Why I'm Not Going To Use AI For Art Anymore
This is a transcript of a video I made a few weeks ago, and I thought what I've said in the video is also suitable here, as I have already talked about AI art here already roughly two years ago. Looking back, things really haven't changed a lot since then. All the blockquotes below are my current additional thoughts when I'm formatting the transcript for this blog.
I've decided to post this here after seeing this reddit post; what the original poster have said aligns with my own experience with Suno.ai. Naturally there were people in the post who were like "no you are AI-ing wrong you need to do this and this and this"; it's not really a very convincing argument when Suno.ai sometimes can't even get the style prompt correct. I suppose people who genuinely care about music would always want full control over the creative process (and thus would always be angry at AI), and people who are completely fine with AI-generated result are the ones who never cared as much in the first place.
So, if you follow closely to news about AI, chances are you already have heard about Suno.ai, an AI that generates songs for you. You input a few parameters like genres and lyrics, and the AI could handle the rest and gives you music. I first came across this AI from someone using it to turn the text from the packaging of a medicine into a song, and the result was quite hilarious, even for someone who's not that big of an AI fan like me. So recently I decided to give Suno.ai a shot.
The song in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxF6pWm954c
I've explained this in the video and I suppose I should put that explaination here as well: basically the medicine has become a meme in China after the initial COVID outbreak; its manufacturer claimed that it can cure COVID (it can't; like most "Chinese-Western hybrid medicine" made in China, it can't even properly deal with normal cold symptoms), it doesn't cure COVID, but the claim got adorned by a local government and Zhong Nanshan (famed to be the man who solved the SARS pandemic nearly 20 years ago) himself, so a massive panick-buying happened with people even taking the ones meant for farm animals (which, considering how for-human hybrid medicine in China tend to be not working at all, might be a much smarter choice than we would've believed…). Of course in the end it was all a hoax and no one got punished for scamming common people, whose income was already heavily affected by the pandemic.
From my very limited knowledge, this kind of stuff has never been as quite a forte as other tasks such as handwriting recognition. So when Suno.ai returned tracks that are really close to your everyday common music, I was actually quite impressed. Listen to these two tracks I asked Suno.ai to make for me:
The tracks mentioned:
But the moment I listened to the tracks generated by Suno.ai closely, I noticed a lot of hiccups. Sometimes the vocal doesn't follow the lyrics, they sing the wrong line or just straight up scats when they should have been following the lyrics. Sometimes the generated tracks will have this weird reprise part at the end, which I can only assume that the AI is trained on data, scraped from places like YouTube, and on those sites musicians sometimes use a part of the music at the BGM for the promotion parts at the end of music videos. Listen to this other generated track and you'll know what I mean.
After making the video I tried Suno.ai a few more times, and sometimes it generates people's talking voice at the end of a track, which obviously comes from the practice of the musician inserting a thank-you and self-promotion section at the end of the works the published on sites like YouTube.
So when things like this happen, I will have to edit it manually using Audacity to make it sound passable. Sometimes I have to use another AI to separate the vocal and the backing track so that I can properly make the edits. Sometimes it's just un-salvagable, and the editing took me way too much time anyway. It's not the kind of time that I want to spend on something that I can't legally say I own because it's all AI generated after all. Nearly all the tracks I've managed to ask Suno.ai to make are all at best of rough demo quality.
AI, even at its current stage, is surprisingly good at separating tracks - not perfect, but good enough to be convincing to the common people.
And among all those flaws, the biggest problem I've encountered is that even if the results are as impressive as they are, they were never quite what I wanted. This feeling of being annoyed from the results being close but not quite, is really similar to the experience I've had with NovelAI.
If you didn't know, NovelAI provides a tool that can generate anime-style illustrations. But the images it generates often has many technical issues like blurry fingers, broken limbs, extra limbs, limbs that are bent in a impossible way, limbs from different persons merging together and a lot of other technical issues; and among all those technical issues, the images never quite turned out the way I wish it could. So what I would do to try to get that one perfect image is that I would change the prompt and the parameters and every little thing they allow me to change. And I would do it again and again and again. It was frustrating to say the least. And I always ended up in the same spot: The results are quite good if you look at it from face value, but they are always shy of what I had in mind. It felt like I was asking for something that the AI simply couldn't deliver on a fundamental level.
NovelAI really sucked ass. I genuinely regret spending money on it. Other models, e.g. the ones featured on pixai.art, are way better, but the core problem remains: I wish to have absolute control over the elements of the image, the kind of control prompting could never give me.
And you know what's worse about all this? It costs real money. I haven't paid for Suno yet but I spent way too much money on NovelAI. The return rate on this investment was so bad it got to the point multiple times that I was like, you know what? Screw this. Forget about the AI. Just give me a pen and tablet. It's fine. I will learn how to draw the thing myself.
(And this is really funny in a way. I wrote the outline for the script of this video and asked ChatGPT to generate the full script for me. And while the result is okay, it's not in a way that I will be comfortable recording myself with; so I ended up having to rewrite nearly all of the script on my own.)
All of this led me to think about the people who use AI and call themselves artists. Out of all the people I have seen online, they themselves are the ones who are the most adamant about making people acknowledging them as proper artists. While I don't know what kind of tools they use because they often seem to have better results than I do. I do wonder if the reason why they are so paranoid about this is that they secretly or subconsciously know that they were never involved in the creation process and they were never in control of anything about the medium, and because of that, they feel the same kind of powerlessness as I did deep down when using Suno.ai and NovelAI. I very certainly did feel very powerless after spending many hours and a lot of money poking and tweaking just to not have something that I can fully enjoy.
So, where does all of this leave us? Well, AI can certainly be a powerful tool in at least two kinds of circumstances: the ones where you have absolutely no idea how to begin and need that one shot in the dark as your reference and the ones where one doesn't need to truly enjoy the things it created and just need something that looks good enough, like, for example, making promotional materials for corporations and stock images for web articles. For anything other than those two, it would be fun for a while in the beginning; but because with AI you have much more restriction and have way less control, you would just get frustrated with what you can do in the end. And the more you pay for the tools to make these restricted creative decisions for you, the less worthy it feels to do so. At least that's the case for me.
Now this is a little bit NSFW: I'm afraid that if anyone were to say anything about the "lacking of soul" of AI-generated art one of the most convincing argument would be AI-generated anime-style porn… AI-generated porn, strangely, has consistently been the least sexy among other kind of porn; and I suppose anyone who's at least half of a hentai connoisseur (?) would agree.
So my conclusion about using this Suno.ai tool is that I should just forget about it and start learning how to write songs…
Last update: 2024.9.14