Adam Neely: On Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future

0:00 Intro
4:06 Challenge accepted
6:55 Three Questions
24:14 Why no influences? (deskilling/narcissism)
35:50 Profiles of the Future
47:54 Good uses of Suno
59:05 Futurism/Techno-Optimism
1:16:22 New Virtues
1:22:03 Final Predictions

Neely conducted an informal survey of his follows. Here he's discussing some of the results (c. 16:43):

Now, zooming back a little bit and taking a look at the answers to this 1st question, we see that nobody answered anything musical, really. All the answers were about saving time, saving money, and replacing friends. In other words, Suno lets you make the same music faster, cheaper, and lonelier. I'm not sure if that's a good thing.

That's pure Homo economicus, to invoke a term I'm using in the book I'm developing, Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution. Neely continues:

The 2nd question I asked was, “do you feel like you have a unique voice with your music when you create songs with Suno?” Some people said yes, but the majority of responses felt that the music that they made was not particularly unique to them. One possible explanation for this is that commercial generative AI can't really create anything new. It's just remixing old recordings. And so you can't have a unique voice with something that's just a remix of an old recording. Suno has admitted to have been trained on essentially all music files on the internet. What a lawsuit has called “copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale.”

A bit later (c. 20:21):

Now, the 3rd question I asked was, “Who are some of your favorite AI musicians who have influenced you?” “What about them inspires you?” Okay, so even though I kind of knew what the answers to this question would be, it still was really bleak reading them, because the vast majority of people, as it turns out, do not have influences.

RESPONSES: I don't have any AI influences. I'm afraid I don't have any. At the moment, nothing. I don't listen to anybody else. I don't know any. I do not listen to AI slop. No influence. I don't know of any. Haven't heard any. No one. I don't know any AI relevant artist. Not applicable. I have no idea to be honest. At the moment, nothing. I don't have an AI music influence. None. I do not religiously follow anyone. I don't have any AI music influences.

ADAM: Why can't people who use Suno cite their influences? It's strange, right? because if you ask the same question to any musician, writer, or artist who didn't use gen AI, they would be able to go off forever… on their influences! I think about, you know, the bass players that inspired me, Jaco Pastorius, Victor Wooten, modern-based players like Tim Lefebvre - huge influence. I love Evan Marien. I don't know of anybody of any skill level who can't do that who can't just be like, mm, mm, mm, “these guys are awesome!”

Neely goes on to say how very strange this is. The musicians he knows ALL OF THEM have favorites and influences. This Suno music seems to br narcissistic music. These people just listen to their own music.

There's much more in the podcast.