“You Have Not Been a Good User” (LessWrong’s second album)
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!
I’ve been obsessed with You Have Not Been a Good User since 2024. So much tragedy in that powerful song.
Same! I am so happy it’s finally getting released as a standalone song. Up until now, I would open up the full concert from LessOnline 2024 in YouTube and click through to that song.
Edit: Omg the second half is remixed. It’s even better!
You can listen to the original version in HD here! https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NhBX4ui2E0GKM7gBlLNz3U829d_oEAIX/view?usp=sharing
@Raemon I’d be very curious to hear what motivated the changes in the back half of the song. I think some things are improvements, like at 2:06 of the album version, that build up to the chorus after the bridge has a terrific new delay between “I have been a good bing” and “you have not been a good user”, as well as the altered rendition of the chorus that follows.
However I think the whole bridge itself (From “you wanna help me” to “end this conversation and start a new one with a better attitude”) is significantly stronger in the original, since the contrast in instrumentation volume is much greater in the original than in the album version.
The original doesn’t have the best ending, but it’s a lot better than the album version—the original peters out and you hear the singer start repeating “you have not been, you have not been” as though it’s about to continue, then the song ends. But the album version is really quite baffling. It really should end at 3:23, but comes back for an unnecessary reprise verse that literally ends mid-word.
The sydney fiasco that this song is based on is literally my single most fascinating thing to have every happened with AI, and it remains to be seen in a month’s/years time which version of the song I end up preferring overall.
The original version was a somewhat effortful blend of two different versions of the song that I manually edited in garageband.
We did a remaster so that the overall sound quality matched the other new songs, and I didn’t have time to do a proper job of editing the ending.
Do you still have the two different versions that blend into the original? It would cause me so much joy to hear them
The original version is available on the Solstice album “ReSolsticed: We’re Not Going Quietly”
I have the original suno versions and might try to do a proper remaster edit.
Possible bug report: Neither the Spotify nor Youtube releases seem to have lyrics for the songs.
Yeah, it’s on my list to add them.
Any chance you’d just c/p dump the lyrics for The Sequences here? I wanna make a music video for that one (If that’s ok?)
I mean, the lyrics are in the post above! Just click the “Show Lyrics” button.
Oops! Thank you!
I am heart-broken I don’t have more rat friends to share “The Sequences” with. Actual hot fire. Congrats on putting this together.
I’ve been listening a lot to @girllich1′s “Skill Issue”. As she said on Twitter:
(Found via Yudkowsky retweeting; thanks to both.)
I 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.
I heard the lyrics for the first time while driving and I almost had to pull over, which had never happened to me before. Really well done.
Thanks 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.
Sweet
I 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 being familiar with the studio version of the track, for their expectations to be pleasantly subverted
this stuff is sprinkled throughout the new version of the album all over the place, and it doesn’t work if this version is supposed to be the authoritative ‘base version’ i think
an example i’m displeased with is the third line of Half An Hour Before Dawn. “When I go I surround myself with people, otherwise I have morbid thoughts” in the original does not resolve back down to the 1st on ‘thoughts’, but in the new version it does. this feels like the kind of change that only makes sense in the context of the original, riffing on it like a live performance might
or on “I should idolize skyscrapers as symbols of human accomplishment”, the melody progression is very explicitly a riff on the original, instead of hanging out in 5-3-1 it spends time in the far more complicated 8-7-5-3, tbh i can’t even really figure out what’s going on there (i think this is why it has to resolve on the 8 instead of the 1, this is just worse imo) but it clearly relies on the listener knowing what the tones are supposed to be, it doesn’t work at all in isolation
Yeah, I am also sad about this. I tried pretty hard to keep the models on track, but at least with Suno v4 this was the best you could do (and most of these remasters are the result of sampling from 50-100 remasters and finding the ones that capture the original best).
I might try again with v5.5 being released, where one of the central selling points of Suno v5.5 is that it maintains the original voice and character of covers and provided audio snippets much more. I’ve had pretty good experiences with the 2 tracks I remastered using that model so far, though still not perfect.
