It's a pretty absurd claim to say that learning Suno is no different than learning a musical instrument. My 8 year old nephew was cranking out "songs" in Suno within an hour of being introduced to it. Reminds me of when parents were super impressed that their 3-year old could use an iPad.

Generative tools (visual, auditory, etc.) can serve as powerful tools of augmentation for existing creators. For example, you've put together a song (melody/harmony) and you'd like to have AI fill out a simple percussive section to enrich everything.

However with a translation as vast as "text" -> to -> "music" in terms of medium - you can't really insert much of yourself into a brand new piece outside of the lyrics though I'd wager 99% of Suno users are too lazy to even do that themselves. I suppose you can act as a curator reviewing hundreds of generated pieces but that's a very different thing.

I always get a little confused when I hear non-musicians say that something like Suno is empowering when all they did was type in, "A Contrapuntal hurdy-gurdy fugue with a backing drum track performed by a man who swallowed too many turquoise beads doing the truffle shuffle while a choir gives each other inappropriate friendly tickles".

You imply "it is Prompt -> Song" but in reality it is "Prompt -> Song -> Reflection -> New Prompt -> New Song.." It is a dialogue. And in a dialogue you can get some places where neither of you could go alone.

As software developers we know that multiple people contribute to a project, inside a git repo, and if you take one's work out it does nothing useful by itself. Only when they come together they make sense. What one dev writes builds on what other devs write. It's recursive dependency.

The interaction between human and AI can take a similar path. It's not a push-button vending machine for content. It is like a story writing itself, discovering where it will end up along the way. The credit goes to the process, not any one in isolation.

Almost all naturally-generated music is derivative to one degree or another. And new tools like AI provide new ways to produce music, just like all new instruments have done in the past.

Take drum and bass. Omni Trio made a few tracks in the early 90s. It was interesting at the time, but it wasn't suddenly a genre. It only became so because other artists copied them, then copied other copies, and more and more kept doing it because they all enjoyed doing so.

Suno ain't gonna invent drum and bass, just like drum machines didn't invent house music. But drum machines did expand the kinds of music we could make, which lead to house music, drum and bass, and many other new genres. Clever artists will use AI to make something fun and new, which will eventually grow into popular genres of music, because that's how it's always been done.

Japanese oldies became a trend for a while - the people who found and repopularised the music dont get to say they created it and how it’s so awesome to have mastered the musical instrument of describing or searching for things. Well, of course they can, but forgive me if I don’t buy it.

Maybe when there is actual AGI then the AI will get the creative credit, but that’s not what we have and I still wouldn’t transfer the creative credit to the person who asked the AGI to write a song.

When artists made trance, the creative credit didn't go to Roland for the JP-8000 and 909, even though Roland was directly responsible for the fundamental sounds. Instead, the trance artists were revered. That's good.

> Japanese oldies became a trend for a while - the people who found and repopularised the music dont get to say they created it and how it’s so awesome

I'd bet there are modern artists who sampled that music and edited it into very-common rhythm patterns, resulting in a few hit songs (i.e. The Manual by The KLF).

Musicians not just copy but everyone adds something new; it's like programmers taking some existing algorithm (like sorting) and improving it. The question is, can Suno user add something new to the drum-and-bass pattern? Or they can just copy? Also as it uses a text prompt, I cannot imagine how do you even edit anything? "Make note number 3 longer by a half"? It must be a pain to edit the melody this way.

Not everyone. I've followed electronic music for decades, and even in a paid-music store like Beatport, most artist reproduce what they've heard, and are often just a pale imitation because they have no idea of how to make something better. That's the fundamental struggle of most creatives, regardless of tool or instrument.

I haven't tried Suno, but I imagine it's doing something similar to modern software: start with a pre-made music kit and hit the "Randomize" button for the sequencer & arpeggiator. It just happens to be an "infinite" bundle kit.

As for DJ'ing I would say it is pretty limited form of art and it requires lot of skill to create something new this way.

I give my idea to the model, the model gives me new ideas, I iterate. After enough rounds I get some place where I would never have gotten on my own, or the model gotten there without me.

I am not the sole creator, neither is the model, credit belongs to the Process.

