If I had to guess, three related factors:

1. Platforms like Suno lack the granular control that can make a song distinctive and interesting. A prompt is an all-or nothing paradigm. There is no gradual build towards a final result like in normal creative processes. Yes you can supply lyrics but that’s hardly a substitute. And on top of that it’s painfully slow due to the nature of the technology.

2. As a result of 1, experienced music producers (familiar with regular DAWs) don’t want to use it. They probably prefer something with instant feedback. Tweak a synth param, you can instantly hear its effect. And changing one instrument doesn’t randomly affect unrelated things.

3. As a result of 2, the majority of AI generated music is throwaway and or created by amateurs who don’t have the ear for what makes a song good.

Emulating the lowest common denominator is the function of an LLM. It works better for things like code because boring code is actually the best code.

I don't know about music, but there are plenty of pioneers of AI art who were pretty interesting in my opinion. Mario Klingemann, Tom White, Memo Akten and Samim Winiger are some names I remember who made a lot of cool stuff. I admit I haven't kept up at what they're doing today, though (maybe because I left Twitter, and I think many of them did too).

I think it's because its main use in this particular context is to produce results that the creator does not have the skill to produce and/or does not want to invest the time to produce.

I guess you could argue that drum machines offered simplification/automation when they first appeared compared to the option of a human drummer, but also, those machines opened up all sorts of creative and stylistic possibilities that simply couldn't be done by sitting someone at a traditional drum kit. Using AI to make music doesn't do this -- it's a shortcut that has no argument in its favor whatsoever except that it saved the person making it time (and/or enabled them to generate something they couldn't have produced through their own work). That's why it is fundamentally uncool in a musical context, and always will be.

Idk, man, I beg to differ: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DCR2BlygrTP/?igsh=c203NmQwYnI...

>emulating lowest common denominator pop sludge.

So the stuff that is most popular?

But (semi) jokes aside, I think that AI music tools are just not fully developed yet. The current approach is more or less one shotting a track. Whereas I think a system that allows one to generate layers would bring in many new sounds. Something like a "speak to instument" system, where you can hum melodies and then generate instruments to play those, then compose a track with all those individual parts.

Because people don't put the effort in. A lot of electronic music can be considered lazy - just press button, turn a knob, boom you have music. Right? But then you have someone like Aphex Twin and they make something unique out of these easy machines.

I'm sure someone can make unique or passable music with the help of AI tooling, but they can't do it by just saying "make me this music", no matter how much effort they think they have put into the prompt.

When modern DAWs like FL Studio started democratizing music production, there was immediate backlash in the music production community. I know this because I lived through it. Music made with FL Studio was considered garbage, not by serious musicians, amateur. "FL Studio users are incapable of making good music", etc. Of course now well-respected musicians like Tyler the Creator and Porter Robinson use FL Studio and there isn't really a question. This is a common theme every time some new method of creating music comes around - just look at how they called Dylan "Judas" when he debuted electronic guitar, etc.

"Every previous technological advancement in music produced amazing new sounds and styles" is classic hindsight bias. In retrospect, once everything has sorted out, and all the good music has risen to the top, it's easy to look back in history and point to the highlights. But when you live through it, it looks a lot more like a mess with no redeeming qualities.

I find AI Iran to be the best hip-hop in a long time. What's bad about this?

https://youtu.be/i0u_BNPOsMw?si=IQ49AkUM-4tFTqKX

It's probably not all so bad. There probably are people out there intentionally creating things with AI assistance that sounds pretty rad.

But the idea of being able to just create endless music with low effort is too compelling for too many, so the good stuff is drown out by the mass amounts of low-effort slop being produced.

This is exactly what everybody said about rap and drum machines and sampling when I was growing up in the mid to late 80s.

They were right and wrong. A lot of it was really formulaic bullshit, and much of it doesn't hold up at all. But it also spawned one of the most creative and exciting periods in music history.

Will this be the same? It feels like it won't, but that's how things feel in general because I'm old. So who knows?