Let’s Chat

A colleague of mine co-wrote a song with another songwriter. He’s a producer, so it usually falls to him to record a demo.

To his surprise his co-writer sent him a finished work of their song. She had uploaded their voice memo to Suno and voila — it spit out — at least to my ear — a pretty viby demo. One that would have taken my colleague many valuable hours to produce himself.

He asked me if he thinks he should be happy. 😳

The platform boasts: “Create Your Music With Suno! No Instrument Needed, Just Imagination. Make a Song Now.”

The boast should read. “No Instrument Needed, No Imagination either.”

And “Make a song?” What does that mean? I’m pretty sure we used to write them. Or am I just old?

By the way, if your desire is to have a fully-written ‘original’ song (prompted by a chosen subject, tempo, flavor), Suno would be happy to do that too. But then, who is the author: You (because of your prompt) or Suno? And who gets paid? And how should you report your Meta to The MLC? You know about the MLC, right:? You have to have an account in order to get paid if you’re your own publisher. You’re welcome. 😎

Anyway, this got my friend and I talking about AI for a while over oysters and calamari at the Mermaid Inn — the implications, the de-valuing of human songwriters, singers, players. But apparently everyone is doing it!

Me? I’m old school. It takes me a while to jump on a techie bandwagon. I still hire singers and spend hours getting vocals right. I really love the hang. I make a nosh. We kibitz.

That said, I have to ask myself if I’ve been taking the long road to spite my face?

Which brings me to Chat. I resisted that too. But I finally wanted to see what all the fuss was about. It took one session to turn me around. Now I can’t stop ‘Chatting.’😳😳

Chat is Google on steroids — a highly efficient assistant. A consolidator — a collector of information it would take 5 times as long to curate if I were jumping from website to website.

Chat helped me smooth out a couple of business emails — emails I had already written in ‘my own voice.’ I could actually see how (and study why) they were clearer, more digestible with Chat’s help. It allowed me the opportunity to study unfavorable patterns in my writing which I could improve on my own if I so chose. And I do. So that’s good.

Plus if I don’t use Chat my communication will be inferior like the way my body was less shapely after I chose to ditch the pads in my sports-bras. (see Pet Peeves).

There’s no going back.

But what will AI do for wonder? For kids looking out a car window trying to imagine how the world works? Sigh.

Then there’s The Velvet Sundown”— The fictional band with completely AI generated material. Three albums in one summer. Prolific! The ‘members’ even have real fake names.

I didn’t want to listen to it but c’mon! I pressed play. To me the songs sounded like a random hodgepodge of words spat out from a prompt asking for what a 70’s psych-rock band might say. They didn’t make me feel anything, Feel Anything. FEEL anything:

whisper and shadows  / dreams left behind  / searching for answers you’ll never find

Seriously?

The ‘author’ claims the project was a hoax and perhaps it was. I suspect the massive amount of streams aren’t due to artistry but the massive the amount of curious people (like me) who had to hear it.*

So who’s getting the last laugh?

The toothpaste is out of the tube.

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