So if I have a melody in my head, how do I make AI render it using language? Even simpler, if I can beatbox a beat (like "pts-ts-ks-ts"), how do I describe it using language? I don't feel like I can make anything useful by prompting.

I've been recording myself on guitar and using suno to turn it into professional quality recordings with full backing band.

And I'm not trying to sell it, I just like hearing the ideas in my head turned into fully fleshed music of higher quality than I could produce with 100x more time to invest into it

Actually having an "autotune" AI that turns out-of-key poor singing into a beautiful melody while keeping the voice timbre, would be not bad.

Yes the barrier for entry is low, but there is a very high ceiling as well

These tools will probably be great for making music for commercials. But if you want to make something interesting, unique, or experimental, I don't think these are quite suited for it.

It seems to be a very similar limitation to text-based llms. They are great at synthesizing the most likely response to your input. But never very good at coming up with something unique or unlikely.

Unless of course you mean "original" as in, some kind of wishy washy untargetable goal that's really some appeal to humanity, where any piece of information that disagrees with your hypothesis is discarded because it is unfalsifiable. Original might as well mean "Made by a human and that's it" which isn't useful at all.

Whereas I use it to mean new or different.

Literally nothing AI outputs is new or different.

You got 30 seconds, of which there might have been a hook that was interesting. So you would crop the hook and re-generate to get another 30 seconds before or after that, and so on.

I would liken it more as being the producer stitching together the sessions a band have recorded to produce a song.

This is a very old argument within artistic communities.

In cinema, authorship has resoundingly been awarded to the director. A lot of film directors go deep in many creative silos, but at its core the process is commissioning a lot of artists to do art at the same time. You dont have to be able to do those things. Famously some anime directors have just been hired off the street.

In comics things went the other way. Editors have been trying to extract credit for creative work for a long time. A lot of them have significant input in the creative process, but have no contractual basis for demanding credit for that input. It frustrates them. They can also just commission work, or they can have various levels of input in to the creative process, up to and including defining characters entirely.

Really then, in your example, theres clearly a point where you have had enough of a creative input in the creation to be part of the artistic endeavor. One judge in china ruled in favour of the artist after they proved that they had completed 20 odd revisions of the artwork, before watermarking it.

That is of course, assuming we only follow your strict, reductionist argument. Even for AI art, most generators these days take more than text input. You can mask areas, provide hand drawn precursor art and a lot of other things. And that also assumes no post processing.

Not all AI generated items will be art. But what I find offensive, is the judgement that as a class nothing touched by AI could be considered art. Mostly because I lived through "Digital Art is not Art" and "Computer Games are not Art" proponents of both got overtaken by history and rightly shamed.

If I ask a comics guy their favorite comic artist they aren't giving me back editors names. They will have favorite editors, or even editor artist pairs, but the artist remains distinct from that.

I simply posited that commissioning a piece of work does not make you an artist. Having art generated for you to your taste is not 'making art'. Hiring an interior decorator to decorate my house does not mean I decorated. Ordering off a menu and requesting extra cheese does not make you part chef.

A better blurring for your argument would be the use of session musicians. If I say I love The Beach Boys, how much of what I love is session musicians work versus Brian Wilson's? Is he the artist that I enjoy? But that gets back to it, doesn't it. We as humans want to connect art with it's creator. Why? Because art is some reflection of something. Art is 'life is a shared experience'. AI 'art' is not part of that shared experience. I want to connect with Brian Wilson. But I don't connect with some music critic who writes about Brian Wilson's music even though we both connected with the same artistic work, even if I learned about the work though the critic making my relationship to them just as important (I wouldn't know it without them). There being an artist in the middle improves/transforms it/means something (what it means is what is up for discussion).

A pretty crystal is just as pretty as a piece of art, but it is not a piece of art. AI art might be more like the crystal. It might contain beauty/interest/capture attention. But it's not connecting with someone's creation, with intention. I have a local museum and I love exhibits that a specific curator there has focused on more than ones they didn't touch. But that doesn't make them an artist. AI 'artists' fall into that category.

No but its the same genetic fallacy. Some digital works arent art. Therefore all Digital art is not art. These people were rightly ridiculed.

Suggesting that because some people put no effort into AI Art, that AI art as a category cannot be art is also a silly genetic fallacy.

