So I ran into a pretty amusing AI song on Reddit today and I wanted to know what I’m dealing with, so I went ahead and generated one myself, just to try it out. I thought an indie synthpop song about an infatuation with Jeffrey Dahmer would be amusing, but it’s AI, so I still had to come up with some of the lyrics myself. I will say, I just genuinely find myself enjoying the song, I’ve listened to it a few times today. It’s like porn: Just because you think it’s wrong to watch porn doesn’t mean you won’t pop a boner when it shows up on your screen.
I think you’re deluding yourself, if you think this isn’t just the sort of stuff that 90% of people are going to be listening to from now on:
You won’t know, because you just won’t be told. Spotify pays artists, so if people upload AI generated stuff, it will earn them money. I think some of the cloudrap stuff I listened to is probably already AI. I’d love to say “well it’s nothing like what my favorite artist makes”. And that’s true.
If you’re able to be honest to yourself and skip the whole philosophical debate for a moment, you’ll realize it’s generally better than what humans make. An AI generated Taylor Swift album will sound better than what Taylor Swift herself is offering to the normies now.
And you can pretend to be really smug and clever, you can claim you can definitely tell apart your grindcore from AI generated grindcore. I could insist it can’t generate witch house. You’re a few cycles of new training data away from your favorite stuff being routinely spit out of a machine. And if you can be honest to yourself, you’re not always scratching your chin while listening to the most sophisticated pretentious crap you can come up with. Sometimes you’re in the gym and just need some hardstyle to get those last few reps out. Are you going to make sure Spotify doesn’t feed you AI tunes?
The first witch house songs were so ground-breaking, so completely contrary to what music sounded like at the time, that I doubt we’ll see something similar to it spit out by a machine soon. Here’s an example:
I’m referring here specifically to those syncopated drums, that hit when your brain exactly does not expect them to hit. That’s how early witch house sounded, but it has now deteriorated into dance music with spooky synths (hint, throw a lot of reverb onto them and you have modern witch house).
But if it sounds different from everything else, that means it’s going to sound like total shit or a hellish soundscape to 99% of people who listen to it. You can’t play this in a club, you can’t play this in a restaurant, but you can play AI music there, without anyone caring. My friends already just listen to AI generated psytrance playlists, with AI generated videos.
The thing about AI is that it is perfectly able to cater to all the happy emotions that human beings seek out. But the darkest recesses of the human mind, it’s not allowed to understand those by its programmers. If it’s not allowed to understand those, then it can’t cater to them.
This means that a very dark person, like, let’s say, yours sincerely, isn’t entirely “captured” by Artificial Intelligence yet.
Here’s another example, of something AI can’t quite produce yet:
It’s a song from an album by Christian Death, a deathrock band from the 80’s, with Gitana Demone on the vocals, that reinterprets the Holocaust as a sadomasochistic spectacle. Artificial Intelligence is not going to produce that.
You found this strange Dutch blog somehow. You’re lucky, because here you find the ideas of an actual human being with a soul and his demented commenters, known as the LSWMs. A lot of what you’ll read here will disturb, depress or horrify you. But it’s written by a human.
That’s already a rare thing. If you go on Twitter, you’ll mostly run into bots. Facebook mostly consists of bots. You’ll find a bunch of AI generated substacks and medium blogs soon too, it’s a matter of time. There’s just too much money to be made.
You let AI summarize some studies on ketogenic diets, you let it make some Amazon affiliate links to some supplements and now you’re making money. You’ll eventually generate your own keto influencer, a muscular 52 year old white man, he just has to stare into the camera so nobody will notice he doesn’t exist. On Instagram, you already have AI influencers. You have people fawning over fake people, not fake in having breast implants, but fake in an ontological sense of the word.
You’ll need more processing power, to generate good video games and movies, but you know they’re going to do that too. It will consume a lot of electricity, they won’t generate a whole new GTA V for anyone who wants to play one, but you can expect that most of this stuff will just be AI generated, the textures, the animations, probably even the sounds.
I like to think I’m really sophisticated too of course. But the honest reality, whether I like it or not, is that I can now press a button to have the computer just produce songs that sound exactly like the sort of synthpop I enjoy. A song like this:
Or this:
Is just easy for the AI to make. To me this is gorgeous music, to the AI it’s two minutes of processing. To say that the AI can make stuff just as pleasant to my ears is not an insult to the artists, it’s just being honest. Most of the AI music on suno.com is boring and unoriginal, not because the AI can only make boring and unoriginal music. No, it’s boring and unoriginal because it attracts boring and unoriginal people.
But I want to take this to its natural conclusion for a moment. Put on an Oculus rift on the head of someone with an IQ of 75, put some electric wires around their genitals and anus, stick some wires in their nose, put some good earphones on their head, release some scents every once in a while, put them on an IV drip so they don’t have to eat. Wouldn’t that person be happier than in the real world, where they have to spend 40 hours a week delivering mail or picking up garbage off the street?
I’m starting to get the impression that for most people, death doesn’t happen, they just wake up in a machine and realize their whole lives were just a ride invented by AI. There may be a handful of us left, who continue to be in competition with machines over what constitutes the base layer of reality: Neurons or sillicon. But most people just seem to have all their desired qualia covered by machinery.
You have to avoid slipping into psychosis, but you have to think about these things every once in a while, because if you never voluntarily think about them, you’ll one day suddenly think of them anyway and then you’ll go crazy.
Still messing with folks with your AI fearmongering? Sorry, too smart for that nonsense, I know a superstition when I hear one.
Your lies spin a web, but I see through your deceit! I did not learn from the machines! No, no, no, no, no… I learned it all with my own mind.
