AI Music Generation Sparks Debate: Suno AI CEO Claims People "Don't Enjoy" Making Music

CEO of Song-Generating AI App Says People "Don't Enjoy" Making Music With Instruments

AI companies continue to reach for tortuous narratives to justify stuffing AI tech into virtually every aspect of our daily lives. Take Mikey Shulman, the CEO of AI music generator company Suno AI, who had some choice words about how he sees the creative process when it comes to making music during an appearance on the "20VC" podcast flagged by 404 Media. "It's not really enjoyable to make music now," he said. "It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software." "I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music," he added. Shulman's comments are astonishingly self-serving, as that's exactly the kind of audience Suno AI is hoping to attract. And in reality, of course, lots of people -- amateurs and professionals alike -- love playing music. If it were up to Shulman, it seems, music would devolve into an amalgamation of often copyright-infringing AI slop, allowing "artists" to create tracks with a click of a button. In short, arguing that the majority of people no longer enjoy making music is symptomatic of an industry hellbent on eliminating as much of the human element from creative endeavors as possible -- a dystopian vision, critics charge, of art as a whole. According to Shulman, Suno AI is aiming to make making music "ten percent faster" and "ten percent easier." "If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people," he told the 20VC podcast. But whether the resulting, AI-generated music will give listeners the same kind of satisfaction as creating music themselves remains debatable. Sure, creating your own bespoke track by typing some words into an AI music generator is a fun trick, but relegating almost the entire creative process to an algorithm leaves plenty to be desired. Suno AI has also been caught up in a number of copyright lawsuits, with the Recording Industry Association of America accusing the startup of training its AI on copyrighted recordings without permission. In other words, Shulman doesn't just want people to give up agency in the creative process, but his company may be ripping off the work of human artists as well. Shulman's comments also highlight a nagging debate surrounding the use of these kinds of tools: can we even claim ownership over the resulting music? Is taking shortcuts with the help of AI really what human music artists should strive for? Could AI-generated music even be called "art?" Users on social media were almost unanimously appalled by Shulman's remarks on the podcast, calling his stance that almost nobody enjoys making music an "absurd mindset." "It's very revealing," one X user tweeted in response. "The solutionist language just doesn't make sense for art, or for other things where the work is the enjoyment, but the tech companies seem stuck in their story." "What a dystopian future," one YouTube commenter wrote. "And lack of self-criticality is especially disconcerting."

CEO of AI Music Company Says People Don't Like Making Music

"I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music." Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of the AI music generator company Suno AI, thinks people don't enjoy making music. "We didn't just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or makes it 10 percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people," Shulman said on the 20VC podcast. "And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now. It's not really enjoyable to make music now [...] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music." Suno AI works like other popular generative AI tools, allowing users to generate music by writing text prompts describing the kind of music they want to hear. Also like many other generative AI tools, Suno was trained on heaps of copyrighted music it fed into its training dataset without consent, a practice Suno is currently being sued for by the recording industry. In the interview, Shulman says he's disappointed that the recording industry is suing his company because he believes Suno and other similar AI music generators will ultimately allow more people to make and enjoy music, which will only grow the audience and industry, benefiting everyone. That may end up being true, and could be compared to the history of electronic music, digital production tools, or any other technology that allowed more people to make more music. However, the notion that "the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music" betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of music, why people make art, become artists, and the basic human practice of skill building and mastery. Music is a form of creative expression that's old as humanity itself and exists in every culture. Babies will "make music" by clapping their hands and smashing blocks together long before they can talk, and they don't find that frustrating. It's true that becoming very good at making music takes time. Picking up a guitar for the first time does not immediately produce the joy of perfectly executing a sick guitar solo. You have to start from zero, maybe learn some theory, and build the muscle memory and calluses on your fingers. Some people enjoy this slow process of getting a little better over time and become musicians. Some people don't and instead spend their time becoming good at blogging, carpentry, programming, cutting hair, etc. The interviewer, Harry Stebbings, interjects while Shulman says the making music isn't enjoyable and compares it to running, another obviously challenging thing that many people enjoy getting better at over time. "Most people drop out of that pursuit because it's hard, and so I think that the people you know that run, this is a highly biased selection of the population that fell in love with it," Shulman said. It's funny and frustrating that Shulman can't (or pretends he can't) connect the dots and understand that the process of learning and challenging yourself is part of what makes music inherently appealing. During the interview, he repeatedly says that Suno can grow the music industry to be as big as the video game industry by making it more accessible. This, of course, ignores the fact that video games are designed to be challenging, that the most popular games in the world are incredibly competitive and difficult to master, and that most video games are essentially the process of slowly getting better at a difficult task. This is not a surprising position for the CEO of a generative AI company to take. It is very possible that generative AI will become a more popular way for producing images, music, and text in the future. We report on how those AI-generated outputs are flooding the internet already, though in most cases that output is derided as "slop" because it's low quality and annoying to users who find it increasingly difficult to find valuable, human-made content on the internet. Pretending that typing a text prompt into Suno makes one a musician inflates the worth of that output and the company. "Every single person at Suno has an incredible deep love and respect for music," Shulman said later in the interview.