Hacker News Reader

Comment by bongodongobob | Hacker News Reader

Any musician will tell you most music isn't original. You just don't have the ear for it. You telling me Green Day's songs are all unique and original? Even jazz uses 6-2-5-1's over and over. Unless you only listen to avante garde prog rock or something, all of music is derivative. And that's ok. Every song being a unique snowflake isn't important. If you like it or it makes you feel something, that's all that matters.

View on HN

Green Day (was) definitely original. The level of unoriginality I'm talking about goes way beyond "pop music is the same old chords from the 50s" or "the 70s were the golden age and everything since then is derivative."

What's the basis for this? Unfortunately it's hard to describe, but I've listened to a wide variety of popular and niche genres my whole life with a specific eye toward appreciating all the different ways people appreciate music and I know when something feels new.

Even most (or all?) pop music feels new. If it wasn't, I don't think it would be popular. Sure, it's all derivative, but what makes music enjoyable is when it combines influences in a fresh way.

"French house polka" achieved by doing a statistical blend of the two genres just isn't that interesting—it misses so many ways that things are combined by artists—specific details of the texture of the sound, how it's recorded, cultural references, tons of tiny little influences from specific artists and other genres, etc.

I've tried very specific prompts in Suno and it's not even close to useful for someone who knows what they're doing. The image generators are hardly better—things overwhelmingly trend toward a fixed set of specific styles that are well-represented in the training sets.

This critique falls down in certain areas though. Using tools like Suno to come up with songwriting ideas can be fantastic—as long as you have the taste to curate the outputs and feed it into your own creative process. It's also fantastic for creating vocal samples, and I'm sure it'll crush it for functional music (advertisements, certain types of social media) in short order

If you think song and image generators can't make creative things, the problem is between the seat and keyboard. It is unfortunately that simple. 4o as an image generator can create out of distribution images because it literally works at a conceptual level.

Suno currently is limited architecturally to in distribution components, so trying to create instruments or vocal styles it never heard won't work. The parts that you can work in are a vast and rich creative space.

Tell me you don't know the first thing about making pictures or music without telling me you don't know the first thing about making pictures or music.

:) I'll bite...

For bonus points.. the tail-less crocodile.. https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815c29c1bf081918c791447441c400e

You just lack imagination, like I said.. there are almost no limits but pixel density and aspect ratio currently.

You're not making art, you're running prompts through a meme picture generator.

Like I said, you know nothing about making art. (Not a big deal, not everybody needs to.)

In an alternative parallel universe we might have gotten actual AI tools for making art - these would be various infilling plugins, basically. ("Make me a Photoshop brush that paints pine-needle looking spiky things", that sort of thing.)

What we got in this reality is not that, though. Meme making of the sort you posted is not art.

(That said, making memes, especially of the spicy and/or topical kind, is the one niche that generative AI is good at and nails perfectly.)

I mean I did have a meme or two in there to show the range. You clearly didn't look at it if you think it is all memes. Maybe think hard about what art really is.. a brush is a brush..

I don't have to justify my art to anyone. The magic is.. you can't choose what is art. You can choose what YOU think is art and that's fine. However you can't dictate to the world what is art.

I agree you don’t have to justify your art. But which was not a meme? I clicked many and found only memes.

Arguing about what "art" is is a tale as old as time, relax. Your own perspective is not the only valid one that can exist.

That's not the AI creating art though, that's you using 4o like a pencil. The ideas / creativity came from you, not the AI.

P.S. Do you mind sharing the prompt you used to do the crocodile?

Sure... I mean it isn't a single prompt.. it is always a process.

https://chatgpt.com/share/681855ce-a9d4-8004-9a3a-deb19994d8...

Edit: I was really just testing to see how well it could do layout and out of distrobution images. This was right when it came out and I was trying to see what the limitations were.

Nah he's right. Gatekeeping art and "the process" is as old as time.

> If you like it or it makes you feel something, that's all that matters.

You’re right!

> Even jazz uses 6-2-5-1's over and over.

You’re not even wrong! I wonder if jazz does anything else besides that?

All books are derivative too, the English ones use the same 26 characters over and over.

You're intentionally missing the point, but ok.

The 26 characters with a thousand @font-faces.

It's actually surprising how many ways and styles humans invented to draw the same letters; that amount of talent and creativity AI models do not have, at least now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com