The End of Culture
Reflections on AI
Suno is an AI tool that lets users generate music in two-minute chunks. Describe the kind of song you want to hear and receive it within seconds. Like most AI services, it can be extensively trialed for free: enter any prompt and make the music happen. I’ve had over 300 tokens since I started using it last year and have come nowhere close to exhausting them, though they appear to have recently locked the more advanced models behind a paywall.
I enjoy music. I listen to a lot of it. But I don’t know anything about how it works. I can’t play any instruments, can’t read sheet music, and can barely sing. I could never write a song.
This makes Suno an arcane and mysterious platform to me. It does something that I cannot do myself. Though AI image generation is functionally similar, I can conceive of myself drawing a picture: I cannot even imagine what it would be like to write a song.
Now I can. It turns out it’s as easy as writing, “A 1980s New Wave hit about buying a houseboat.” Or, “A 1920s musical number, low bass, rhyming chorus, angelic choir background.”
If you are curious what Suno might generate as a response to the latter prompt, you can give it a listen here:
Suno is extraordinary. Audio quality issues aside, which are mostly resolved in newer models I don’t have access to, it seems to understand rhythm as well as most human musicians. What it produces is often legitimately catchy, and it does this in seconds. Perhaps all the world can be reduced to mathematics; and what is music but a mathematical expression of noise? Maybe it’s no surprise that computers can quantify melodies so easily.
I spent the better part of a day turning Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Bells” into a song. It struck me in college that the poem had an intensely lyrical quality, and I’d wanted a suitably gothic musical arrangement for it ever since. I even considered composing one myself at one point (though I was swiftly defeated).
No longer. Here, in just a few hours, I had something that precisely matched what I had imagined those years ago. It is rhythmically varied, sonically interesting, and matches my taste in music precisely. Though most of what I’ve generated on Suno isn’t very compelling, I’ve had “The Bells” on repeat for the last three days. I like it. It’s a song tailored specifically for me. I like it not just for AI, but as a real song. It could be better—but it’s the closest thing that exists to what I want to listen to. So I listen.
I won’t share “The Bells” here. AI “art” works because it can be tailored for the individual, generated in seconds or hours. It isn’t tailored for you, and you probably won’t appreciate it. This is why posting your Midjourney images or ChatGPT photos to Pinterest is such a waste of time. These things work because they are bespoke, not because they are inherently high quality. Were I to upload “The Bells” here, it would surely be nothing more than cheaply generated slop to most strangers. But to me, it’s the song I’ve always wanted.
The End of Culture
Now imagine a future where everything is “The Bells.” You have an idea for a book you’d like to read. You ask your preferred LLM to generate it. Within moments you have a novel tailored to your every preference, and though it might not be flawless, might not be Literature, it is good enough to read like any book off the shelf at Barnes & Noble. Except it is your favorite book, because it has everything you know you like.
You’re feeling like listening to something new. You could open up Spotify. Or you can have Suno take a look at your preferences and generate a few bangers that match precisely what you’ve had on repeat all month.
You have a game you’d like to play. GameGPT makes it for you instantly. It has read your angry Internet blog and knows exactly what you do and don’t like. It is the best game you have ever played. Its small deficiencies are compensated for by the sheer fun you have seeing your old ideas come to life.
This future has no vision. It is a world in which no one is ever challenged or confronted by anything uncomfortable. Ideas are no longer transmitted between humans, and no one ever experiences anything beyond the filters of their AI tools. You will never be surprised. You will never encounter anything new.
In this world, nothing ties groups together. You have nothing to talk to your coworkers about. There are no metaphors that make sense to your whole family at the dinner table. The bonds of society have broken down. Culture itself has ceased to exist. There is only the Machine, and the Individual.
This is the future of AI entertainment.
“The Bells” is a great song. I legitimately enjoy listening to it. But I can’t help but see the far-reaching consequences of a technology that creates culture fundamentally tailored to people, rather than populations. What will the civilization enamored with these tools produce? What will it be remembered for? And what will happen to the people within it?
For those who insist AI will never raise to a level at which it competes with human-produced art, because the AI lacks a soul or some similar nonsense, I would say that Suno has already, in its infancy, proved you resoundingly wrong. Computers can and do understand what makes music work. They will only get better at it. They do not need a “soul” for this. And if music can be written by the machine, so can books, games, and movies. It’s just a matter of time.
Maybe I’m being melodramatic. But I believe this truly could be the end of culture as we know it. We have already experienced the breakdown of society with the decline of broadcast entertainment, the rise of the Internet, and the digital age. AI will kick the process into superoverdrive. Yet what is to be done?
AI is here to stay. There’s no stopping it. The only question is who gets access to it. For my part, I think that’s better you and me than someone else.
If music was broadly consumed for a personal want or need, then there'd be nothing to add. But Tailor Swift isn't famous because her songs are unprecedented in "sonic" qualities or deeply thought-provoking in the lyrics department. She's famous because her looks, personality, music, background and marketing are, as a single unit, iconic to countless people today. In other words she famous for the exactly opposite reason of why you like The Bells. Famous for the same reason a God or any other popular figure is. Because her existence gives people a reason to talk and bond over something, to feel part of a group. She synchronizes the emotions of large groups of people, who now are not so alone anymore.
You like music as an individual as a side-effect of your own role in a larger group. If you think of yourself as someone apart from the group, you will like more personal music, like The Bells. But ultimately any famous music will have to produce that synchronizing effect. If Suno or similar services replaced popular music we'd indeed have the end of culture. But the AI wouldn't be operating the transformation, it would be our deeply individualistic values here in the west leveraging AI as a tool to only like something only we know, while jealously and irrationally keeping it only for ourselves. After all, "no one else could ever like it."
Also, i must further note that like so many people living today you've fallen for the "there’s no stopping it" fallacy, nothing more then "learned helplessness", a psychological phenomenon our culture embraced with post-modern "end of history" fatalism and is reminiscent of the peasant slave mentality of feudal systems. Everything and anything created by humans can obviously be stopped. In fact if it isn't stopped it will destroy society if society cannot adapt to it fast enough. The Amish as a collective decided to abandon these dangerous tools long ago, and only grow in number while we perish at below half of the population replacement rate we need for our economies and societies to survive past the next 3-4 decades, even with rampant immigration. Soviet Communism barely a century ago phased out the free market as a whole just like that. There are still people alive who lived through most of that. Just like demographics is reaching an inflexion point, so is technology. And past that, change is not only possible, it's inevitable. Watch what happens when the founding myth of our civilization, that technology frees us, is turned on its head.