Up until the advent of Artificial General Intelligence, there will at least be prompt engineers.
I'm going to come up for air long enough to share a little about the rabbit hole I've been stuck in for the past few weeks. Then I'll probably dive back in there for more, for better or for worse.
We all hear the news stories about how anyone who does work that isn't physical work will soon be replaced by AI. Many of us, when we hear such a story, are apt to be dismissive about it, remember something we experienced with an AI chatbot hallucinating, and get on with life. As many of us try and fail to find work as software engineers, studio musicians, paralegals, writers, and a rapidly growing number of other professions, we learn to take this AI stuff more seriously.
I did play with the chatbots since ChatGPT swept the news, and found their ability to write good lyrics was very limited. But after hearing what a friend in Australia was doing with Suno, the leading AI music platform, I was eventually compelled to spend $10 for a month's worth of membership and play with it myself.
I want to say upfront that me playing with Suno is not meant to be an acceptance of the model of development here. As with all the other massively popular platforms that are so often part of the oligarchy of Big Tech, the notion that profits derived from various methods of monetizing our common cultural heritage should all continue to be funneled upwards into the coffers of the trillionaires is an outrageous one. Having said that, however, I still have my music on all of Big Tech's streaming platforms that haven't taken it down, and I don't think I'd help solve any problems by withdrawing my participation in the method through which most people in the world now get their music (those streaming platforms).
Same rationale goes for Suno. It exists, and it's being used on a widespread basis. If it gets sued out of existence for copyright infringement and all the songs anyone has created using the platform get stricken from the web, I will celebrate. Given the trends with Big Tech and what Big Tech wants over the course of my lifetime, however, I suspect Suno and so much more like it are not only here to stay, they represent the future.
In the future -- the near future, I suspect -- the most important jobs in society of the few that remain will be prompt engineers and consultants. Prompt engineers mostly, but we'll always need some consultants to figure out what the prompt engineers did wrong, when that happens, especially when it comes to professions more important than, say, composers, musicians, or directors.
Ethics aside, however, the experience of obsessively writing lyrics and feeding prompts into Suno to create songs together has been intense. Intensely exhilarating as well as intensely shocking. I feel like I'm just going through life in a daze derived from the effort to reconcile what I'm experiencing here with what the near future of music and society is going to look like.
Over the past three weeks I've put out three full-length albums as a prompt engineer working with Suno. The song I'm sharing with this post is not on any of the albums. The albums are all sung in a woman's voice.
While I and I think most other artists don't have any ethical issues with someone of one gender writing songs to be sung by someone of another gender, the ease with which one can do that using Suno is fairly breathtaking. Much easier than hiring a singer, let alone a band. Also far easier than taking hormone blockers, or even putting on makeup. In the "voice" field you just click "female."
For anyone who has ever recorded an album in a studio with highly-skilled musicians, engineers and producers, and agonized over choices about whether we should hire that keyboard player or whether we should hire that drummer, when what you really wanted was both, being able to come up with directives like "newgrass chanson skiffle with a modal sound" and see what Suno comes up with is thrilling in a way that's hard to describe.
It's as appalling as it is thrilling, however. As with other prompt engineers, I imagine, the idea of taking credit for these musical creations just because I played the role of writing lyrics, giving a few musical parameters, and rejecting the first fifteen efforts Suno came up with, doesn't feel right. It feels like Suno is doing most of the work.
As a songwriter, for decades I have been writing lyrics, which I'd say are still better-crafted than what AI tends to come up with, or, for that matter, what the music industry hit machine comes up with most of the time. And for decades I have taken those lyrics and worked hard to come up with effective music to make the song a song, and make it do what a good song can do. I've gone through this process thousands of times.
If I'm being honest, and not trying to play it cool, I would then have to say that what comes off as fairly inventive, natural-sounding, quality music, recorded at extremely high fidelity, is what Suno does to lyrics I feed it, within seconds. At least as interesting as anything I would have come up with -- but then it doesn't just come up with the idea, it spits out the whole recording, including of course natural-sounding vocals.
I go back and forth between mourning the impending AI-ification of everything, and being enthralled with the ease with which I have created a whole new musical identity. The simple fact of her having a woman's voice -- or being a woman, as we may phrase it -- keeps on giving me ideas for songs to write that wouldn't seem to have the desired impact if sung in a man's voice. More liberating still is knowing from the outset that I'm not at all confined by what instruments I play, or anything like that -- you want newgrass chanson skiffle, with a tuba? No problem.
Judging from what happened when Angry Birds came out -- I lost three months of my life -- I'll probably recover from my Suno addiction eventually, and start doing more useful things. In the meantime, my apologies if you're being overrun by AI slop, and whatever role I may currently be playing in that phenomenon.
