2/2/26 - AI-dventures
(note that i do not believe the term "ai" to be a good term for the neural networks and large-language models we have today, though i'll still be calling it ai to avoid confusion + i'm lazy)
i'm working on an album called AI Slop, and its gonna be a plunderphonics album that samples exclusively ai generated music. the goal is to be a sort of critique/commentary on the current state of the ai debate, as there's a lot of things i really dislike about it. anyway, the title track is going to be fully ai generated. at first i thought about just having it be a shitty random song nobody cares about, then i thought about having it be a shitty brainrot meme song only 12 year olds would care about, but then i had the idea of having it be about a person in an ai generated world realizing its ai. i thought that could be a pretty good case for ai use in music, to a point where it'd honestly make more sense to use ai for this than to make it by hand. so my dad got me a suno subscription (he's been toying with it himself for a bit too) and i started generating stuff. i wasn't too impressed with a lot of the early generations, of which i've attached a couple of here.
(btw all the audio files on this blog post are public domain. do what you wish with them; credit is appreciated, but by no means a necessity. also, if you're having trouble playing the audio here, right click it and click Save Audio As to download it to your computer.)
honestly there's dozens of generations like these i could show, but i don't think you want to listen to two hours of the same mediocre ai-generated song, so i'll spare you most of it. anyway, there were a couple generations i liked quite a bit, especially this one:
Got DAMN that bass. i need to learn how to design bass like that. i really like how frantic the whole thing feels. i also like how the first drop is kinda messy, but the second drop is a lot more clean. not a big fan of the lyrics, though. i'm wanting something that actually represents the weird flaws and inconsistencies of ai art rather than the generic "am i living in a simulation" thing this song went with. so i decided to be a bit more firm with what i wanted from the lyrics, and eventually i got this:
Holy Fuck that second half is actually incredible. the instrumental, the lyrics, the vocal performance, it's all pretty much exactly what i wanted out of this song. it's also kinda interesting cuz it feels a bit more... euphoric? and a tad less frantic than the one above this. that's a shame, too, cuz the first half is pretty damn mediocre. still though, it's the best result i've got so far, so i told the ai to use it as inspiration from now on. i'm just now realizing that i probably could've trimmed the first minute off and had it only reference the good part, but oh well.
this is where it became pretty apparent why ai generally sucks for making art. see, if i was making this by hand, i'd have so, so much more control over the outcome. i'd be able to go in and manipulate each individual element from the inside, creating something that's fine-tuned to my exact tastes. with ai, i'm generating a single static waveform, leaving like 98% of the outcome up to random chance. the best i can do with that is separate the stems and maybe do some weird stuff with them, as i'm trying to do on AI Slop, but usually this is suboptimal, especially since most of what the ai outputs is pretty mediocre at best. occassionally, though, it makes something pretty incredible, like here:
gjehaioughgghgaegghgnnhgnhgn i need to find more music like this dude holy shit. well, ok, to be fair, the lyrics still aren't quite what i'm going for. how can i make the ai give me better lyrics...? it feels like it's not understanding what i want... well, to be fair, it did produce this immediately before the above song was generated:
this is one of the better outputs i've gotten lyrically, and the instrumental is good too, but it's not Amazing like some of the others i've gotten. i was noticing lyrics tended to be a bit of a choking point, and i didn't want to stay stuck discarding stuff with great instrumentals but mediocre lyrics forever, but i also didn't want to write the lyrics myself cuz i felt like that would kinda miss the point, so i decided to take the best lyrics from previous generations and sorta stitch them together, like so:
Damn those drums are punchy. might have to sample them for the album. anyways, if you've been listening to all the songs on this page (which i'll admit is a stretch), then these lyrics should be familiar. they're technically all ai-generated, but sorta curated by me in a way. now, while this is definitely the best lyrical output i've had so far, i really wish it had the vocal performances and instrumentals of some of the other results i've highlighted here. i decided to turn up the amount it referenced those songs, and...
