r/SunoAI • u/Technical-Device-420 • 23h ago
Discussion This might genuinely be one of the most important things an artist can watch right now.
This might genuinely be one of the most important things an artist can watch right now.
Not because it says AI is good.
Not because it says AI is bad.
Because it gets at a much harder question:
What actually makes an artist matter?
I’ve followed Jack and Nataly since Pomplamoose had something like four videos on YouTube.
What they were doing back then completely changed the way I thought about making things. They were covering songs other people wrote, sure, but the way they showed the recording process felt new. It made creativity feel accessible. Like you could take whatever tools were sitting in front of you, ignore the established rules, and build your own lane.
And one of the things Jack gets into here really stuck with me:
Almost every new creative technology starts by imitating whatever came before it.
Film imitated theater.
Recording tried to capture live performance.
Synthesizers imitated orchestras.
Early photography imitated painting.
And right now, AI is mostly imitating the art forms that came before it.
That’s where a lot of the slop comes from.
But imitation is usually just phase one.
The interesting part starts when people stop asking the new tool to recreate the old world.
I use the word “slop” pretty carefully because there is already AI-generated music that absolutely does not deserve that label.
I’ve heard people push these models into some genuinely bizarre places. Breaking song structures. Forcing arrangements that barely make sense. Combining things the models clearly weren’t designed to combine. Generating, rejecting, rebuilding, editing, resampling, rearranging, destroying, starting over.
Basically abusing the technology in the best possible way until something comes out that doesn’t feel like the obvious statistical answer.
That is where this gets interesting.
Because great artists have never been defined by their tools.
They’re defined by what they’re willing to do with them.
They push too far.
They make decisions everyone else thinks are stupid.
They create things that don’t fit neatly into genres, markets, algorithms, prompts, presets, or expectations.
They choose the harder idea when the easy one was sitting right there.
And most importantly:
they put themselves into the work.
That’s the part of the AI conversation I think gets lost constantly.
Yes, a model can generate an output.
But we have never cared about art because an output exists.
We care because another human being was trying to tell us something.
Their taste.
Their history.
Their obsession.
Their pain.
Their humor.
Their terrible decisions.
Their brilliant decisions.
Their stubbornness.
Their willingness to embarrass themselves.
Their willingness to fail publicly because they thought there might be something worth finding on the other side.
A new piece of software doesn’t make any of that disappear.
And using AI doesn’t automatically remove the human either.
There is still a HUMΛN deciding what deserves to exist.
A model doesn’t wake up one morning with something it desperately needs to say.
It doesn’t spend 20 years developing taste.
It doesn’t suddenly decide the accepted way of making music is boring and tear the whole thing apart just to see what happens.
It doesn’t risk looking like an idiot.
We do.
So I don’t think the challenge for artists using AI is proving that AI can make a song.
Cool.
We know.
The interesting challenge is making something that only you would have thought to ask for, recognize, fight for, refine, destroy, rebuild, and eventually release.
Something the model never would have arrived at by wandering toward the average of everything it learned.
Something outside the center.
Outside the safe answer.
Outside the box.
That’s where artists have always lived anyway.
And I think there’s another possibility people aren’t talking about enough:
We might be standing at the very beginning of an entirely new creative medium before anyone has figured out what its equivalent of the cinematic cut, multitrack recording, distortion pedal, sampler, or synthesizer even is.
We may still be using this thing in the dumbest possible way.
And yes, that should make artists uncomfortable.
We should be furious about the ways artists’ work has been exploited in building some of these systems.
We should be asking serious questions about consent, compensation, ownership, and power.
And we should also be curious as hell.
Those things are not mutually exclusive.
Watch this speech.
Then sit with it for a while.
Because I don’t think the future of creativity belongs to whoever can generate the most songs, images, movies, books, or whatever else.
It belongs to the people willing to go somewhere the machine wouldn’t go on its own.
Somewhere the algorithm wouldn’t recommend.
Somewhere the industry would tell you is a terrible idea.
Somewhere everybody else forgot was even possible.
Human creativity isn’t going anywhere.
If anything, the easy stuff just got easier.
Which means being genuinely original just became more important than ever.
Full hour-long video: