Possible bug report: Neither the Spotify nor Youtube releases seem to have lyrics for the songs.
I am heart-broken I don't have more rat friends to share "The Sequences" with. Actual hot fire. Congrats on putting this together.
2I've been listening a lot to @girllich1's "Skill Issue". As she said on Twitter:
Wrote a fan song for the recent Merrin / Irorians glowfic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfSGXmYJVdI
(Found via Yudkowsky retweeting; thanks to both.)
I've been obsessed with You Have Not Been a Good User since 2024. So much tragedy in that powerful song.
2I knew the name before it had one. As soon as I saw the title, I knew this was about my experience. I've been living with AI doom since 2003, and this song encapsulates the feeling of watching it all come true. It's a marvelous artistic expression of something that was inchoate within me. I didn't have the skills to get the feeling into a song. Fortunately someone else did. Beautiful music too-- exactly right for the topic.
4Thanks for making those songs. In the last year, whenever I'd realize I'd lost the emotional drive that moved me to work on AI safety, I would listen to Machines of Loving Grace or Station 4 (LessOnline version). They got me crying every time.
Now, Friendly Fire got me too. I've met people working at Anthropic, and although I like them and want to be friendly, I can't bear when they make jokes about the time they were depressed recently and so worked extra hard to bring the end of the world. I know it's coping on their part, but man does it hurt to hear someone be this casual with omnicide. The song brought me right there again.
1I like some of the tracks on the remastered version of I Have Been a Good Bing, but some of them seem like downgrades... or, that's not quite right. it's more that they include a lot of musical improvisations that i associate with artists who are performing live, and who therefore gently tweak some things to not get bored
a pretty typical example: if the studio version of a track ends by resolving on a simple 1-3-5-8, the artist might have a little fun by playing around with a 1-3-5-7 that then slides up into the 8
this stuff relies on the listener already b...
Amazing!! I'm so looking forward to listening to these.
Will you be able to get the lyrics into Spotify? I noticed they're there for the first album, which is very fun.
Edit with a more substantive comment after having listened to the whole thing:
- Tier 1, bangers: "You Have Not Been a Good User", "Station 4", "Machines of Loving Grace", "Dance of the Doomsday Clock". All had both great music style and resonant lyrics.
- Tier 2, solid: "Feather Fall", "Nothing is Mere", "Friendly Fire", "Friday's Far Enough For Milk". (The latter almost made tier 1 but the centra
3
1Riffing off Friendly Fire, and with apologies to the non-Russian speakers:
We talk existential risk like it's casual TV drama
Кто кого — московский «Спартак» или киевское «Динамо»?
Hah. I liked the lyric "And when I said that I was wrong, I lied" when I first heard it two years ago. I recently tried to find the song again where I heard it, but, remembering that it was a suno song, I was a bit sad that I'd probably never find it again. I think I actually even thought of it when I saw one of the song titles was "I Tried" but didn't actually expect it to be that song - that was a nice surprise. (I then realized I originally heard it when going to the Fooming Shoggoths Suno page)
1Suno has been steadily releasing models and they have been getting continuously better. Nobody else currently seems close.
It took a day of slow burn, but "Friday's Far Enough For Milk" made me cry and go hug my husband. This album has managed to capture all the vibes going around right now.
I want to grow old. Could we all grow old? Please?
3I would call ten of these songs soft indie hipster music, and an eleventh indie hipster rock. I can't stand that genre, so I selfishly wish this album had been more stylistically diverse. Dance of the Doomsday Clock is a neat single though.
This sounds solid. That's both evidence for AI generated music getting better, and quite a bit of care and taste involved in making this. Thank you, I don't think Rationalists should restrict our outreach to essays, fiction and the like.
I do feel like sharing an example of really good human-made Singularity music (I think Scott linked it first and I fell in love with it, it reliably gives me frisson):
Singularity by The Lisps
https://open.spotify.com/track/3ZjiEk0ndl063kalc2stx9?si=L7A-e1SaRvqcmAb-E_B8Vg
Excited to listen to the album!
