But it’s never going to be 1:1 duplication is it? Sometimes it’s better to copy code as a template for something new, rather than try to immediately force a new abstraction.
I agree with you that it’s a truism, but it’s useful advice for people who have a habit of trying too hard to DRY their code. IIRC the author comes from the Ruby world, where DRY was a big thing, and this talk was part of the pendulum swinging back away from this DRY obsession that sometimes just resulted in convoluted code.
There are millions of people making music in an ever-expanding set of genres. The idea that no one is making 80s or 90s style music is absurd. I guess she can listen to slop but maybe just look around a little instead?
You can spend your time looking for music or you can spend it prompting Suno. Personally I'll always take the former, I enjoy it, but to each their own.
That's a really ironic comment. I think accepting AI music as a substitute for all but the most unimportant background noise, is a sign that one doesn't really care about understanding other people.
> It's spend all your music-listening time looking around.
Spotify algorithm not kind to everyone I suppose… I’m enough of a normie with music it works for me. Crate digging doesn’t feel too time consuming at all (as easy as throwing on quirky California college radio stations).
I listen to SomaFM (https://somafm.com/) and FIP (https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip), they have online streams by genre. When something gets me interested, I look up the artist, and I keep discovering lots of new names, independent labels, etc.
It can be, but you'll need to look up the human made / curated playlists; definitely avoid Spotify's own (as they've been seeding them with their own songs for a while now, even before AI), and don't enable the auto mixing / radio feature.
I agree with you when it comes to my own process of finding new music, but the example given was a lot more specific than just 80s/90s music. Who’s to say that person didn’t do extensive searches before using Suno? Sounds more like the classic discoverabity problem big platforms continue to do poorly with to me. But I agree with the sentiment, great stuff by real artists is out there if you’re able to find it.
This seems harder than you suggest. I suggest things to my streaming platform and it reverts to what I call "cruisy shit" within 5-10 songs as though it's playing a game of "6 degrees" between my chosen starting point and what it wants to play.
For me, "The Algorithm To Engage" is more of a "the beatings will continue until morale improves Algorithm".
"Slob" / "slop" is thrown around so much I don't take anyone seriously who drops that word unless the output matches the commentary. There's definitely a lot of trash AI stuff out there don't get me wrong, but there's also insanely high quality AI generated things out there. Hell, I've sent people songs made in Suno, and they were surprised to learn that those were AI generated. If you open suno and type in "90s jazz song" then yeah, you're likely going to get a bit of generic AI slop. If you get into specifics, voice style, instrument types, how they're played, which chords, etc. You can get some insanely high quality music. Not only that but Suno has a whole DAW style extension to it they call Suno Studio which is very powerful, you can get AI stems, you can add your own voice.
Someone could get studio quality tracks for $10 a month, and add their own vocals and have a high quality sounding song. Is it slop if you pour hours of work into it tweaking every detail? At that point using a DAW is slop then (which I'm sure some people hate music made that way, but a lot of music is made this way).
I’ve been thinking the same thing about AI artwork (as opposed to “chat pls make me a funny picture” and seeing what comes out, although there’s some increasingly interesting things coming out of that approach). There’s often an insane amount of work going into the guts of the image generation pipeline. Sure, it’s not pencil-on-paper drawing things but to me, art is about creating and exploring. All the same vitriol was directed toward cameras, audio synthesisers, 3D rendering, Photoshop, digital cameras, etc. The hate is not about the technique, it’s about someone else getting the same results “easier” with a different workflow.
What? Those things were absolutely not criticized in the same way. Most of the time they weren't criticized at all lol.
The problem isn't about it being "easier", it's about people who want the praise and attention of being a maker but don't want to put any thought or effort into it. They have no thoughts and nothing to say and what they generate reflects that.
I don't mind it, because there already was a lot of slop before AI, which a lot of people seem to forget. But that's also because they weren't the consumers / target audience so it's off their radar.
I just don't get it. Music isn't just what comes out of the speaker. There are artists, with lives and influences behind the music. There is personal expression in the lyrics. Even when the artist chooses to remain anonymous, or they choose to not have lyrics at all, there is still something personal behind it. A DAW is just a tool, and it's a tool that can be used badly, for example, over produced metal with quantized and sample replaced drums. Sure, AI can be a tool for music production just like a DAW can, but when it crosses the line into, lets call it "vibe-produced" music, it is indeed slop, and deserves to be referred to as such.
