Yeah, I know y'all notice those "em-dash" in the title... This article is about AI, but it's more than that.

I'm sure everyone is so sick of AI art, AI music, AI movies, AI articles written with em—dash all over the place. When I first saw AI art, I hated it, then started using it for memes. When I watched AI videos, I thought it was soulless, then I started making some for my Youtube channel. Finally, I tried to listen to AI songs and found it a bit bland and generic, so did I do? you guessed it:
I made my own!

Within the next couple months, I'm planning to release 10 songs that I AI-produced. Why such heresy?

Why are you doing this?!?!

Well let's see. My first reaction about AI art was that it looked soulless and lacked meaning. That said, I was thinking AI is evolving and could get there at some point.

Then it hits me... Is it the fact that AI art has the "AI" tag? Or does the lack of human touch makes it bad? If I find a movie very amazing, will it be that much different if I find out it's AI made?

In a world where AI crap is being dumped on us every day, there's still the difference between good and bad art. And even with human artworks in the mix, there's art that touches your heart, and there's crap. In fact, with the influx of Hollywood remakes, I would argue that AI doesn't have a very high bar to pass to beat humans.

One thing notable with AI though is that it learns from humans and hardly goes beyond that. Basically, generative AI could produce something good, but can it surpass it? For instance, during the rise of Hollywood, there was a vague in France called "Nouvelle Vague", making movies with low budget, real location, cheap actors, dialogs that felt real. It was an embrace of real life, which contrasted against traditional Hollywood movies' polished scenarios and lush decors. It was new, fresh, good! Could AI have come up with that on its own?
Likewise, when we talk about music, could AI come up with "punk rock" or "techno" if it was only trained with oldies from the 60's?

Likely not. I believe there's still a place for us human artists in this world. The challenge for humans to overcome AI will be to create meaning into their work. To be successful, filmmakers must use their creativity to produce movies better than just rehashing past films swapping actors, because AI can just do that now. Thankfully, enough with those lazy remakes!

Regardless whether we think of AI as a tool or as an opponent to beat, it's worth embracing to its fullest and truly understand what it's capable of.

That's not at all why I'm doing all this BTW, so let's move on...

What got me into AI music?

Frankly, I used to be pessimistic about AI music. Yet, I had to give it a try. Right before that, I was starting to get into "slow + reverb" songs (take a famous song, slow it down, add reverb, upload it to YouTube and get tons of views with zero effort).

Thank God I got past that phase!

But then it led me to try Suno. From what I heard, you could really one-prompt a song about anything. So I try that. It produces crap of course!
But then I try something else: Inject a song that I previously wrote (a video game tune) along with the words.

Basically, I have both the melody and the lyrics. I could never marry the two together outside my brain, until now.

Then the result is... OH MY GOSH!

How does... how did the.... ??
how dit the AI figure out exactly how to match the melody... the way I imagined, and make it sound good!

Ok... now it's making a small mistake, but it's ok...

Arghh... now it shifted all lyrics and it's completely out of sync with the melody!!!!

--

Still, it's not that bad!

After several tries, I actually get the song that matches what I have in mind.

But that's not all, I can keep pushing it again and again, and eventually the result is...

OH MY GOSH!! It's even better than I conceived it! Can I really claim it's my song at this point?

(Of course I will).

Alright, so what's your plan?

Now, if you dig into my social media, you can probably find those those songs. But I think it's more interesting to follow my plan.

Basically, within the next couple month, I will release articles in pairs. First, sharing the ingredients for my songs:

• The original melody.
• The lyrics.

Then the next day, I'll release the song I AI-produced.

• The prompt to define the style
• The actual AI song

I'm making this a weekly thing, so expect a new song every week starting next Friday, July 18.

There, I'll even make a calendar reminder for you:
📅 Come back next week to hear my AI song!

I think it could be fun listening to the difference, and find out how we get from one basic tune to a full fleshed song.

Will it be another piece of dung or a flower blooming among the whole pile?

I'll let you be the judge of it.

What's your long term plan?

This whole thing got me motivated to make my songs legit. So I've started to look into ways to reproduce all the songs, sequencing the tracks with DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), and looking for singers to sing. (Because trust me, you DO NOT want to hear my singing).

So I guess, if you're a singer or a music producer and you live near San Francisco, feel free to ping me. I'm still looking around for that sweet voice that will make my song sound like a smash hit!

Who knows? Perhaps by the time we reach the last article in this series, this whole story could have a happy ending!