Hi folks, another shitty story from the slop-pocalypse ((AI-)slopalypse?).
Article from billboard, archive
NB: I think this story is bullshit. I imagine some parts are true, but there’s no concrete source given for the “$3 million” figure. So it’s my speculation that this story is hype cooked up by Suno (the AI company enabling this all) and thrown at publishers for an easy headline. Also the human behind this has their name spelled differently in the two articles, so clearly some quality journalism is happening.
I am pretty sure the “$3m” deal is fake. There are many ways to claim you’re doing a deal that absolutely does not involve a panny moving (except to the publicist), from just fuckin’ lying to churning to provisions behind so many conditionals they can’t happen, but sum them anyway.
anyway yeah thiere is nothing not fake about this story
and in particular no non-fakeable evidence of actual public interest
Yeah. Even though I was pretty sure there wasn’t anything of true substance, I was hoping there would be more to this story.
zoom and enhance
By Doug Melville, Contributor.
The Forbes “contributor” hive strikes again.
To quote the most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary),
Most content on Forbes.com is written by contributors or “Senior Contributors” with minimal editorial oversight, and is generally unreliable. Editors show consensus for treating Forbes.com contributor articles as self-published sources, unless the article was written by a subject-matter expert. Forbes.com contributor articles should never be used for third-party claims about living persons.
I fuckin knew it. I did not know where to look to see the contributor attribution, so thanks for pointing it out.
The future of music, assuming this continues, is way less humans being inspired to make music.
Society fucking hates musicians, their labor is constantly spit on and devalued even as the wealthy take it as a given they will keep making music that they can steal the profit from, but there is a breaking point where artists just disappear into a daily struggle because they don’t have the time, money or quality of life to keep making music and we are far past that point at least here in the US.
Enjoy your AI slop everyone, honestly we all as listeners in a way deserve this AI slop given how we have abandoned the idea artists should be a part of our future in any way that we materially value shrugs.
Humans will never stop making music. I was watching a fascinating video last night about how Pygmy tribes were making music on a one-note bamboo flute.
And this story screams bullshit. Why in the hell would anyone pay a $3M dollar deal for an AI singer/model? Give me two months to catch up on the tech, $2,000 in new IT gear, spin a local AI, I’ll give you a new singer right out my living room.
I’m hoping the pendulum will swing and people in groups playing actual instruments and using less digital filters to sound gritty and real, will make a comeback.
How can we mere mortals help to pop the AI bubble faster?
Please. Let’s just get this over with. If I die then I die. But this insanity may finally, mercifully, fucking cease.
Didn’t we just see that AI actress crash and burn? Rich people fucking love wasting time money and effort on this dog shit.
So…
What happens if Suno updates their software and “Xania Monet” is no longer possible? What happens if someone finds out what the seed for “Xania Monet” is and makes their own songs with it?
I’m sure Suno would find some way to spin it.
Suno might, but apparently the contract is just with some person who is using Suno to help create this, not Suno itself. So what incentive does Suno have to keep the voice? They didn’t sign the 3 million dollar contract. They’re not getting any money out of this deal.
Edit: though there’s probably not a deal at all, so there’s that.
I asked my AI pet rock if it liked music, and it told me to buy the songs /s shudder
Mentioned “artist” yt channel.
https://www.youtube.com/@XaniaMonet/videosIgnorant question ahead: how do the voices work with these things? A face, or entire body, is limited in its range of motion by our skeleton and muscles (for the large part. Puff your cheeks - there’s one of many exceptions). A voice, though, is MUCH more dynamic. Programming the lyrics and notes wouldn’t be nearly enough. Just getting the tone and inflections right seems like it would be an absolute nightmare.
I was wondering the same thing about that AI “actress”. In the case of a talented professional, (or even a hack who’s terrible but trying their best) a LOT of care and thought goes into the emotion behind each word. How do they program that? Or are these just fancy 3D puppets with human voice actors behind them?
IIRC, you tell the thing “sing these lyrics in the style of [insert artist here]” or “as if you were a soulful blues singer with a two pack a day cigarette habit” or whatever, and the thing does it for you.
It can get the tones and inflections right because it’s been trained on hundreds of thousands of spoken words with the correct tones and inflections, and that training developed an extraordinarily complex algorithm for generating tones and inflections.
And if it doesn’t? One of the interesting things about AI generation is that it’s inherently randomized. No two results of the same prompt will be exactly alike. So even if the AI only nails part of the song on the first “take”, humans can run the prompt over and over again and stitch together pieces from different takes into an entire song, just like actual singers do.
Star Trek used to imagine AIs that would be great at logic but bad at emotion. It’s the other way around. Our AI tools are amazing at mimicking emotion, because they’ve been trained on millions of works with genuine emotion. But give them a math problem and they’re apt to screw it up.
(I mean, this one could also be an AI puppet with a human voice behind it. We’ve had Vtuber tech for like ten years now. But it could also be completely AI.)
I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. Audio prompts can be just as approximate as video prompts. Very simple answer. Thank you.
Of course, I’m still not crazy about it, but that’s a different topic.
AI is not a person…
Some clown out it into a legal entity and some other likely a related clown made this deal for shill op purposes.
Read between the lines people
If anyone if y’all listening to this slop, you are the problem.
Whoever phrased this headline has already lost their mind to a stochastic parrot
