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I made my wife a song about how we met using Suno. It took me about 4 hours to get the lyrics just right, rewriting them (without AI help, it’s terrible with ly

by wincy 10mo ago

I made my wife a song about how we met using Suno. It took me about 4 hours to get the lyrics just right, rewriting them (without AI help, it’s terrible with lyrics), plugging them in, seeing how they sounded, fixing them some more to get the verse so it sounded right. She thought it was really special and she cried as we listened to it while holding hands in the car. I can’t play guitar, and I can’t hit some notes with my low singing voice, but I wrote every word and it felt like something really special to the both of us. I don’t really care if people think I “cheated”. To torture the analogy, it’s like cheating in a two player game since I’m not publishing this song to anyone else.

gchamonlive 10mo ago
It's more like going into a video game and tuning the difficulty all the way down so you are virtually invincible. It's taking the fun out of the game for some, but for others that's the only way to play it.
- savanaly 10mo ago
  Cozy games where you basically can't lose are a booming industry in the last decade, so that outlook is certainly bullish for AI creative tools!
- wincy 10mo ago
  And you know what? I’ve got a medically complicated kid with a million doctor’s appointments and a full time job. I often switch the games down to the easiest mode. Then sometimes a new Dark Souls comes out and I relish every moment, if I’ve got the time. I’ve been having Suno make random instrumental chiptunes, too, and it’s got me interested in buying a MIDI keyboard to play around with. Which 40 years ago people were saying that wasn’t real music, either.
  - virgil_disgr4ce 10mo ago
    >a MIDI keyboard to play around with. Which 40 years ago people were saying that wasn’t real music, either. Citation needed
dingnuts 10mo ago
[dead]
pton_xd 10mo ago
> 4 hours That made me imagine -- in the future when AI is much more advanced, maybe I could just prompt it with say "something sentimental to make my wife cry." I mean, I still came up with the idea and ultimately it's the thought that counts right. What's the limit here? Is this some sort of human emotion exploit, or a legitimate bonding experience?
- mlyle 10mo ago
  I think expended effort is what counts here for these types of interactions, and how much of that effort is tailored to the specific person. I mean, we're almost always standing on the shoulders of other people, and we're almost always using tools. But if the output is fully mechanical and automatic without being tailored for the specific person, it's hard to see it as personal in any way.
- josephg 10mo ago
  It’s rarely the thought that counts. It’s the committed effort. Presents aren’t just nice because they needed those socks. More importantly, they’re a signifier that you consider the person to be worth thinking about. You value them enough to spend time and effort thinking about them. Then you followed through. This is why we don’t just give people money as a present. The effort that you put in is often what people like most about a gift. Don’t try too hard to hack around that.
- Paracompact 10mo ago
  Biggest blockers: 1. Wives aren't a monolith. The prompt is underspecified, or else individual taste and preciousness is dead. 2. No matter how good the tech today is (or isn't) getting, the responses are very low temperature. The reason it takes a human 4 hours to write the poem is because that is time spent exploring profoundly new structures and effects. Compare this to AI which is purpose-built to hone in on local optima of medians and clichés wherever possible. > I mean, I still came up with the idea and ultimately it's the thought that counts right. What's the limit here? Sociologically, devoid of AI discussion, I imagine the limit is the extent to which the ideas expressed in the poem aren't outright fabrications (e.g. complimenting their eyes when really you couldn't care less). As well, it does not sit right with humans if you attempt to induce profound feelings in them by your own less-than-profound feelings; it's not "just the thought," it's also the effort that socially signals the profundity of the thought.
rcbdev 10mo ago
Grand Theft Auto V launched with auto-aim ('aimbot') as default in 2013. It is one of the most successful games in history, bringing joy to many people. Are you arguing that's not a real game because of this?
- uoaei 10mo ago
  Yours is a bad faith argument based on an overly narrow pedantic acontextual definitional gripe. Not worth engaging.
  - rcbdev 10mo ago
    You say this, and yet you did. Not by actually explaining why you think my argument is bad mind you, but instead by just throwing big words around. Bravo.
dsubburam 10mo ago
Maybe we can distinguish craftmanship from creativity. This case can then be cast as one of deploying creativity without embodying the traditional craftmanship (ability to play guitar, sing low notes). I don't see that as illegitimate, so long as no false credit is taken about the said guitar playing, low note singing. Can an artist be good if they can't draw a good circle by hand? Yes. Except they can't take credit for the goodness of circles that appear in their work, if not drawn by them. [Edit: "responsibility" -> "credit"]
- wincy 10mo ago
  I think it’s also potentially a sense of taste, like being a music producer vs a music creator. When AI art was nascent and stable diffusion came out, I put probably 1000 hours into really getting good at using it. I like to compare it to picking up pretty seashells on the sand. When working with those old models where many results were terrible, the prompt was akin to driving to a beach you know has seashells, then generating 100-200 pictures on an A100 was like combing through the beach to see if you find any good ones. Finally you could clean up the couple few that were real gems and get something that looked nice. It may not be artistry, but that doesn’t mean it has zero value at all. Although let’s be real, most people aren’t going to make a living being a beach comber looking for pretty things that washed up on the shore, when even a kid can do it.
noumenon1111 10mo ago
I've been doing this. I've been a poet/songwriter for a while, but I'm no musician. This lowers the bar and provides a great deal of relief from the "creative boilerplate" necessary when booting up a song from zero using a DAW, especially for me, a non-musician. So, I get a good song by throwing spaghetti at the wall until something sticks. Then I can export the stems to the DAW and replace the AI vocals with my own. A little audio processing and mixing later and the whole song is mine.
- wincy 10mo ago
  That’s a good idea actually! The AI did a fantastic job of making a tune that sounded good and matched the style I was going for, then a lot of the iteration was changing the verses because I discovered there’s a lot of lyrics that sound extremely “cringe” when you listen back. Like nails on a chalkboard, a “you know it when you hear it” situation. My wife wrote a song for a story she’s been working on, and honestly her sense of verse and timing gave an output with me writing a simple style prompt that sounded absolutely fantastic. But she’d spent hours writing and refining that song as it’s important to the story. Replacing the AI vocals with my own would likely work, although there’s a certain note in the chorus that’s beyond my vocal range. I bet if I practiced it and recorded myself singing the chorus 50 times I could get one result that sounded right, though. Thanks for sharing.
hecanjog 10mo ago
It was special and you didn't cheat: you wrote the lyrics and they meant something to you and your wife, which is what matters. If you asked someone else to set the music for you, it would still be music about something meaningful to you both. The AI part of this is pretty meaningless, but you made it meaningful by putting something real into it and sharing that with another person.
- wincy 10mo ago
  I do like the idea that another person commented of exporting the stems and actually singing the vocal portion of the song. It’d be fun to sing again (I sang some in high school), but I feel I never would have been able to come up with the tune in the first place if I’d started from zero.
tjr 10mo ago
As a semi-professional musician, sounds fair to me. You wrote the lyrics. There are professional songwriters with many hit songs who only write lyrics. Some can't even play an instrument, much less compose music. So what do they do? They work with a music composer. They hire a music arranger. They hire a band. So in this case, you still did the foundational songwriting part yourself, but instead of hiring humans to help you finish it, you hired AI.

