After those first two weeks though, we just… didn’t use it again. The novelty wore off and there wasn’t anything really to bring us back. That was the real downfall of Sora.
TikTok and social media is a strange mix of both, people posting response videos to everything.
Personally, I've stopped subscribing to Spotify, YT music, etc because the slop from Suno is good enough to replace mainstream music or whatever lofi playlist. It's free, it's good enough, and it's not grating to hear after a few days of that favorite song.
The video slop can well replace TikTok and Reels. Make educational content about your hometown. Explain how to throw an uppercut.
But I guess the desire to create something that others would consume is also different from the desire to simply create.
The musician in me just shed a tear
Hopefully AI outcompeting humans at slop sparks a renaissance of humans creating truly beautiful human artwork. And if it doesn't, then was anything of value truly lost?
What are you talking about? There’s lots of modern music that’s not corporate slop and that’s absolutely great. Never in history was access to great music as easy as it is now.
I get my modern music from Bandcamp. If you can't find good stuff to listen to, that's a 'you' problem.
Maybe, just maybe, I'm not talking about "my" music tastes, but offering commentary on the state of music at a global scale. Weird that this point was so hard to follow!
From wikipedia: Many Daft Punk songs feature vocals processed with effects and vocoders including Auto-Tune, a Roland SVC-350 and the Digitech Vocalist. Bangalter said: "A lot of people complain about musicians using Auto-Tune. It reminds me of the late '70s when musicians in France tried to ban the synthesiser. They said it was taking jobs away from musicians. What they didn't see was that you could use those tools in a new way instead of just for replacing the instruments that came before. People are often afraid of things that sound new."
This is patently untrue.
It's like how if a junior engineer and a principal engineer use claude opus 4.6 they get radically different results. The junior doesn't have the taste or knowledge to know good from bad so the AI oversteers and slop is made. The principal has finely tuned sense of taste and deep knowledge, so they aggressively steer the AI at every step. This is also true in other AI domains.
To be absolutely clear: you can't make good AI music. Try all you want. Try the prompt you just wrote. Show and tell. It's not something you're going to be able to do.
It's a neat tool for genuine creators, and a crutch for people interested in slop.
There is a fundamental issue of trust here. Facebook has me tagged as history nerd so I get to see those slop videos. They are fun, but always superficial and often plainly wrong. So unless the slop comes from a known, trustworthy source, the educational element is simply not there.
For throwing an uppercut it's even more important, if you follow wrong slop instructions you can end up breaking your wrist or fingers.
I wonder what OP categorises as 'mainstream'. As a classical musician this breaks my heart.
There are exceptions though. FUKOUNA GIRL by STOMACH BOOK, for example. AI can't come close to replicating something like this. Not the cover art, not the off-key voices, not the relatable part of the lyrics. I don't believe this is a top #100 song, though it certainly is popular.
This is a vocaloid break up song: https://youtu.be/9pQR4a5sisE
The first isn't bad by any means. There's a million break up songs and that's one of the best sad ones. Most are just... angry? Blaming? Empowering? They work fine. They sell records. Many have have a billion views.
But the second one, even with the clunky translation, strikes somewhere deeper. It's written by someone who had enough time ruminating on a break up. The ending hits a little harder, because break up songs are about endings.
Both are sincere, but the first feels more formulaic. I'm inclined to think the first one is the soda.
I feel Suno leans towards this group of songwriters and poets who have something to say. Sora doesn't.
You wouldn't care to order the food as I personally like it -- might be too spicy (or too bland) for your taste.
Suno songs are overtuned for personal preference in the same way.
And on the second part, I somewhat disagree. I mean, yes everyone has a personal preference, but if you bucket all those personal preferences they all fit nicely together (In many buckets).
I think the point of Suno is to make you not search for your specific thing though, and instead produce your own. Searching for niche music has always been a thing. If our goal is to listen for free, we don't care about Suno (or any other way to make music) one bit, it's just another DAW for those making music.
And AI music in general sure has its fans, check out Only Fire for example.
