Comment by lotyrin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lotyrin | Hacker News Reader

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I caught my mom watching a bunch of AI impersonations of musicians on Youtube singing slop that rarely rhymed or had any kind of message in the lyrics and with super formulaic arrangements. I asked her what she liked about them and it was like "they seem well made" and I showed her how easy Suno is to use and then showed her some of the bad missed rhymes and transcribed the lyrics to where she could see there wasn't any there there to any part of it (and how easy it is to get LLMs to generate better). It seemed to have been an antidote.

This is stuff that used to take effort and was worth consuming just for that, and lots of people don't have their filter adjusted (much as the early advent of consumer-facing email spam) to account for how low effort and plentiful these forms of content are.

I can only hope that people raise their filters to a point where scrutinizing everything becomes common place and a message existing doesn't lend it any assumed legitimacy. Maybe AI will be the poison for propaganda (but I'm not holding my breath).

The issue is that one could reasonably argue that about 95% of pop music is was already formulaic slop. Not just pejoratively, but much of it was even made by the same people. Everybody from Britney Spears to Taylor Swift and more modern acts are all being driven by one guy - 'Max Martin'. [1]

Once you see the songs he's credited with, you instantly start to realize it's painfully formulaic, but most people are happy to just bop their head to his formula of highly repetitive beats paired with simplistic and easy to sing 5-beat choruses.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin

Also since autotune technology got good, a lot of them can’t even sing.

Max Martin is considered incredibly good at what he does.

https://youtu.be/DxrwjJHXPlQ?si=m-A6M8xrad5MrQqZ&t=151

Adam Conover discussed ad bumpers from the 1990s and 2000s. These were legal requirements for children's programming from the FCC. They're a compliance item, yet they were incredibly well made and creative in in many cases:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vI0UcUxzrQ

Because people at the top of their game will do great creative work even when doing commercial art and in many cases, will do way more than is perhaps commercially necessary.

So much of this AI push reminds me of the scene in 1984 where they had pornography generating machines creating completely uninspired formulaic brainrot stories by machine to occupy the proles.

Max Martin is a stand out talent.

You can take a thousand people and give them baseline technical skills for any medium. If you're lucky a few people out of your thousand will have a special kind of fluency that makes them stand out. from the rest.

Even more rarely you'll get someone who eats the technical skills alive and adds something original and unique which pushes them outside of the usual recycled tropes and cliches.

Martin is somewhere between those two. He's not a genius, but he's a rock solid pop writer, with a unique ear for hooks and drama, and stand-out arrangement skills.

Fascinating! The last sentence could also talk about the famous book.

You're saying 1984 is completely formulaic brainrot?

No not that scene, I just failed at the joke. The commercial music scene was formulaic in the 80's and earlier already. Popular culture porn.

I do argue that, actually. I mostly avoid manufactured corpo-pop.

> The issue is that one could reasonably argue that about 95% of pop music is was already formulaic slop.

The existence of some handmade slop does not justify vast qualities of even lower quality automated slop.

Said handmade slop dominating Billboard does.

I much prefer the huge amount of music written/performed by Nile Rodgers instead.

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