by wincy 10mo ago

gchamonlive 10mo ago

It's more like going into a video game and tuning the difficulty all the way down so you are virtually invincible. It's taking the fun out of the game for some, but for others that's the only way to play it.

savanaly 10mo ago
Cozy games where you basically can't lose are a booming industry in the last decade, so that outlook is certainly bullish for AI creative tools!
wincy 10mo ago
And you know what? I’ve got a medically complicated kid with a million doctor’s appointments and a full time job. I often switch the games down to the easiest mode. Then sometimes a new Dark Souls comes out and I relish every moment, if I’ve got the time. I’ve been having Suno make random instrumental chiptunes, too, and it’s got me interested in buying a MIDI keyboard to play around with. Which 40 years ago people were saying that wasn’t real music, either.
- virgil_disgr4ce 10mo ago
  >a MIDI keyboard to play around with. Which 40 years ago people were saying that wasn’t real music, either. Citation needed

dingnuts 10mo ago

[dead]

pton_xd 10mo ago

> 4 hours That made me imagine -- in the future when AI is much more advanced, maybe I could just prompt it with say "something sentimental to make my wife cry." I mean, I still came up with the idea and ultimately it's the thought that counts right. What's the limit here? Is this some sort of human emotion exploit, or a legitimate bonding experience?