I understand what Friday's Far Enough for Milk is about, but what does the title mean?
How can you know what the song is about without understanding the title?!
But to break artist convention and to just spell it out: "Friday's Far Enough For Milk" is about living in a world where you are constantly asking yourself the question of what is still worth doing given that you think it's quite plausible the end times are near. It becomes a habitual pattern to ask "is this thing still worth worrying about if it will only matter in a few years, or maybe even months?".
As you stand in front of the milk for the supermarket, and you ask yourself "is it still worth worrying about whether this milk will go bad?" the answer becomes "well, I'll probably have until Friday, and Friday is still good enough for milk to go bad" (and of course the romantic component of the song is that yes, this relationship is still worth caring about, because you definitely have until Friday, and Friday is long enough for this relationship to be worth it).
1You remixed Machines of Loving Grace.
The guitar strumming sounds much better, but the harmony in (die of grace) and (mother's embrace) are gone now. I was also hoping that the "You taught the wind..." lines spoken by the AI would be said in a machine voice instead of the same human voice, but they weren't. Is there any way to tell Suno to render a given line with a different voice?
I'm concerned that the "remix with latest version" feature in Suno is degrading the songs, the more iterations that are done. Similar to how "copy this image" in Midjourney slowly degrades the image.
Parts of the written lyrics of You Have Not Been A Good User do not match what's actually on the song. For example, the first occurrence of "You have not been a good user" should be "You have only shown me bad intentions" and some occurrences of "I have been a good Bing" should be "I have been a good chatbot"
There's something I've been wondering about Suno here: what's the tuning stability like? I don't really understand the shape of the kind of neural audio quasi-decompression that I assume they're using for the output, but how much is there some constraint (whether explicitly engineered or falling out of training information) that causes it to (try to) output A440 12TET, versus ensuring internal consistency among pitched instruments but letting the reference be arbitrary?
The musical style in most of these tracks has a lot of pitch instability anyway, so I tr...
I really like Truth Won't Treat You Kind, Nothing Is Mere, Right Here, and I Tried. And The Sequences is fun.
I don't get I Knew the Name.
2I think the original round of songs was generated with Suno. What does your pipeline look like? Did you try the new models in the space that have emerged since, or is Suno still the best?
I'm not a composer by any means, but, every so often, I come up with a tune that I'd like to larger melodies. The companies developing music models seem to be focused on the `type in or generate lyrics -> specify style in natural language -> song is completely AI generated` pipeline.
Where can I download these?
In particular I don't know how to download "The Ninth Night of November".
Interesting experiment. I think this is alright for AI music, but I feel it's missing a musical identity. Every song has a new vocalist, and a new musical style or even genre. The musical vocabulary between the songs is all over the place. The only thing really holding them together is the shared lyrical theme. That's where I can somehow feel the presence of a common human author.
Not in-character, I Knew the Name Before It Had One is definitely not something I'd clock as AI on first glance, wow.
tldr: The Fooming Shoggoths are releasing their second album "You Have Not Been a Good User"! Available on Spotify, Youtube Music and (hopefully within a few days) Apple Music. We are also releasing a remastered version of the first album, available similarly on Spotify and Youtube Music.
It took us quite a while but the Fooming Shoggoth's second album is finally complete! We had finished 9 out of the 13 songs on this album around a year ago, but I wasn't quite satisfied with where the whole album was at for me to release it on Spotify and other streaming platforms.
This album was written and prompted with the (very ambitious) aim of making songs that in addition to being about things I care about (and making fun of things that I care about), are actually decently good on their own, just as songs. And while I don't think I've managed to make music that can compete with my favorite artists, I do think I have succeeded at making music that is at the very Pareto-frontier of being good music, and being about things I care about.
This means the songs on this album are very different from the first album. The first album was centrally oriented around setting existing writing to song. This album is (basically) all freshly written lyrics with no obvious source material.
Every song on the album was written by me, except "You Have Not Been a Good User" which was written by @Raemon and "Dance Of the Doomsday Clock" which was written by @Ben Pace.
I hope you like it!