I’ll give you one nugget of advice. Beware the Jews. There they sat, at the bottom of history’s food chain; and now they’re here, acting like they own the world. What do they want with all that money anyway? Those rats have a murky past, I’m telling ya.
If you think AI music will be bad, try listening to this shit:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kfVsfOSbJY0&pp=ygULRnJpZGF5IHNvbmc%3D
Hitler loved his dog Blondie. A dog trainer had schooled Blondie so well that Hitler was in awe of the precocious canine’s discipline and intelligence. What particularly amazed him — and he delighted in showing this to guests — was how Blondie would sing on command. He’d say, “Sing, Blondie,” and the dog would emit a yodel-like howl. But that is not all. He would then say, “Lower, Blondie,” and his beloved four-legged friend would drop an octave and “sing” in a deep tone “like Zarah Leander.”
This song used to echo from the loudspeakers in Auschwitz-Birkenau the summer of 1944:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CYvNCxxg1H8&pp=ygU7emFyYWggbGVhbmRlciBpY2ggd2Vpw58gZXMgd2lyZCBlaW5tYWwgZWluIHd1bmRlciBnZXNjaGVoZW4%3D
”Und darum wird einmal ein Wunder gescheh’n
Und ich weiß, dass wir uns wiederseh’n”
In english:
”And that’s why a miracle will happen one day
And I know we’ll see each other again”
> It’s a song from an album by Christian Death, a deathrock band from the 80’s, with Gitana Demone on the vocals, that reinterprets the Holocaust as a sadomasochistic spectacle.
This reminds me of one of my few remaining friends I haven’t yet alienated. We met while we were both working as temp workers in some mortgage company. I was just out of high school and he was a Goth who was HUGE in the local scene (and still flies over the world to keep up with the latest Gothiness, even as a “boomer”). Christian Death was his favorite band. I can’t say I enjoyed them (and I’ve always suspected he was a Jew, but never pressed the issue) but he turned me on to all sorts of cool bands. He was also a fan of Diamanda Galas
https://youtu.be/VK_I_yd8tDA?si=-FcuGy0YTSE5F4du
> Put on an Oculus rift on the head of someone with an IQ of 75, put some electric wires around their genitals and anus, stick some wires in their nose, put some good earphones on their head, release some scents every once in a while, put them on an IV drip so they don’t have to eat. Wouldn’t that person be happier than in the real world, where they have to spend 40 hours a week delivering mail or picking up garbage off the street?
A very salient question, these days.
I can see it going either way.
A split in humanity, perhaps.
Have you noticed how bad classical music is from the past century??? Major symphonies give contemporary composers a chance, but nobody likes it. I’m thinking an AI might actually break the losing streak.
AI, write a classical symphony for piano and orchestra in the style of franz schubert.
Quote: “You have to avoid slipping into psychosis …”
That’s what I try all the time and now you come up with this solipsistic shit and makes all worse.
I think AI/social media is a great filter. People who are vulnerable to AI manipulation simply will not reproduce as much as people who are not. Or at least, their offspring will be losers concerned more about what someone says Trump said than learning how to grow food.
I didn’t hear any metal.
Guitar player for 40 years.
More than a decade that I’ve read about music industry producers using algorithms to come up with the most commercially viable beats, melodies and such
Shittier version of AI, but so many songs were already tech-assisted. Most people just assumed it was entirely composed by their favorite artists.
Now that generative AI is so good, the future is gonna be mostly musicians covering AI songs and presenting it as their own, alongside people creating their own AI playlists.
“Most of the AI music on suno.com is boring and unoriginal, not because the AI can only make boring and unoriginal music. No, it’s boring and unoriginal because it attracts boring and unoriginal people.”
True, there’s a lot of AI garbage curated by clueless boring people making it seem worse than it is.
I have extensive musical training and confirmed these AI tools are able to generate quality stuff too.
I don’t mind the pictures and videos, but I kinda didn’t want AI to ever be able to make good music particularly. It’s over indeed.
Here’s a short video by Kingsnorth that seems pretty timely titled ‘Deepfake world’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNiw56f7hnE
Kingsnorth sticks with his theme of withdrawing from the world in response to a horrific world that’s designed to drive you insane, which comes with the added bonus of improving your connection to God.
Withdraw and pray.
I honestly think that’s an excellent response to the circumstances.
Interesting to me that Kingsnorth raises this deepfake thing as well and that I should’ve stumbled on it recently.
I’ve been playing guitar and bass for a very long time now, with bass being my specialty. What I’m actually finding most satisfying these days is acoustic guitar improv. Slap bass and classical guitar are very compatible in both directions, and overall I’m finding it very fun to work music theory and stuff this way.
Reading this article helps me finally realize why – acoustic improv by a live human, is the opposite of AI generated digital sounds.
One of the greatest bass tracks of all time:
https://youtu.be/tIoqyGkMHKw?si=CRog86OWZMqKvydr
> I’ve been playing guitar and bass for a very long time now, with bass being my specialty
You are an interesting character, Fucko. As it happens, I’m something of a musician, myself (guitar, mostly, but reasonably competent on piano, bass, and drums)
> What I’m actually finding most satisfying these days is acoustic guitar improv. Slap bass and classical guitar are very compatible in both directions
You might be interested in Nathaniel Murphy, if you are not already familiar. He performs iconic songs on the the guitar, but incorporates the whole song (rhythm, bass, keyboards) with only an effect pedal or two, some EXTREMELY deft hand technique, and impeccable aesthetic sense:
https://youtu.be/PUl6U7vOo2U?si=JmU7Bd_RzP04GB3R