Yeah this is how I feel. People who like AI music seem to be a same people who would just throw on random "deep work" or "lofi" youtube playlists and let them run all day. That has never appealed to me. I like to learn about the artists and history.
Sometimes there is. Sometimes it's just made up shit with no real backing in the same way a lot of stories told in comedy routines are. Not all of it is genuine expression.
I love music and I frequently go to live shows, so the bar for me has kind of become "Can I go see this artist live, OR is it so good that I don't care that I can't?" If it passes that, I'll listen. I've found one AI generated song that has made it onto my top 100 favorite songs I've ever heard.
The thing that really shits me with AI music is when it outputs default ChatGPT sounding lyrics. There's certain tells and boy do they give me the ick.
> Sometimes there is. Sometimes it's just made up shit with no real backing in the same way a lot of stories told in comedy routines are. Not all of it is genuine expression.
I don't necessarily agree. Read the lyrics to the "irony is a dead scene" EP by the Dillinger Escape Plan and Mike Patton. It's nonsense. Still genuine expression.
Most Carpenter Brut songs don't even have lyrics and there is endless expression there. I know that I consume music in a very different way than most people, and that's probably why I have such a strong opinion here.
Thing is, did it take effort and creativity to make it? I suppose you could argue that fine-tuning a prompt takes effort, creativity and knowledge, but I argue against that that it's only a fraction of what it takes to make real music.
If it didn't take effort to make it, if you can repeat it a hundred times in a week, it's slop. It's a good descriptor, even if to an untrained ear it's convincing.
YouTube is excellent. Aside from my main account I have one that I mainly just use to listen to music, and I just surf the algorithm listening to whatever is in the recommend list, which is usually a handful of songs I've got on heavy rotation, but YouTube also tends to cycle back some old favorites, and some new gems. I just keep surfing it day in day out letting it take me where it will as one of two main ways I listen to music. I regularly find new gems pretty reliably. All the gems then go to my playlist in Spotify, which I listen to during my commute.
I think the cost pressures just make most AI generated stuff slop. Its not that AI can't make good stuff its that the slop to good ratio is 100s of times worse with AI published music than with human stuff. Simply because AI generation cost is essentially zero.
Purely a economic argument but also the rare good music from AI I am still looking its generally speaking not that cohesive and for unremarkable. A lot of human work is that to but the discovery of good music from people feels much less daunting
That's not to say you can't make effortful novel content using AI, but this is just lazy hollow stimulation. Like all the laziest of AMVs, nothing to say outside of "isn't this cool?".
We want to see the person underneath and what ideas they explore through the medium - AI is just a fancy new tool of the times.
Who cares what brush or canvas Vincent used to make Starry Night? Without his name on it, it's just another oil painting.
People on social media follow creators who make novel content irrespective of how they made it.
AI generated content will always be lower quality because the entry level is literacy, hence YouTube intervention with their "it's probably not worth your time" label.
It makes sense. It hard to think creatively when your environment is stagnant. You need some new sights and sounds to kick things along, especially when you’re stuck on something.
I like the story of Shigeru Miyamoto getting the idea for flying through archways in Star Fox from walking through archways in a Shinto shrine near the Nintendo headquarters. It wasn’t from playing other video games or reading about game development, it was just from thinking creatively about his real world environment right outside the office.
I have really noticed recently that a lot of modern media (film, TV, videogames, etc) seems much more based on prior media than on the author's experience of the world. Like everything is now operating at a meta level. It's a little sad.
I wrote a response to this, but then I realised I was responding to the claim that modern media was more derivative, rather than what you actually said, which was that modern media is more _meta_.
Can you go into that a little more? Do you have specific examples that make you sad?
The first example that comes to my mind is the show Community, which I really enjoy, and which doesn't make me sad at all.
P.S. an article I linked to in my original response was https://www.filfre.net/2025/01/the-crpg-renaissance-part-1-f... which I mentioned as it talks about a historical standout in the genre but puts it in the context of the copycats and the schlock. It's now irrelevant to my comment, but I'd like to link to it anyway.