>If I ask a comics guy their favorite comic artist they aren't giving me back editors names. They will have favorite editors, or even editor artist pairs, but the artist remains distinct from that.

Correct. Because the authorship debate in that space settled in the opposite direction. If Comic Editors succeeded and were treated like film directors, they would have headline billing on comics and they would be a household name. But it went the other way, and instead Editors who try to claim credit for artistic works, even with receipts, get laughed at.

>I simply posited that commissioning a piece of work does not make you an artist.

Right, but the implication there is that is all people using AI generators do.

>Hiring an interior decorator to decorate my house does not mean I decorated.

Right, but if you are giving the interior decorator creative input, like, "No that sucks this should be red" and revising their output hundreds of times, you are actually involved in the decoration process. And if that decorator is just, hanging up exactly what you tell them to, then they might just be a dogsbody and you the interior decorator.

>I have a local museum and I love exhibits that a specific curator there has focused on more than ones they didn't touch. But that doesn't make them an artist. AI 'artists' fall into that category.

Some do. But the vast majority put a lot more effort in than simple curation. I remember seeing people, when Midjourney first became viable, simply generating 12 images with a single prompt, and sharing all 12 on facebook to pages that wanted nothing to do with them. Thats not art. But its also not the done thing anymore.

Yeah and it worked great until industrial agriculture let lots of people eat who had no skill at agriculture. In fact, our entire history as a species is a long history of replacing Skill with machines to enable more people to access the skill. If it gives you sad feelings that people without skill can suddenly do more cool things, thats entirely a you problem.

>too lazy

Again, I wholly reject the idea that there's a line between 'tech people' and 'art people'. You can have an interest in both art and tech. You can do both 'traditional art' and AI art. I also reject the idea that AI tools require no skill, that's clearly not the case.

>nature

This can so easily be thrown back at you.

>why should anyone want to hear what "you" (ie: the machine) have to say?

So why are we having this discussion in the first place? Right, hundreds of millions are interested in exploring and creating with AI. You are not fighting against a small contingent who are trying to covet the meaning of "artist" or whatever. No, it's a mass movement of people being creative in a way that you don't like.

• We're having this discussion because people are trying to equate an auto-amalgamation/auto-generation machine with the artistic process, and in doing so, redefining what "art" means.

• Yes, you can "be creative" with AI, but don't fool yourself-- you're not creating art. I don't call myself a chef because I heated up a microwave dinner.

• If throwing paint at a canvas is art (sure, why not?) then so is typing a few words into a 'machine'. Of course many people spend a considerable amount more effort than that. No different than learning Ableton Live or Blender.

• See previous points.

A better analogy would be "I don't call myself a chef when ordering from Uber Eats".

Banging two sticks together is music. Get off your high horse.

If I write a song about my kid and cat it's funny for me and my wife. I don't expect anyone else to hear or like it. It has value to me because I set the topic. It doesn't even need to be perfect musically to be fun for a few minutes.

People are mixing and matching these songs and layering their own vocals etc to create novel music. This is barely different from sampling or papier mache or making collages.

People made the same reductionist arguments you're making about electronic music in the early days. Or digital art.

Look, sarcasm aside, for you and the many people who agree with you, I would encourage opening your minds a bit. There was a time where even eating food was an intense struggle of intellect, skill, and patience. Now you walk into a building and grab anything you desire in exchange for money.

You can model this as a sort of "manifestation delta." The delta time & effort for acquiring food was once large, now it is small.

This was once true for nearly everything. Many things are now much much easier.

I know it is difficult to cope with, because many held a false belief that the arts were some kind of untouchable holy grail of pure humanness, never to be remotely approached by technology. But here we are, it didn't actually take much to make even that easier. The idea that this was somehow "the thing" that so many pegged their souls to, I would actually call THAT hubris.

Turns out, everyone needs to dig a bit deeper to learn who we really are.

This generative AI stuff is just another phase of a long line of evolution via technology for humanity. It means that more people can get what they want easier. They can go from thought to manifestation faster. This is a good thing.

The artists will still make art, just like blacksmiths still exist, or bow hunters still exist, or all the myriad of "old ways" still exist. They just won't be needed. They will be wanted, but they won't be needed.