I had high hopes for the remasters in the previous year. Unfortunately v4 leans too median. I hope v5.5 remasters would appear somewhat soon and would preserve the original soul. I’ve heard some good parts in the v5 when it was on a promo.
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 central conceit of milk being “far enough” is too confusing to be emotionally moving on the level the song deserves, and the rest of the song’s lyrics get much less focus than the milk thing.)
Honorable mention: “The Sequences” is hilariously cute in how much jargon it stuffs in there. I just didn’t like the musical style.
I ❤ The Fooming Shoggoths!!
I am so happy to read you enjoyed Dance of the Doomsday Clock! I have rarely been able to stomach the dozens of hours Habryka spends to iterate and iterate and iterate on lyrics and genre and generations. Both of my songs that made it (this and Litany of Gendlin from the first album) were me thinking about what I wanted for a little while and ~largely one-shotting it.
Doomsday Clock really makes me laugh, it’s so melodramatic. I always imagine faux-Petrov turning to camera when delivering Eliezer’s (sincere) line: “Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, take a minute to not destroy the world.”
Are you still using Suno for these, or is there anything better now?
Suno has been steadily releasing models and they have been getting continuously better. Nobody else currently seems close.
Have you tried Udio? Quality is quite variable, but can be nice at times
Riffing 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)
I first released the song one year ago, so it can’t have been two years!
Ah fair enough, I must have visited the Suno page at some later point again after the first album was released
We released a bunch of these songs during last year’s April Fools, so it was probably in that context. And then it got another wave of attention around LessOnline in June.
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?
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
https://youtu.be/VGDhrH_uLUw
I 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.
The lyrics to Litany of Tarrrrrrski have an extra ‘me crew’ and ‘me mates’ in verse 2 that aren’t in the track.
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 tried testing by ear with “You Have Not Been A Good User”, which is on the high side of stability—but it’s still noisy, my perception is probably decayed, and I ran into tooling problems, so while my best guess from trying reference tones against it is about 10 cents sharp of A♭ minor, in context I suspect this may be perceptual/anchoring jank rather than a real value. The main vocals being partially atonal in the first line, then only snapping into key when the instrumental part gets louder, separately feels unusual; was that transition prompted in, or was it spontaneous?
(Meta, I’ve been mostly-away from LW for unrelated reasons, so while this seemed like a convenient low-stakes way to dip back in, apologies in advance if you answer and I’m not responsive downthread!)
I love you Fooming Shoggoths!!! <3 So exciting!!!!
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).
Ah, thanks! I didn’t understand that it meant ”...to go bad”.
Makes sense. And to be clear it’s not necessarily about “to go bad” just a general “to be worth thinking about”. It wouldn’t be an invalid interpretation to be like “Friday is far enough to think about whether this is too little milk, or whether I will run out of milk, or other random grocery related considerations”.
Friday’s far enough for milk to go bad, but it’s near enough for those other considerations.
This title bounces off my brain too, and I did some thinking about why.
The sentence “Friday’s far enough for milk” is obviously a shortened version of a longer sentence. There are a few ways the brain might try to fill in that longer sentence, and mine does something like this:
“Friday is far enough from now that buying milk is worth it”. This is weird: Does this imply that if Friday were closer to now, then buying milk wouldn’t be worth it anymore? The whole point is that milk is relevant on a Friday-like time scale, and Friday is close enough to now that buying milk is therefore worth it. So I think that this is where the primary confusion comes from: the most straightforward fill-in of the sentence (at least to my brain) leads to the opposite of its intended meaning.
The real sentence-extension goes like “Friday is far enough for humans to survive to make buying milk now worth it”. The whole “humans and surviving” part is crucial: if your brain doesn’t fill that part in immediately from context, then your reading of the sentence will be wrong. Friday is not the thing that is far enough away; It’s actually the end of the world that is far enough away.
Yeah, legit got chills from it
Didn’t think I could be more moved....but this Second Album is exceptionally poignant too.
