It's Good-ish
Suno arrived, and the worst part is it kind of works.
suno and udio kept improving. AI music is now genuinely good, not good-ish. the observation that good-ish was the most unsettling outcome was exactly right — it was the transitional state before good.
I typed some words into Suno and it made a song.
Not a song-shaped noise. Not the uncanny valley slop I'd been quietly counting on to justify my lack of concern about this. A song — with a structure and a vibe and lyrics that scan — the kind of thing that would not embarrass you if it came on in the background of something.
I was not prepared for this to happen in December 2023.
The polite fiction I'd been running was that text-to-music was still a year or two out from mattering, the same way I'd been telling myself that about image generation in 2020, and voice cloning in 2021, and code generation in 2022. I have a good record of being wrong about timelines in one specific direction.
There's a particular quality to "good-ish" that is actually the most unsettling outcome. If it were bad, I could dismiss it. If it were genuinely great, I could be impressed and move on. "Good-ish" means we are exactly at the threshold where it starts replacing things before anyone has decided to let it.
Anyway. The song is fine. I can't stop thinking about it.
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