Not OP, but there is a wide chasm between what Community does and what OP was referring to.
Community's thing is that it is a meta show. It uses the meta it references to get a point across, make a joke, or provide a spectacle (a good example of spectacle are the Paintball episodes)
What OP referred to, and what I've noticed, was that media nowadays is just a mashup of what came before with little to say about it. Or to put it in other words: not transformative. The creator likes something, and they put it in their work because it's cool. There's nothing wrong with doing just that, but when you start seeing the same thing over and over again in different works, it gets tiresome.
We're so obsessed with filling every waking moment with something that we don't allow ourselves to have the "a-ha!" moment any more, so we default to "what if X and Y?" where X and Y are thoughts on the surface of our mind rather than two unrelated things that somehow click when the default mode network activates. For example: what do archways in a Shinto shrine have to do with a fox piloting a starship around? Absolutely nothing, and yet for Miyamoto that thought made sense.
Ah, thank you very much for this reply, because I haven't watched Community myself so I didn't realise the confusion between a show that's intentionally about a meta situation vs. ... well what you've written explains my meaning exactly.
You should watch some episodes, even if you don't watch all of it. There's a reason why it influenced popular culture (even if no one remembers it doing so).
I don't know if I have a good argument for it myself. I have seen a lot of people saying specifically that they based their {thing} on {prior thing} rather than something from life, but I haven't exactly kept a list. Beyond that it's mostly a feeling.
The very brief (and bastardised) summary is that we're cutting ourselves from what is real, so we base our art on the fake reality that we're experiencing.
I'll never forget when one of my teachers asked: "who has seen a sheep?" The entire class put up their hand. The next question was "who has seen a live sheep, in front of them?" more than half the class put their hand down. We all know what a sheep looks like, but not because we've been near one.
Yes indeed, I'm aware of it, though I admit I never finished the whole thing. It did make me notice this situation even more acutely.
It's funny that the part everyone quotes from the book (namely the Borges fable and the 'desert of the real itself') is in the introduction. Makes me wonder how many others didn't actually get through it. :)
> the intent of the original Zelda game (and every Zelda title since) was to give players a "miniature garden that they can put inside their drawer." His inspiration came from the fields, woods, and caves outside Kyoto that he had explored as a boy, and he has always tried to impart this sense of exploration and limitless wonder to players through his Zelda titles.
Great analogy. The problem is the incentive structure. Anthropic would nothing nothing more than for all of us to write big sprawling slop codebases so we can spend endless tokens reading, rereading, fixing, refixing forever.
It’s simple but contains all the necessary info. You can say “build an endpoint to get user data” and it will absolutely do something, but it might be stupid, and when you compound 1000 stupid prompts like that you get spaghetti.
It doesn’t contain any information at all about the structure of the JSON output. Is this a greenfield endpoint and anything will work is does it need to conform to an existing API? What about response codes for different failure modes? What about logging?
Your comment exemplifies what a lot of people complain about vibe coding: it works great for greenfielding CRUD apps, but it’s a bitch to use in a real code base.
On a real codebase there’s going to be v5 that is the newest version, v4 that we planned to migrate off of but we had to keep around for iOS clients, and v3 that no one except for a dozen huge enterprise customers use. But we need to support all 3 styles. This stuff is sort of documented, but not completely, and there’s a push by some people in the org to use v5 style for every new feature, but there’s one director pushing back on that. So you need to go talk to a few people and get enough condensed to CYA before deciding what to do.
Some version of that happens in every big company or every long running app. Claude isn’t AGI and that prompt isn’t nearly specific enough for anything outside of greenfield.
I actually believe it just surfaces them, humans will tolerate ambiguity like that and deal with it. AI Agents either won't work properly or will just fail to do anything useful.
Every group of humans has shit processes. So if you’re trying to use AI in an actual company, today, that prompt won’t work properly or will just fail to do anything useful.
If you want to watch Shakespeare on your TV you are welcome to. But also I don't think that's the point at all. If it's my job to hammer 100 nails a day, and then my boss gives me a hammer that is 10x more effective. I don't get to go home early, I'm just expected to hammer 1000 nails now. Maybe the work becomes more pleasant, maybe it doesn't. But either way it definitely benefits the boss and the person who makes the hammer.