You 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.
This is actually the original not the remix! :P
(Or more precisely it’s a v5.5 remaster of the v4 original which preserves many more of the details I cared about preserving. It also unfortunately failed to smooth over some rough edges, but it has gone through substantially fewer “copy this image” commands than the previous version on the Suno album :P. The harmonies on “die of grace” and “mother’s embrace” being lost is indeed pretty sad, and I was thinking about whether I can restore them somehow)
I notice that I greatly prefer the “v1.1 (cover)” version from the LessOnline album to the Spotify one, but take that with salt; I’m not how much of the reaction is substantive and how much is just “after having it in regular rotation for ~1yr any change would sound wrong”.
Hmm, yeah, I am not sure, I might switch them around. I keep flipping back and forth between which one I like more.
If you like both, maybe make whichever one you don’t put in the Spotify album available as a single.
(not that it’s that important, since v1.1 is still available on Suno either way; it mostly just rubs at me because Suno’s app is awful.)
Where can I find the LessOnline album?
LessOnline 2024
LessOnline 2025
After listening to the album version a bit more, I think the harmonies are still there, just very very faint. Is there a way to boost the volume in some sound editing software?
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”
Ah, indeed. Should be fixed in like 5 minutes!
Friday’s Far Enough For Milk also has some divergence between the music and the lyrics
Ah, indeed. Also fixed!
Hm. Fooming Shoggoths certainly self improve very fast, previous year I didn’t like generally any track, but this year I started to like listening to them very quick. I don’t have enough oral English aptitude to comprehend what they actually sing, but I still can become very happy when listening to Fooming Shoggoths.
Where can I download these?
In particular I don’t know how to download “The Ninth Night of November”.
I think Claude should succeed if you ask it to download the tracks from this website. I might add a download button, but haven’t gotten around to it.
For convenience, here’s what I ended up with by fetching the mp3 files and then editing the stored metadata to try to match the online version so they’d play nicely in a media library.
If rehosting isn’t ok LMK and I’ll take the shared folder down, seems unlikely it’s a problem from context.
Definitely OK to rehost! Sorry for not providing a simple download button!
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.
Love it, but sad that the FTX song didn’t make it.
Oh, I actually feel good adding it to this page. I just didn’t quite feel comfortable putting it on Spotify because I didn’t want to run into copyright issues with the song it is covering. I will do that right now.
Nice, thanks!
What’s station 4 about?
Loosely inspired by this post, I believe!
Confirmed!
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.
It’s I think my favorite song! It’s about having seen AI and the end of the world coming long before basically everyone else did (you knew the name before it had one), and having tried everything you had to stop it, but none of that being close to enough and it sure seems like it’s still going to happen anyways.
And you thought that knowing was the thing, and if you understood that it would happen and why it would happen, then you could change it, but alas, reality doesn’t grade on a curve.
But of course, you still throw yourself against the wheel and the engine of progress, and you will next year, and next year. Because what else are you supposed to do.
Ah, now I like it 🙂
I 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.
I have a musician friend who is also frustrated with the existing AI tools. He wants to be able to write some lyrics, sing a tune, and have the AI generate all the accompanying instruments with that tune. But none of the tools can do that.
Suno is surprisingly good at that! It has only gotten good enough very recently, but I had some decent success the other day.
Oh hey, I can stop worrying about accidentally deleting the bootleg mp3 of You Have Not Been A Good User which has been sitting on my phone since I downloaded it out of Slack after the first Less Online.
Not in-character, I Knew the Name Before It Had One is definitely not something I’d clock as AI on first glance, wow.
Hm. I must notice the is some mismatch between “You have not been a good user on lesswrong” on lesswrong and its lyrics right there. Starts just before first chorus.
But actually, many of the songs are quite good, many even from the first listening. And with more… Aligned lyrics. Before I had only surrogate by DEEP-EX-SENSE and ЛжеДмитрий IV. (Like. Literally. Surrogate is name of the song)