9:27 am. Greetings all,
I hope all is well as you’re reading this post. I almost forgot that I didn’t plan to get my monthly blog post in and, here we are, the last day of October. Nonetheless, I’ll begin.
As of late, I’ve been seeing increasing social media coverage about the use of platforms like Suno being used by anyone has access to it and can issue prompts into the app, to create AI generated music that sounds extremely realistic, keyword here is “anyone”. I’ve not only come across ads from the website itself, but other entities that sponsor the use of Suno for AI generative music. For a background on the origins of the company, you can read about it here.
To avoid this post ending up as TL;DR, there is an understandable uproar about AI generated music, as such that is created with little to no talent (aside from the arguable notion that you have to possess some talent of “prompt engineering” to achieve improved results). In addition, the shouting about the ever growing methods of web scraping (if you will) of human generated music uploads to train platforms like Suno, and finally the long going issues about copyright infringement and the many lawsuits flying about. As one example, I’ll present this one video, which has links to websites providing more information.
As you may have read over the last few months, Spotify (now in supposed redemption mode to some extent) has allowed for an AI generated music group called Valvet Sundown to inflate tons of streams across multiple playlists. Similar issues across other streaming music platforms have been occurring with gen AI songs doing the same over and over,
Let’s face it, get AI music is here to stay and will only proliferate as time goes by. Sync music licensing platforms are already using said music in lieu of going through the process of accepting and reviewing composer submissions for the usual reasons new technologies present – the saving of money and time. While the former process is in full effect, it hasn’t killed the latter long time process but, nonetheless, the impact is apparent.
Earlier this week, I came across a sponsored post about Suno on Facebook. The comments about men AI music production hate were well in place, countered by a few replies (one in particular by a younger user) that defended the fact (immaturely, by the way, based on rebuttals) that no matter what kind of musically trained skill you have attained prior to AI, if you don’t use and adapt to it, you’ll be left in the dust. This mindset is obviously felt by many in terms of using AI in general and is understandable because it is applicable, not just to general AI, but much of the development of technology prior. Since gen AI music will not be gong away, there will be a generation, correction – currently is and will be, that (as listeners) won’t care if the music is gen AI or not, let alone being able to tell if it is or not. This is inevitable, however, musicians and artists like myself will continue to express the concerns we do. A comment was made in this FB post that the same fearful mindset was said about drum machines, in that they will eliminate the need for drummers. I replied that while that statement is true, the comparison is not the same, as you must have some talent to program a drum machine beyond using any premade loops that it possesses, and even with programming and/or loop usage, you still only end up with a drum track, not an entire song.. Secondly, there is no AI involved, so there is no process it enter prompts into it for music to be generated.
The obvious argument is that music generated by Suno, much like code generated by Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, Warp, and the like, are products generated by AI trained on what humans have provided, not the human real time creativity, let alone the interaction of humans to create music. Therein lies the continual activity of cognitive ability offloading, and in the case of gen AI music, no “musical composition” talent needed. Of course, the aspect of having no talent to create music spans decades prior to this post – one example being use of turntable sampling to created hip hop records – different technology, same foundational principal.
Where will all of this go? Time will, as usual, tell. Feel free to comment (or not) as you wish.
Oceans of rhythm,
Fresh.