yeah, i think this is my favorite generation so far. the vocals at the chorus don't quite hit the same highs as some of the others have, but rest of the vocals are pretty good, the lyrics are good, and the instrumental is good. all those individual elements (barring the lyrics) have been quite a bit better in different generations, but this one is the best on average. it's kinda funny, cuz i didn't ask for it to add the second "do you see?" at ~2:51, but i think it added to it. i still wasn't quite satifsfied, though. for one, the lyrics. i want the lyrics to be a little nonsensical, to represent how ai doesn't really understand human emotion and just kinda Says Shit, but i still want it to represent ai's flaws accurately. the line "the rain falls up, it twists, it drains" is a perfect example of it just Saying Shit, but it's also a perfect example of it not really getting what i'm going for here. i want this song to be about AI Slop, not a glitched simulation. so i decided to get the ai to replace that lyric with lyrics that builds apon the previous lyric that says "the coffee spills but never stains," which is a lyric i like, as it addresses ai's lack of object permanence. here's one of the better results i've gotten with these fixed lyrics:
still though, i wish i knew how to make it have the lyrics starting with "people moving like they got nowhere to be" be on the actual chorus like in the version that's 2:12 long instead of the buildup to the chorus. the one above this is currently my favorite generation overall i think, though i definitely think i can do better. all of these were made in november 2025, and writing this and listening to them has helped me realize what i should probably be doing for this song. the lyrics will probably be fixed further, and i'd like to get an instrumental that reaches the highs i know it can. you'll have to wait for the album to come out to see the final product, though. unless i end up using one of these, which isn't impossible.
so, what did we learn? well, i learned that i don't want to use ai for my future projects. not for any moral reason or anything; it's not stealing, it's not inherently bad artistically, it's not "soulless" (whatever that means), the environmental impacts are way overstated in most cases (and also rarely compared to the environmental impacts of many other things we do regularly, like making art traditionally, sending emails, eating meat, etc.), i don't care that it's low-effort, and i don't care if it's "real art" (whatever that means). the reason why i don't want to use ai is just cuz it's pretty useless. the ai industry has done a remarkably good job of marketing their products as a way to Finally be able to express yourself artistically without having to go through the Agonizing Agony of learning how to do it with traditional art tools, but like... it's pretty close to impossible to really express yourself artistically when 98% of the output is determined by essentially random chance. using these tools doesn't give me anywhere near the amount of control i want when making art, and pair that with the weird artifacts ai tends to give and it becomes pretty clear that this tool is of very little use to me. not only that, but it's of very little use to the art world as a whole. the best i can do with it is make intentional use of those weird artifacts, which i'd like to think i've done a little with this song. that's one reason why i refuse to believe that ai will replace artists; while ai does have a niche set of uses, they don't put artists in any danger, because this niche is something that ai has carved out for itself. things like the music video for Igorrr's song ADHD don't replace traditional artists because this is an entirely different medium. photography didn't stop people from painting portaits - not even hyper-realistic ones - because they are entirely different mediums. beyond that niche set of uses, though, other methods of creating art will always be superior - not just from a quality standpoint, but from a convenience standpoint. it will always be more convenient to use a DAW and be able to manipulate each individual aspect of the song to your exact tastes than to near-randomly generate a single static waveform.
that said, you may be wondering how i can say ai sucks when all the generations i've posted here have been so good. well, for one, i haven't been showing anywhere near all the results i've gotten. a lot of them have ranged from mediocre to straight-up bad:
there are dozens more generations like this that i cannot be bothered to export and share here. but yeah, when so much of the outcome is determined by random chance, there will inevitably be some shit results. however, there will also inevitably be some incredible results. i suppose that's one cool thing about ai, now that i think about it. indeterminacy in music is a concept that's been explored by thousands of composers and producers for decades, and to great effect, as it can lead to some pretty strange and interesting results you probably wouldn't have thought of on your own. ai is a rather extreme version of this idea; not all control is lost, but it is an extremely significant amount, to a point where it's not too useful on its own. but then, i suppose using tools like this on their own has never been a good idea. generally, you're not going to get something that's a true reflection of yourself by completely random chance, though you can use elements of indeterminacy to create something unique, as i'm attempting to do with this album.
i thought about having a bit here where i say i could do better than the ai, but i wonder about that. if i were to make a version of this song by hand with a DAW, it would certainly be a lot more personal, a lot more tuned to my preferences, a lot "better," if you will, but it would also certainly be heavily influenced by the songs i generated for the normal version. (plus, in this specific instance, it hits a lot harder if the song singing about questioning if its ai-generated is actually ai-generated.) the ai has shown me a lot of interesting and inspiring ideas, ideas i want to play with and (probably) execute better than the ai did. that's one cool thing about art: you never know what random bullshit will trigger the right neurons to get the creative juices flowing.