image by Suno AI — its suggested ‘cover art’ for the Yacht Rock song below
Several new friends and acquaintances have asked me to explain what I mean when I say we have no free will. It’s hard to explain in words, and pretty much impossible to do so briefly. So I thought I might get some inspiration on how to convey it by drawing on real-life examples of things we do that we think are our decisions and under our control, to illustrate how they are not. Never provide a powerpoint when a story will always work better.
And what better way to tell a story than to do it through song? So, feeling especially lazy these cold, wet winter days, I gave Suno AI a one-paragraph subject prompt, and asked it to create some stories for me, and then set them to music. No pre-written poetry this time — I’m making AI do all the work. To get some different perspectives, I asked it to produce songs in a variety of genres, to see if the stories the songs told varied significantly by culture.
I confess at the outset that the music it produced is significantly better than the songs’ lyrics. My best (IMO) music has come when I’ve provided Suno with solid lyrics, and then, somewhat surprisingly, given it the absolute minimum guidance on the music — what voices, what instruments, and generally what genre I want, but not details on structure, composition, time signatures, chord sequences, or anything about the flow of the piece. It doesn’t understand your explanations about that stuff, and I’m starting to realize I don’t know much about it either.
But when you just give Suno a sentence or two about the song’s subject, and make it produce the lyrics and the music, as I did here, expect that the lyrics will suffer the most.
Although it did produce some duds, the following selections, I think, are good enough to make a discerning popular music listener’s library. Even if you do think we have free will.
Here’s the best of these songs [Suno version includes lyrics; SoundCloud version loads faster]:
K-Pop Song — Free Spirits
[Suno] [SoundCloud]
— “No free will” means never having to say you’re sorry. “I’m just a domino, push me once and watch me fall.” The music is fun, the harmonies excellent.
Zouk-Kompa Afro-Caribbean Song — Out of All Control
[Suno] [SoundCloud]
— Strong voices. Great rhythm and harmonies. Interesting instrumentation. Awesome instrumental outro. Totally danceable. Some pretty amazing lyrics! “We’re out of all control | Don’t you put that weight on my soul | Wired to the rhythm, Locked in the roll | Heartbeat marching to a story foretold | We’re out of all control So don’t blame me” and “Got these ghosts in my DNA | Got this script I didn’t write today | You want a choice where the wires all cross | You call it freedom but the coin’s already tossed”. My favourite of these songs.
Yacht Rock Song — No Say In The Matter
[Suno] [SoundCloud]
— I have a soft spot for Yacht Rock. Rich lush harmonies. A little sentimental. Good chord progressions and nice fills. Could have been a Fleetwood Mac song. Outro has me playing air guitar and has a sweet finish. Lyrics meh but I’m singing along to it every time I hear it.
Pop-R&B Song — I Didn’t Do It
version 1: [Suno] [SoundCloud]
version 2: [Suno] [SoundCloud]
— Just fun, both versions. Remarkable harmonies and vocal fills. Lots going on musically here in every line, not just routine verse-chorus stuff. “I didn’t do it, I swear it wasn’t me | Blame it on the cosmos, baby, blame it on the chemistry | If every move is written then I’m just following the script | I didn’t do it but I’ll take the benefits”.
So, in two senses, whether you’re surprised or appalled by this music — I didn’t do it!
Beyond a vague one-paragraph prompt, these songs — composition, lyrics and music, arrangement and performance — are all just AI looking for patterns that seem to please human listeners and readers, and feeding the results to us.
And, since I have no free will in any case, even the prompts, and the ‘decision’ to write this post, weren’t ‘mine’.
I hope you had no choice but to find them as interesting and fun as I did.
If you’re interested in hearing more of ‘my’ music, you can find it all on my Suno page (slow loading but includes lyrics), or my Soundcloud page (faster loading, no lyrics). ‘My’ six best (IMO) songs, with all music by AI based on my prompts:
1. After Us — a song about my feelings about civilization’s collapse, and what might come after (lyrics mine, AI assisted)
2. If It Wasn’t For Words — a song about how human life might have emerged on Earth if we’d never evolved language (lyrics mine, AI assisted)
3. Everything Is Fine — a tongue-in-cheek ‘protest’ song about our denial that everything is falling apart (lyrics mine, AI assisted)
4. Only This — a song about radical non-duality and a ‘glimpse’ of the absence of a separate self (lyrics entirely mine)
5. Rise and Shine — a K-Pop girl group style song on women achieving equality (unedited AI lyrics based on my prompt)
6. She Knows — Celtic-style song based on the maiden-mother-crone triple goddess myth (unedited AI lyrics based on my prompt)
Just to reiterate what I’ve said on my previous AI-inspired posts:
1. I have a love-hate relationship with AI. When it’s used properly and carefully as a tool, as an aid to learning and creativity, I believe it can be very useful, and enormous fun. But most of its large-scale applications (like replacing jobs and facilitating wars and surveillance) are ill-conceived, immoral, incompetently designed and conceived, vastly overreaching the capabilities of AI, ecologically disastrous, socially disruptive, and extremely dangerous.
2. The staggering amount that has been invested in AI has absolutely no viable business case to justify it. It represents possibly the most astounding squandering of money based purely on imagined and improbable future developments and blind faith, in history. Those who have studied this have concluded that this massive bubble will soon burst, and those who’ve invested in it will lose their shirts. At that time, the window to use AI as a learning and creativity tool will quickly close forever. Our playing with these essentially-free tools now is not going to aggravate its abusive uses, nor will it have any impact on the timing or extent of the coming AI crash. So my view is: use it, smartly and cautiously, while you can; it will soon be gone.