The less middlemen to creation, the better. And when someone desires a thing created, and they put in the money, compute time, and prompting to thusly do so, then they ARE the creator. Without them, the manifestation would stay in a realm of unrealized dreams. The act itself of shifting idea to reality is the act of creation. It doesn't matter how easy it is or becomes.

Your struggle to create is irrelevant to the energy of creation.

It may be nice for society that ordering food is possible, but it doesn’t make one a chef to have done so.

With AI, there is a vision and there is a tool executing it. This has a recursive loop involving articulation, refinement, repetition. It is one person using a tool to get a result. At a minimum, it is characteristically different than your comparison, no?

To add, my original statement was concerning going into a grocery store and buying ingredients. That was once a much more difficult process.

As an aside it reminds me of a food cart I would go to regularly in Portland. Sometimes the chefs would go mushroom foraging and cook a lunch using those fresh mushrooms. It was divine. If we ever reach a time when I can send a robot out to forage for mushrooms and actually survive the meal, I would celebrate that occasion, because it would mean we all made it through some troubling times.

You might not be a creator, but you could make an argument for being an executive producer.

But then, if working with an artist is reduced to talking at a computer, people seem to forget that whatever output they get is equally obtainable to everyone and therefore immediately uninteresting, unless the art is engaging the audience only in what could already be described using language, rather than the medium itself. In other words, you might ask for something different, but that ask is all you are expressing, nothing is expressed through the medium, which is the job of the artist you have replaced. It is simply generated to literally match the words. Want to stand out? Well, looks like you’ll have to find somebody to put in the work…

That being said, you can always construct from parts. Building a set of sounds from suno asks and using them like samples doesn’t seem that different from crate digging, and I’d never say Madlib isn’t an artist.

I will say Michelangelo was particularly controlling and distrusting of assistants, and uniquely did more work than other master artists of the time, but the point remains. The vision has always been the value.

But if you ordered 100 dishes iterating between designing your order, tasting, refining your order, and so on - maybe you even discover something new that nobody has realized before.

The gen-AI process is a loop, not a prompt->output one step process.

Controlling that flow of generation, re-prompting, adjusting, splicing, etc. to create a unique song that expresses your intention is significantly more work and requires significantly more creativity. The more you understand this “instrument”, the more accurate and efficient you become.

What you’re comparatively suggesting is that if a producer were to grab samples off Splice, slice them and dice them to rearrange them and make a unique song, that they didn’t “actually” make music. That seems like it would be a more absurd position than suggesting AI could be viewed as an instrument.

Tools like Suno make people feel like “their own music” is good and they have accomplished something because they elevate the floor of being bad at a tool (like all technological improvements do). They feel like they have been able to express their creativity and are proud, like a kid showing off a doodle. They share it with their friends, who will listen to it exactly one time in most cases and likely tell them it is “really good” and they “really like it” before never listening again.

That type of AI use is akin to a coloring book, but certainly doesn’t make for “good” music. When a kid shows off their badly colored efforts proudly, should we yell at them they aren’t doing “real art”, that their effort was meaningless, and that they should stop acting proud of such crap until they go to art school and do it “properly”?

It most definitely is different and you’ve proven it with your own post. Guitar takes a long time to get to a place where you can produce the sounds you hear in your head. Suno gives you instant gratification.

Look, if it gives you pleasure to make Suno music then you should do it, but if you think having an ai steal a melody and add it to your songs counts is the same as creating something, you’re kiddo by yourself. At best you are a lyricist relying on a robocomposer to do the hard part. You could have achieved the same thing years ago by collaborating with a musician like Bernie Taupin did with Elton John.

There are drawbacks to being a skilled (trained/practiced) musician. You specialize in one instrument, and tend to have your creativity guided by its strengths/weaknesses.

I think that soon, some very accomplished musicians will learn to leverage tools like Suno, but they aren't in the majority yet. We're still in the "vibe-coding" phase of AI music generation.

We saw this happen with CG. When it started, engineers did most of the creating, and we got less-than-stellar results[0].

Then, CG became its own community and vocation, and true artists started to dominate.

Some of the CG art that I see nowadays, is every bit as impressive as the Great Masters.

