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Comment by vunderba | Hacker News Reader

This right here exemplifies my fundamental issue with GenAI.

Paint a picture without painting a picture!

Write a novel without writing a novel!

Compose a melody without composing a melody!

There was an absolutely insane comment on HN a few months ago where the poster said that they felt a sense of accomplishment after "producing" a song on Suno. I mean... how could that possibly be true? They didn't compose the melodic motif, figure out the chord progression, structure the song, or even write the lyrics. The world is getting a bit too kafkaesque for my liking.

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Suno to me has only produced the most trivial garbage but music is really hard to produce.

I could see how someone with no background in music could feel a sense of accomplishment with this.

It is like a gen z version of playing the ironman or smoke on the water riff on guitar. It is just not that hard to play the ironman riff either.

As someone who has put thousands of hours into learning music, anything that gets people into music is a positive to me.

It seems like generative AI art and music really triggers tech people who have nothing to do with art and music.

"Kids these days starting off programming a web app with a language model. In my day we had to take adderall and debug assembly code just to print an underscore to a dot matrix printer. That is the right way to start and anything else is WRONG"

It's a bit like taking a photo and it coming out surprisingly good.

You just pointed the thing and pressed a button. Yet you feel accomplishment.

Sure you might have chose a lens, depth and tried to point the things somewhat precisely. Then you sat at your computer to cut enough of the edges and fiddled with some curves so it feels nice for you. But ultimately you didn't make any of it. Machine made it all. You just guided it with the knobs provided for you. Yet you feel accomplishment if you make something good because you also made hundreds of it that were crap.

> There was an absolutely insane comment on HN a few months ago where the poster said that they felt a sense of accomplishment after "producing" a song on Suno. I mean... how could that possibly be true?

They "created" something that, until now, would have required skills they didn't have. You don't see how someone could feel a sense of accomplishment for the end result, the thing they poofed into existence and like?

We use tools to make things (even art) easier to create. I don't make my paints from scratch (anymore), or string my paintbrushes (anymore), or now sometimes choose my color palettes or general composition -- tools (like genAI) exist to let artists create art easier, and saying "you didn't put in enough thought/work/etc for it to count as art!" feels dismissive of the creative process and the joy people find in expressing themselves, regardless of how they got there.

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