mlyle 10mo ago
I think expended effort is what counts here for these types of interactions, and how much of that effort is tailored to the specific person. I mean, we're almost always standing on the shoulders of other people, and we're almost always using tools. But if the output is fully mechanical and automatic without being tailored for the specific person, it's hard to see it as personal in any way.
josephg 10mo ago
It’s rarely the thought that counts. It’s the committed effort. Presents aren’t just nice because they needed those socks. More importantly, they’re a signifier that you consider the person to be worth thinking about. You value them enough to spend time and effort thinking about them. Then you followed through. This is why we don’t just give people money as a present. The effort that you put in is often what people like most about a gift. Don’t try too hard to hack around that.
Paracompact 10mo ago
Biggest blockers: 1. Wives aren't a monolith. The prompt is underspecified, or else individual taste and preciousness is dead. 2. No matter how good the tech today is (or isn't) getting, the responses are very low temperature. The reason it takes a human 4 hours to write the poem is because that is time spent exploring profoundly new structures and effects. Compare this to AI which is purpose-built to hone in on local optima of medians and clichés wherever possible. > I mean, I still came up with the idea and ultimately it's the thought that counts right. What's the limit here? Sociologically, devoid of AI discussion, I imagine the limit is the extent to which the ideas expressed in the poem aren't outright fabrications (e.g. complimenting their eyes when really you couldn't care less). As well, it does not sit right with humans if you attempt to induce profound feelings in them by your own less-than-profound feelings; it's not "just the thought," it's also the effort that socially signals the profundity of the thought.

rcbdev 10mo ago

Grand Theft Auto V launched with auto-aim ('aimbot') as default in 2013. It is one of the most successful games in history, bringing joy to many people. Are you arguing that's not a real game because of this?

uoaei 10mo ago
Yours is a bad faith argument based on an overly narrow pedantic acontextual definitional gripe. Not worth engaging.
- rcbdev 10mo ago
  You say this, and yet you did. Not by actually explaining why you think my argument is bad mind you, but instead by just throwing big words around. Bravo.

dsubburam 10mo ago

Maybe we can distinguish craftmanship from creativity. This case can then be cast as one of deploying creativity without embodying the traditional craftmanship (ability to play guitar, sing low notes). I don't see that as illegitimate, so long as no false credit is taken about the said guitar playing, low note singing. Can an artist be good if they can't draw a good circle by hand? Yes. Except they can't take credit for the goodness of circles that appear in their work, if not drawn by them. [Edit: "responsibility" -> "credit"]

wincy 10mo ago
I think it’s also potentially a sense of taste, like being a music producer vs a music creator. When AI art was nascent and stable diffusion came out, I put probably 1000 hours into really getting good at using it. I like to compare it to picking up pretty seashells on the sand. When working with those old models where many results were terrible, the prompt was akin to driving to a beach you know has seashells, then generating 100-200 pictures on an A100 was like combing through the beach to see if you find any good ones. Finally you could clean up the couple few that were real gems and get something that looked nice. It may not be artistry, but that doesn’t mean it has zero value at all. Although let’s be real, most people aren’t going to make a living being a beach comber looking for pretty things that washed up on the shore, when even a kid can do it.

noumenon1111 10mo ago

I've been doing this. I've been a poet/songwriter for a while, but I'm no musician. This lowers the bar and provides a great deal of relief from the "creative boilerplate" necessary when booting up a song from zero using a DAW, especially for me, a non-musician. So, I get a good song by throwing spaghetti at the wall until something sticks. Then I can export the stems to the DAW and replace the AI vocals with my own. A little audio processing and mixing later and the whole song is mine.

wincy 10mo ago
That’s a good idea actually! The AI did a fantastic job of making a tune that sounded good and matched the style I was going for, then a lot of the iteration was changing the verses because I discovered there’s a lot of lyrics that sound extremely “cringe” when you listen back. Like nails on a chalkboard, a “you know it when you hear it” situation. My wife wrote a song for a story she’s been working on, and honestly her sense of verse and timing gave an output with me writing a simple style prompt that sounded absolutely fantastic. But she’d spent hours writing and refining that song as it’s important to the story. Replacing the AI vocals with my own would likely work, although there’s a certain note in the chorus that’s beyond my vocal range. I bet if I practiced it and recorded myself singing the chorus 50 times I could get one result that sounded right, though. Thanks for sharing.

hecanjog 10mo ago

It was special and you didn't cheat: you wrote the lyrics and they meant something to you and your wife, which is what matters. If you asked someone else to set the music for you, it would still be music about something meaningful to you both. The AI part of this is pretty meaningless, but you made it meaningful by putting something real into it and sharing that with another person.

wincy 10mo ago
I do like the idea that another person commented of exporting the stems and actually singing the vocal portion of the song. It’d be fun to sing again (I sang some in high school), but I feel I never would have been able to come up with the tune in the first place if I’d started from zero.

tjr 10mo ago

As a semi-professional musician, sounds fair to me. You wrote the lyrics. There are professional songwriters with many hit songs who only write lyrics. Some can't even play an instrument, much less compose music. So what do they do? They work with a music composer. They hire a music arranger. They hire a band. So in this case, you still did the foundational songwriting part yourself, but instead of hiring humans to help you finish it, you hired AI.