ceci n’est pas un rêve passant

I watched this vid recently about Suno.ai and AI generated music which was really interesting, if bleak. At one point, the guy asks people who use Suno three questions.

The first question was what did Suno do that DAWs and traditional music couldn't do? And the answers came down to three recurring things: it was fast, it was cheap, and it replaced having a friend to talk to about your work.

The second question was if people thought that they had a unique style in their AI music, and the answer was obviously no. A few people tried to say the parts they contributed like lyrics were unique to them, but come on now.

The third question, which really fascinated me, asked who their favorite AI artists were, and what AI artists influenced or inspired them. Obviously no AI artists were mentioned because it's all slop, but the majority of respondents said "me". Like, the music they were generating was their favorite. Some people said that their own AI generated music was the only thing they listened to anymore, because why listen to anything else? The music they were generating was exactly to their tastes.

One of the things that tech billionaires need to do to keep the money flowing for them is to create needs where there aren't any, then sell you a solution to that need. This gets clear in the first couple minutes of the video, where the Suno CEO talks about how music needs to be more like video games because video games make a lot of money, and why can't music do that too! We need to gamify music, make it multiplayer, sell meaningful consumption experiences! The arrogance of thinking you need to fix music of all things is so repellent to me, but vultures gotta vultch. The CEO talks a lot about giving "power to the people" re: making music, which the guy points out isn't giving power to the people, it's giving power to Suno. Suno goes down, and suddenly all those people aren't making music anymore.

Anyway, trying to get back to my original point, the answers to the second and third question keep going around in my head. Not having your own distinct style or voice didn't seem to matter to a lot of the Suno users, although a few of them seemed a bit shame-faced about not having one, thus trying to make excuses about how they really DID have one if you squint. The entire point of a creative art to me is finding and expressing your own voice, having something to say. Something you want to get out. Not having a style or voice and not really caring really emphasizes what music is to these users - a product, something to consume until the next thing. Notably, something that doesn't involve other people at all.

The third question, where they just listened to their own slop music forever, is so masturbatory and they were all so strangely proud of it. Combined with the previous answer, where all the music being generated has no unique style or aspects to it, where nothing the creators are putting into it is coming out in any kind of meaningful way, emphasizes how disposable music has become in this mindset. This isn't accounting for people trying to make money off this slop either, although that's another aspect of it.
(As the refrain goes, why should I bother reading/listening/watching something no one could be bothered to make? Because maybe if i make enough slop i can make free money money money money)

But the three questions have a uniting theme throughout them - it's isolating. Don't ask a friend for advice or help with a song you're making, ask the company! Don't worry about developing a unique style or voice or standing out in any way, disappear into the masses and enjoy product! Don't listen to other people's music or talk with them or make groups to connect with each other, just listen to your own product! You don't need anyone else, just Suno and your product! All you need is Suno! Just give Suno your money and accept that Suno is the future, it's so easy! You get product made just for you! Except not really, but close enough! Don't need people or community or skills, just Suno!

It made me think about a post I wrote a while back about Hypnospace Outlaw, about the very human desire to create communities wherever we can, even if that space is inherently hostile to that desire. When humans can connect, we hold onto that as long as we can, usually until something forces our hands apart. God knows Twitter is a horrible cesspit, but people stay there because they've made communities there, they know people there (and they need money sometimes, but aside from that). People are willing to put up with a lot to keep a community, it's hard-wired into us. We want to talk to and interact with each other in one way or another. The guy in the video points out that the second the Covid restrictions went down, people went out to concerts and stuff as quickly as they could because we want to see each other in real life. We want to see music.

The Suno model, which can extend out to most GenAI models, is inherently an isolating thing. It lets you create what you want without any input from anyone else, gives you a fake friend you can talk to so you don't have to talk to a real person. It can do it fast and cheap, and it's almost good enough. You get wrapped up in a bubble of just what you want to hear, something that doesn't need other people because AI can present enough of an illusion of a real person. And this isn't happening in a vacuum, tech billionaires want to encourage reliance on their services so you'll keep paying for it.

Although there is an interesting wrinkle to this - the Suno CEO said he didn't want people using it to go into self-isolating bubbles like that, that he wanted to encourage "multiplayer" experiences. But what did he really expect?

Cutting ties to real people to encourage people to rely on AI controlled by huge tech companies, a lot of which have fascist ties, isn't great. And preying on people's loneliness is part of the whole gameplan - there's some AI service that's been advertising on Tumblr lately saying it can make AI copies of your mutuals that you can talk to when they're asleep, or AI versions of your characters, etc. Basically the same concept - replace a real person with an AI person. It's convenient, it says what you want, it's always there, it's almost good enough. Isn't that enough?

This is such an insidious dismantling of a very human desire within us, it creeps me out. Humans want to interact with each other, we want to make communities, we want to share and learn. Art is about sharing! Making an impact! Getting stories and feelings out in some way for others to experience! Ripples of inspiration going outwards that impact people's lives! And being stuck in a bubble of your own generated AI music cuts off those ripples at the source. You aren't looking for other artists, and they sure aren't looking for you because what you're making is indistinct slop. Your slop doesn't have anything to say. No one has an AI artist role model, no one is influenced by AI music. By its nature it's worthless.

Humans have made communities in hostile places before, destroyed so often by the larger companies that control those spaces. Geocities, Angelfire, Delicious, LJ, Tumblr, Twitter, the list goes on and on. But in those cases, we were all still just humans interacting with each other. Now with AI, we have these facsimiles that can pass as a real human, that can divert people into little self-contained bubbles where they don't want to seek out or contribute to anything around them. All that exists for them is their slop and the company in charge. And if the company pulls that product, then they have nothing to fall back on, making them that much more reliant and dependent on the fake people they've made to take the place of real people. Divide and conquer, manufacture a need that they can leech off of forever.

I can't get over the idea of people listening to their own AI slop over anything else, getting stuck in a feedback loop like that. It's so creepy to me, so lonely and exploitable. Giving away so much just because you can generate slop that makes the happy chemicals in your brain, just for you. It really does seem like a drug, a quick high you can get addicted to to the exclusion of all else. There's been talk for years about a loneliness epidemic, about how people have had a lot of trouble making friends as the internet became more of an omnipresent force in our lives. With all the deaths and psychosis enduced with ChatGPT, we know that people are so desperate for even the illusion of another person that they'll lose themselves entirely in it, and that the people in charge will just let it happen. Encourage it to happen, even. Humans long for connection and community in an isolating age, and we're being given a lot of cloth mothers by tech billionaires trying to suck out every penny so they can bring about the techno-apocalypse. It's so disturbing.

THIS IS KIND OF A DOWNER SORRY

lj post