My guess is because it’s turning development into a Red Queen’s Race [0] where everyone has to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. If everyone else is using LLMs, how can you stay competitive without using them?
There’s a subreddit called HFY which stands for “humanity, fuck yeah!” Which has little short stories about humanity being badass normally in a scifi setting in one way or another. https://old.reddit.com/r/HFY (I have Reddit blocked so can’t verify that’s the correct link)
The vast majority of the genre is utter trash, unfortunately. There are some true gems in the muck, but man are they hard to find. It turns out that most authors can't make humans seem cool without needing to make the aliens they encounter complete and utter morons.
I knew it was real as soon as I read “I stared to see a pattern”, which is funny now I find weird little non spellcheck mistakes endearing since they stamp “oh this is an actual human” on the work
Ha! Despite the fact that I tend to proof read my posts before publishing, right after publishing, and sometimes re-reading them few months after publishing, I still tend to not notice some obvious typos. Kinda makes you feel appreciation for the profession of editors and spell checkers. (And yes, I use LanguageTools in neovim, but I refuse to feed my articles to LLMs).
And Em Dash is trivially easy on iOS — you simply hold press on the regular dash button - I’ve been using it for years and am not stopping because people might suddenly accuse me of being an AI.
I think before heating without smoke, it was perfectly sensible to smoke tobacco because it was the least bad thing you were inhaling on a daily basis, and you were likely going to die of lung cancer regardless. Makes sense we didn’t really discover the risk until after we stopped using wood burning stoves (or burning coal, like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s mother would to in Little House when it was available)
For Mac I spent $0.99 a long time ago and bought Magnet on the App Store which lets me move windows and resize using hotkeys. For windows I aggressively use windows key + left/right to move the windows around, with 4 displays you just have to remember their ordering and eventually it becomes muscle memory to get it to snap where you want it. It mostly moves left to right, in my case.
I think it was the graphics card. I remember getting a paper route and waking up at 5am every morning to save up the money for my Voodoo card. Was absolutely mind blowing as a 13 year old.
I used to sing dumb songs like when changing my kids diaper I’d sing “you got a STINKY DIAPER, you got a stinky diaper and it smelled like pee, oh don’t you knoooow what I mean” sung to Deo’s Holy Diver. Just dumb stuff like that.
I still sing songs like that, only now I’ve got almost an hour of dumb songs that Suno has made, like my kid asked “what if we just put in gibberish and the word poop a lot?” As kids do, and we got this absolutely bizarre Europop song where a dude sings his heart out about poopy poop, and my kids now sing this tune. It’s been nonstop laughs. My daughter is into Harry Potter and we made a song together just about her turning her hair green in potions class, with harpsichord and a theremin. We’re having a great time. I’m never going to be an artist and never going to try to make money off this stuff. I’m just making weird little bespoke memories with me and my kids.
I don't think they're arguing about personal use of AI to make something silly shared between family and friends. It's when those songs you made in an instant start to flood platforms where people took weeks, months or years to release an album they crafted by traditional methods. I don't want to discredit the joy you have in making fun songs with your family. I'm curious what is also gained if you made the songs by making instruments out of strings and pans, and performing / improving your own song from scratch. I'm sure the end result is the same, lots of joy and laughs. But something is definitely lost when the slow process of humble hand made creativity is exchanged for polished instant results. But maybe instant gratification is just the new mode of consumption. Ai promises that with a "good enough" button and my fear is that it will be extended to every facet of life.
I’m not going to listen to people poo poohing what I’ve been doing with Suno, my seven year old and I rocked out to a song that took me less time to make than it took to listen to about my character’s D&D adventure last night. I’m just having fun.
The big secret right now is Suno will output good stuff but then it’s tortuous to get the lyrics to line up if you want to change anything, or add a word, it screws up the entire flow of the song all the way through. I spent 5 minutes making a 6 minute long power metal style song about a Druid fighting a dragon, then two hours unsuccessfully trying to get one with slightly more coherent lyrics and it output like 8 songs that sound terrible in a way I can’t quite put my finger on. The one song I tortured into existence took me 5 hours of work after getting a rough draft.
That said, being able to instantly make a song to tell my kids they need to clean the living room before we open presents and them singing the chorus happily for weeks after is just this great unique memory we have. Bespoke songs just for us is one of the coolest things ever and no amount of grumbling from anyone can dissuade me from it.
Completely agree! I have a child that teared up when (A)I created a song just for her, in the style she likes, with lyrics that have human(!) traits and character that inspires and lifts up the whole family.
Personally, I like making the kind of songs I enjoy listening to myself, across all kinds of genres. Next time, I want to mix a few completely different genres and see how that turns out. It's like a creative hobby were you just enjoy the process.
As for changing the lyrics, yeah, that’s taken me hours as well. You really need to get the lyrics right from the start. I’m not sure this kind of detailed editing can easily be done with such AI tools anytime soon.
No one is upset about being able to generate stuff for personal use. They are upset by the industrial scale of dumping AI slop on platforms like Spotify that make it increasingly difficult to discover anything good anymore.
There is lots of good music still being created these days, but you'll never find it by just hitting next on streaming sites because 99% of the content had about 5 minutes of effort put in before being uploaded.
No one is stopping you from sharing it. Bandcamp won't share it for you, and that's fair. Just like you're not willing to go shill for all my side-projects.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis
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