We'll see that, when AI music generation comes into its own. It's not there, yet.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTP2RUD_cL0

Suno isn't a tool. Tools are characterized by precision and a steep learning curve, and "AI" is nothing like.

I’m an artist (the old-fashioned kind).

That’s where I come from, so my viewpoint is colored by my own experience and training.

Also, "old-fashioned"? This to imply that someone rendering painterly visuals in seconds with AI is some new kind of artist? If so, then no, what they do isn't art to begin with. That at least requires an act of effortful creation.

I spent some time, making CG art, and found it to be very difficult; but that was also back before some of the new tools were available. Apps like Procreate, with Apple Pencil and iPad Pro, are game-changers. They don't remove the need for a trained artist, though.

But really, some of the very best stuff, comes quickly, from skilled hands. Van Gogh used to spit out paintings at a furious pace (and barely made enough to live on. Their value didn't really show, until long after his death).

Briefly instructing an image model to imitate an Old Master and having it do so in seconds fulfills none of those needs, and at least to me there's nothing impressive about it as soon as I know how it was created (yes, there is a distinction there even if at first glance at a photo of a real old master and an AI-rendered imitation, it might be hard to note a difference)

The latter is not art, and the people who churn it out with their LLM of choice are not artists, at least not if that's their only qualification for professing to be such.

When airbrushing became a thing, “real” artists were aghast. They screeched about how it was too “technical,” and removed the “creativity” from the process. Amateurs would be churning out garbage, dogs and cats would be living together, etc.

In fact, airbrushes sucked (I did quite a bit of it, myself), but they ushered in a new way of visualizing creative thinking. Artists like Roger Dean used them to great effect.

So people wanted what airbrushes gave you, but the tool was so limited, that it frustrated, more than enabled. Some real suckass “artists” definitely churned out a bunch of dross.

Airbrushing became a fairly “mercenary” medium; used primarily by commercial artists. That said, commercial artists have always used the same medium as fine artists. This was a medium that actually started as a commercial one.

Airbrushing is really frustrating and difficult. I feel that, given time, the tools could have evolved, but they were never given the chance.

When CG arrived, it basically knocked airbrushes into a cocked hat. It allowed pretty much the same visual effect, and was just as awkward, but not a whole lot more difficult. It also had serious commercial appeal. People could make money, because it allowed easy rendering, copying, and storage. There was no longer an “original,” but that really only bothered fine artists.

This medium was allowed to mature, and developed UI and refined techniques.

The exact same thing happened with electric guitars, digital recording and engineering, synthesizers, and digital photography. Every one of these tools, were decried as “the devil’s right hand,” but became fundamental, once true creatives mastered them, and the tools matured.

“AI” (and we all know that it’s not really “intelligence,” but that’s what everyone calls it, so I will, too. No one likes a pedant) is still in the “larval” stage. The people using it, are still pretty ham-handed and noncreative. That’s going to change.

If you look at Roger Dean’s work, it’s pretty “haphazard.” He mixes mediums, sometimes using their antipathy to each other to produce effects (like mixing water and oil). He cuts out photos, and glues them onto airbrushed backgrounds, etc. He is very much a “modern” creative. Kai Krause is another example. Jimi Hendrix made electric guitars into magical instruments. Ray Kurzweil advanced electronic keyboards, but people like Klaus Schultze, made them into musical instruments. These are folks that are masters of the new tools.

I guarantee that these types of creatives will learn to master the new tools, and will collaborate with engineers, to advance them. I developed digital imaging software, and worked with many talented photographers and retouchers, to refine tools. I know the process.

Of course, commercial applications will have outsized influence, but that’s always the case. Most of the masters were sponsored by patrons, and didn’t have the luxury to “play.” They needed to keep food on the table. That doesn’t make their work any less wonderful.

We’re just at the start of a new revolution. This will reach into almost every creative discipline. New techniques and new tribal knowledge will need to be developed. New artists will become specialists.

Personally, I’m looking forward to what happens, once true creatives start to master the new medium.

Wrong. It takes extremely long before you can make the sounds in your head fit into the scale and recognize them, however with Suno it is impossible.

