Since AI Music platforms like Udio and Suno have been getting a lot of attention lately, I wanted to get some Hexbears’ opinions on the matter. Have any of you been testing the capabilities of these? Care to share what you’ve made?
Udio seems to be trained on a wider range of niche genres, which I think leads to more diverse sounds that are better at obscuring their AI origins. Suno has a much more limited mainstream range, but you can make an entire concept album by extending clips multiple times before you ‘get the whole song’. You can also finely tune each clip by choosing to extend it very early into the clip to pick out the best parts (though at that point, why not just make the music yourself?)
So far I’ve been using Udio to get more diverse samples, combined with an AI music splitter to isolate the good parts. I then plug them into Suno-generated long tracks to augment limitations from the prompting process. The music still isn’t great (and my editing skills are dirt poor) but I think interesting things can get created this way. Soundcloud link to some example tracks
Adam Neely just released a decent video about AI music and what it lacks, and so even though the critique of capitalist art production that he suggests is pretty milquetoast, I’d recommend it as a mild antidote to all the AI music hype.
I think making memes with AI is fine. And maybe even tweaking your own work. And I don’t think making your own songs using another artist’s voice devalues their work - of course this is different if you’re a studio trying to retain their likeness for perpetuity.
Still, people shouldn’t get offended if they get called a hack or talentless or not a real artist. People argue that none of those things mean anything, okay. But so much of this world already dehumanizes people and if you retain the mindset of “uhhh actually it doesn’t matter who creates what I will consume and enjoy” then there’s really no point for humanity at all if we equate ourselves with machines. Might as well just keep our heads down and chase the bag for 40 years then die.
Although rare, it’s worth mentioning because it’s really funny: the people who are very smug about making AI stuff based on other artists’ work, because the artist is “bourgeois labor artisroKKKrat” because making $100 from a commission every month is the equivalent to a landlord and jacking off to AI studio ghibli porn makes you Lenin - you can ignore their silly letters.
There’s a difference between music/art being accessible because corporations will fuck everyone over and IP laws are a sham, and throwing around words and statuses willy nilly. You’re not an artist if all you do is churn out AI produced stuff. That’s fine. You don’t need to be an artist. You can be a person who enjoys and creates AI produced works, I know I certainly am. There are actual artists and creators out there and they should be recognized as such.