So I quit riding the overpriced subway altogether and now consume AI-generated subway imagery and soundscapes for free, they are just good enough to feed my passion for boring tunels.
Some ego-bloated edgelords had nerve to tell me that there are, like, other modes of transportation, but I honestly find their high-horse elitism despicable.. Damn morons.
There will be (or is, I'm behind the times / not on the main social networks) an undercurrent or long tail of AI generated videos, the question is whether those get enough engagement for the creators to pay for the creation tool.
The AI art I have seen creatives produce is far beyond anything I have been able to come up with. We're not at the point yet where you can just prompt "Make me a video that is visually stunning and captivating" and get something cool.
ah, but what a persona that would be if you were a Kai's Power Tools settings menu!
.. such as? What's the "Mona Lisa of AI art"? Is there, like, a gallery? Awards?
Having said that I absolutely hate the audio format, I only used it when I had to drive or when I swam lanes. But these days I do neither.
Ps I don't mean the word 'manipulation' in a negative context.
We all have the same amount of time on this Earth, saying how great a tool is that is causing you to do more work is just... weird?
I'd personally never do this, I value my time.
For example, I can give it 8 papers on best practices in online marketing, it will turn it into a 20 minute podcast.
There are errors, but also with real podcasters.
Or before! Either is mandatory to actually learn the content.
This somewhat makes whole NotrbookLM less useful, but still.
Sometimes I'll take deep research output and listen to it too that way.
^ this is important.
Otherwise you may very well be missing anything really surprising or novel.
See for example https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/after-software-eats-the... , an experience report of NotebookLM where
> It was remarkable to see how many errors could be stuffed into 5 minutes of vacuous conversation. What was even more striking was that the errors systematically pointed in a particular direction. In every instance, the model took an argument that was at least notionally surprising, and yanked it hard in the direction of banality.
On the other, Google might not have done much to upgrade the podcast feature since them.
24/7 titillation is boring
Those 100 videos probably cost $100+ for them to create. Did you pay them $100+? (not a critisism, just a re-framing)
And this is the challenge that these tools have - they have to have a free tier to get people to explore it, but unless they can make it a habit, those people will never upgrade to a paid subscription.
I have no figures, but if I'm being optimistic, these freemium subscription services have 10% conversion rate at best; can that 10% pay for the other 90%? For a lot of services that's a yes, but not for these video generators which are incredibly compute intensive.
I'm sure there's a market for it, but it's not this freemium consumer oriented model, not without huge amounts of investments. Maybe in 5-10 years, assuming either compute becomes 10-100x cheaper / more available, or they come up with generators that run cheaper.
There's some market for b2b I'm sure, but as a consumer facing product it's tough to see how it could ever come close to paying for itself.
Essentially you are watching the same videos over and over subconsciously
I think people attach to other people more than “ai”. When there isnt a narrative “person” behind the content it is way less interesting.
Procgen has a niche, but it never became ubiquitous, because for most people exploring a nice hand-made intentional environment is better.
I am hoping against hope that this will stem the tide because the slop-generators are too lazy or too poor to run other models locally or search them online.
I think this is starting to play out.
When I personally see a blog post which didn't need an image, but still does have an AI-slop image banner, I mentally check out. I might have Claude summarize it, or (more likely) just skip it altogether.
Sometimes people want to paint, sometimes people want a painting.
To have wonderful time with their mom… I bet they had absolutely zero interest in the act and process of making silly videos.
Read the main comment out loud to yourself while imagining it’s someone sitting at a table at a pub.
Now imagine someone turning to this person in the pub, and speaking the subsequent comment, word for word.
No seriously, try it out.
Your reply is more interesting. Hence my (albeit maybe snarky) chiming in. So the original comment does end at a very specific app/sora related conclusion. "Sora didn't keep us coming back."
If I may amend your scenario: imagine this bar is actually in the center of SF or across the street from Open-AI or whatever. We're on HN discussing a post on X about Sora.
The appeal to humanity is not wrong. My point is more let's keep the connection with that humanity in relation to AI, to Sora, to what's going on in this forum.
You didn't at least puff a little ack through your nostrils for that one?