We are in the Uncanny Valley

I did something over the weekend that I’m still kinda coming to terms with and I’m not sure how to take.

I am running a new TTRPG campaign. This one is using the very first game system I ever played, Mage: the Ascension, set in the 90s and using Severance as the thematic base. I’ve been planning this game for almost a year and in that time, I had the idea to create a Lestat-like vampire rock star who defected from the clans and is a successful working musician who’s too big to take down, who basically figures out what is happening to the player characters. And another NPC who realizes that this rock star, PARIS, is not just speaking in metaphors but is actually singing about real things and tries to use the music to connect with the PCs.

So, I have this shock rock, Marilyn Manson-style persona and I had already started working on what their music would actually be like using ChatGPT to compose lyrics based off this character idea and Suno to do the music. Over the weekend, since the campaign started officially on Friday, I decided that I wanted to have the complete album.

I used Claude to come up with the tracklist based on my notes and I gave it the lyrics from the earlier sessions. Once I had a list of titles, I asked Claude, one at a time, to write the lyrics and specific styles for each song. It did that and also wrote context around the song, why it was included, what it’s saying and how it relates to other songs on the album as well as what other artists it was inspired by and what the performance is like.

I then fed that into Suno, using the “style” input to add all the notes around the song besides the lyrics. When everything was done, I asked Claude to put the tracklist into an order that it would appear in on the CD. I plan to actually burn a physical CD and have this as an in-world artifact.

Now, let’s talk for a minute about the framing.

I understand that Suno is basically taking actual, copywritten music and generating new sounds based on its library of stolen music (we know it’s stolen because artists and labels were not consulted or compensated when the library was created, and there are lawsuits about that right now). I’m also aware that the guy who founded Suno has some pretty shitty ideas about how artists work, saying things like no one wants to do the hard part of making music, that’s why Suno exists, which I fundamentally disagree with (even as I’m personally using Suno rather than maybe making that music myself).

I also want to say that I believe in paying artists what they are worth, and I understand using AI for creative endeavors is potentially taking that away. I’ve always said about my own use of AI for art for my TTRPG games that I wouldn’t have paid an artist either, I probably would have tried to find some existing image on the internet to use, whether or not that usage was strictly allowed. So, for me, AI isn’t stealing someone’s paycheck.

And in this case, this is even more true — I wouldn’t commission a musician to compose an album to exacting specifications for an RPG I was running (unless I was getting paid for that game and broadcasting it somewhere or something). Maybe, if I could create the time, I would do it myself, but probably not. And probably I would try to cobble together a mixtape of stuff that kinda sorta fit but wasn’t really the right thing.

So here’s the part that’s disturbing: the album is really good. Like, I’ve been listening to it all weekend and singing along with the lyrics and grooving to it. It also is really good from the perspective of an artifact for the campaign — it tells a different story to players who are listening to the lyrics and enhances the world setting.

I’ve been trying to think about how I could like this. I’ve used Suno before, and I’ve always said it was disturbingly good at what it does, but with their new v6 engine update, it seems even better. What I’m telling myself is that it’s a combination of a bunch of things:

• that the style influences for the songs are ultimately tracing back to me. It’s my invented character with my choice of cultural comparisons, so the music it’s making is going to be based on the specific artists that I’ve already curated.
• that it works because of the story around it, rather than really on its own. If it was released to the world, would anyone else care? Likely not, because the subject matter is specific to this specific campaign. It would just be weird.
• that the lyrics themselves are honestly the weakest point. Most of them are not in any sort of cadence or pattern, they largely don’t rhyme, there’s a lot of spoken word. That could be a stylistic choice for a human but for an AI, I’m pretty sure it’s because it doesn’t get poetry.
• that I have some inherent bias because I was the one that…I can’t say made it, but prompted the music into being. I clicked the buttons, had the conversation with Claude that generated the specifics, so I’m going to feel some natural attachment to it.
• that the music itself is risk-averse. It’s creating songs based on some sort of median for enjoyment. It’s picking the happy path, the middle road, the consensus of what is considered “good”. It’s literally designed for me to like it.

Having recently read This is What it Sounds Like about the specific things that we connect to in music, and one of those things being authenticity, it is unsettling that I can have as strong an emotional reaction to something with no authenticity (because it was not created by a human) as I do with something fully authentic. And I’ve been trying to figure that out. But the other thing that occurs to me is a lot starker and more disturbing and upsetting.

I said that I wouldn’t commission an artist to write an album for me. That’s true, I wouldn’t. As a consumer-grade product, I can create music for me, that I like, and maybe I will choose to listen to that over real artists sometimes. But I immediately think of the trend in Hollywood to use AI whenever possible — for actors, for scripts, for everything. And for the most part, you can’t replace the humans. But if I am a Hollywood studio and I can use an app to compose a movie score based on the very exacting standards that I have for sound and mood and tone and not have to commission John Williams or Danny Elfman and work with them individually as humans (and have conversations with them and have to accept their ideas and creativity) and save a ton of money…I can see a world where that could happen.

We’re here. This is it. This is where we figure out what we’re doing with this technology. Because if we don’t make decisions about it now, our own creativity is going to be leeched from us individually as we just hand over that muscle to machines that can, apparently, do it faster and better and feed us stuff that’s specifically tailored to be exactly what we want. And that’s a very scary thought.