I would compare Suno to a musician-for-hire. You describe what you want, some time later he sends you the recording, you write clarifications, and get second revision, and so on. Suno is the same musician, except much faster, cheaper and with poor vocal skills. Everything you can do with Suno today, you could make before, albeit at much higher price.

The fact people still think this is how these models work is astonishing

Even if that were true, sampling is an artform and is behind one of the most popular and succesful genres today (hip hop). So is DJ'ing or is that also not a skill?

The same puritanism that claimed jazz wasn't music, then rap wasn't music, then EDM wasn't music, blah blah

Gatekeepers of what is and isn't art always end up wrong and crotchety on the other side. It's lame and played out.

I never said Suno wasn’t “art”. The opposite is true. If you want to put your name on something that took no effort or skill and call it art, more power to you. You could do the same in other areas, and lame, low effort “art” proceeds AI by millennia. You are as welcome as anybody to call yourself a creator, however lame that effort may be.

But man the chutzpah of comparing that low effort drivel with people pushing genre boundaries.

Sure, make the models credit the original artists, who cares. That doesn't change if it's an art that should be respected or not.

What an insanely disrespectful take.

I'd love to see programmers reactions to having the measure of their work reduced in such a way as more people vibe code past all the technical nonsense.

Your supposed judgment on skill has nothing to do with something's value as an artform

No it absolutely is not.

Where playing an instrument means balancing the handling of tempo, rhythm and notes while mastering your human limitations, a tool like SuperCollider lets you just define these bits as reactive variables. The focus in SuperCollider is on audio synthesis and algorithmic composition, that's closer to dynamically stringing a guitar in unique rule-based ways - mastering that means bridging music- and signal-processing theories while balancing your processing resources. Random generators in audio synthesis are mostly used to bring in some human depth to it.

https://limewire.com/d/ShyFU#hGrEzdZegs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKZNOnLUBmQ

all the discourse with this remark is quite fascinating as an observer. similar remarks used to be said about electronic music or just use of conventional daw when they were new.

to those who have dedicated years into their craft: one must not mix self-expression from the mechanics of getting there. it is very respectable to dedicate one's life to the analogue way. but if something lets you get there in a different way, allow it.

But we might need new vocabulary to differentiate that from the act of learning & using different layers of musical theory + physical ability on an instrument (including tools like supercollider) + your lived experience as a human to produce music.

Maybe some day soon all the songs on the radio and Spotify will be ai generated and hyper personalized and we’ll happily dance to it, but I’ll bet my last dollar that as long as humans exist, they’ll continue grinding away (manually?) at whatever musical instrument of the time.

You may wish that learning Suno is no different than learning guitar, but I think the effects of AI may be a bit pernicious, and lead to a stagnation that takes a while to truly be felt. Nobody can say one way or the other yet. That said, I'm happy you can make music that you enjoy, and that Suno enables you to do it. Such tools are at their best when they're helping people like you.

Of course, nothing wrong with watching and appreciating a master at work. It’s just when this is sold as the illusion of education passively absorbed through a screen that I think it can be harmful. Or at least a waste of time.

The learning is in the failing; the satisfaction of landing it is in the journey that put you there.

You downplay the training it takes to actually use your body to output the notes. With the guitar your fingers have to "learn" as much as your brain on a scale that no prompt input will ever match. And I say that as a musician that use mostly sequencers to compose.

>> think that soon, some very accomplished musicians will learn to leverage tools like Suno, but they aren't in the majority yet. We're still in the "vibe-coding" phase of AI music generation. We saw this happen with CG. When it started, engineers did most of the creating, and we got less-than-stellar results[0]. Then, CG became its own community and vocation, and true artists started to dominate.

Hey its likely not going to be me, but let's be real - any user of this technology who has gone beyond the "type in a prompt and look i got a silly song about poop" stage will probably agree - someone's going to produce some bangers using this tech. It's inevitable and if you don't think so it's likely you haven't done anything more than "low-effort" work on these platforms. "Low effort" work - which a majority of AI swill us - is going to suck, whether its AI or not.

And while I have the forum, I do want to make another point. I pay more for a month for Suno than Spotify ($25 vs $9). Suno/Udio etc: do what you need to to make sure the artists and catalogues are getting compensated... as an user I would pay even more knowing that was settled.

Ehh... No.