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Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

There's a time and a place for everything.

AI-generated jingles? Absolutely! Nothing says "buy now" like a robot with perfect pitch.

AI-generated ad copy? You bet! Soulless selling from a soulless source.

AI-generated news synopsis? Sure! So long as it’s labeled clearly and doesn’t start quoting Nietzsche.

But when it comes to music, poetry, fiction, or art-I draw the line. I don’t ask my hammer to write me a sonnet, and I don’t need my toaster composing symphonies.

Let the machines handle the mundane. The messy, beautiful, human stuff? That’s ours.

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What about people who just want to express themselves, but don't want to spend the hundreds of hours learning to draw, paint, play an instrument, etc, but certainly don't want to pay the money it would cost to commission?

That was me when I wanted a heavy metal song about a common office annoyance and prompted Suno to create "Per My Last Email":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVia46yAoMU

...you express yourself still. Art isn't about a mechanistic and functional product that needs to be "good", but what's on your mind, and often those imperfections add flair and a human story to the end result. There's tons of pop music created by people who don't even know music theory and are just messing about

Uh, too bad for them? What if I want a hot muscular body, but don’t want to spend the hundreds of hours running, lifting weights, planning and executing a healthy diet; and I certainly don’t want to use steroids?

Can it really be called an expression of yourself when you don’t write the lyrics or have any musical input on the song? This sounds more like having an idea for a song rather than an actual expression of yourself.

Would you still call it an expression of yourself if you paid an artist to write a song for you around an idea you had? I don’t think most people would generally refer to it as “expressing themselves” when they commission another artist.

That's the value of constraint.

People regularly compose symphonies that aren't playable by any orchestra. In the worst case they have passages not playable on the actual instruments because the range is beyond the instruments' range. If a human can't play it or it can't even be played in theory on the instrument, then is it really self expression? What is being expressed, exactly?

This is getting to the core of what music is, and isn't - and part of what music is is an expression of mastery of craft.

It’s not an expression of yourself at all. It’s an expression of the AI that you rubber stamped as yours because it sounds cool and is close enough to what you’re looking for. As a lifelong musician, I enjoy playing with Suno, but please don’t convince yourself that you’re one of us because you typed a prompt into an AI.

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