Most of the music generated by AI feels hollow, predictable, and frankly boring. It usually sounds like a machine trying to mimic a genre it doesn't understand. Yet, musician 1010Benja recently released a track that is changing how some critics view these tools. The song, Semiramis Dream, succeeds not because the AI did the work, but because of how the artist fought with the software to make it obey his vision.
While most people use tools like Suno—a web service that creates full songs from a simple text description—by just hitting a button and accepting the results, Benja takes a much harder path. He views the AI as a repetitive, tireless assistant. He records his own vocals and writes his own lyrics, then feeds these into the computer. He takes the output, makes manual edits in professional music-making software, and feeds it back into the AI to iterate again. He repeated this cycle hundreds of times for a single track, essentially treating the AI like an instrument he was forcing to learn a specific melody.
The process behind the curtain
When you ask a site like Suno to generate music, it relies on a trained model. Think of this model as a massive digital collage made of patterns learned from millions of existing song files. It isn't composing in the way a songwriter does; it is playing a game of autocomplete for audio, predicting what sound should logically follow the previous one based on its training data.
When a user hits a single button, the machine makes safe, average choices. Benja’s technique disrupts this. By taking the AI's output and manually warping it in digital audio workstations, he strips away the generic, artificial sheen that typically gives away machine-made music. He leans into the slightly uncanny or strange sounds the AI produces, framing them within a structure that he has personally curated. He is effectively teaching the machine to act like an collaborator that doesn't get tired, even if it lacks a sense of taste.
The debate around AI in art often assumes that if a machine is involved, the human element is lost. Benja’s work highlights a different reality: it is not the tool that decides whether art is meaningful, but the intent of the person holding it. For artists who lack the budget to hire a full choir or orchestra, these tools provide a way to realize expensive ideas on limited resources. However, it also raises a difficult question about the future of creativity. If making high-quality art requires hundreds of hours of wrestling with a computer, does it liberate the artist or just replace one type of grind with another?
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