quickly than the robotics controls, because manipulating stuff in the digital world is much easier than in the real world.
It's still way too early to tell, but I could also see the argument that AI art does automate away the drudgery so we can devote ourselves to higher pursuits, since it's really primarily good at creating high fidelity illustrations while lacking the good taste or artistic vision required to convey some emotion in a pleasing or provocative way (this is arguable). This allows people to work on the more high level vision of what they want their illustration to look like instead of devoting the time required to develop their manual muscle control.
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