Music is too difficult for techbros
Their nihilistic quest to turn music into mere permutation
Just like the garbage can fire that is AI-generated art, AI music generation is not “democratizing” anything — it’s just commodifying another expression of human creativity to the point of extreme banality. In what I’ve started to think of as the “Mr Beast” school of startups, nihilistic, talentless techbros fueled by Silicon Valley entitlement and jealousy are stealing copyrighted work, feeding it into their embarrassingly soulless music regurgitation machines, then trying to justify it as a new and righteous form of art because it enables the masses to produce (almost) professional sounding music without any hard work. It’s like vanity publishing on steroids.
The sheer audacity of this belief: that AI-generated music is a venerable value-add to society, can only be understood once you realize the CEOs of these AI startups operate on a misguided core belief that the point of human existence is to optimize and squeeze efficiency out of every atom in the universe and that anything that looks or feels like real work or effort is to be avoided, circumvented, solved-for or reduced as a prime necessity. It’s like they have a very specific form of OCD regarding the automation of things. I don’t think they are just lazy, it seems more psychological than that. But you would be forgiven for thinking maybe they are merely professional procrastinators seeking profit in the business of procrastination.
After all, in a recent interview, Mikey Shulman, the CEO of Suno AI said, completely without irony, “It’s not really enjoyable to make music [...] it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you have to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software.” You can see the clip on Alberto Romero’s Substack note. The full interview is on Youtube.
Where to even start with that? Can he really be serious? He sounds like a twelve-year-old complaining about not wanting to do his homework, FFS. Anyone who has developed a grown-up appreciation for music, or who has friends or family members who are musicians, knows that music is a gift to the world that comes from thousands of hours of practice and the artist’s personal struggle with the joys and pains of human experience. That’s what makes it worthwhile to pursue and what makes it worthwhile to share with the world. And this need not be a form of elitism: just about anything that human beings put their mind to, any kind of mental process that results in something of value to others, comes from a place of individual expression, from the deep wells of our innate talents, learned skills, and usually thousands of hours of practice. We can’t all be artists, but we all have ways of contributing to the world and we shouldn’t be immature or destructive in coveting talents we don’t have or don’t want to make the effort to acquire. That’s how I see CEOs like Shulman — people who are refusing to act like adults and are willing to put our culture on a course to self-destruction just to reshape the world to be “fairer” to people who have no creative talent or perseverance.
Removing the need for musicians to play instruments and hone their skills is essentially diluting what it means to create music. Practically anyone can have an idea for a song, but it’s the fine-tuning of that idea through purposeful crafting — finding just the right melody, pitch, tempo, harmony, and texture — that produces real, copyrightable works of art. The AI industry is promoting a kind of fetishization of ideas — music that is devoid of any craft and therefore devoid of any human soul. To add insult to injury, some of these lazy users of tools like Suno are now trying to claim copyright for their works, completely oblivious of the legal and ethical quagmire they are sinking into. Are we heading for idiocracy?
The idea that music or any other art should be “democratized” to the point where anyone can produce their own masterpiece via something as intractable and almost effortless as an AI prompt, is an insult to all artists and a complete misunderstanding of what makes creation a meaningful act. AI is not democratizing art, it is in fact a form of theft or plagiarism leading to the devaluation and dehumanization of art. And really, what would be the point of a world where all 8 billion of us can each produce music that is perfect to our ears? Wouldn’t that just drive us into a solipsistic oblivion? Why are tech companies obsessed with the idea of making it so that it’s no longer possible for any human being to stand out and be special or noteworthy for their unique contributions? No longer content to optimize and automate programming code, they now want to program and homogenize the human race.
As a thought exercise, imagine a future where every citizen on the planet can create any form of entertainment perfectly suited to our individual needs and preferences in seconds: we are not going to gather to enjoy entertainment with other humans anymore or be willing to open our minds to art created by other people, because our own preferences will be too dominant. Who's going to a Lady Gaga concert when we can all recreate and remix her songs ourselves and forget all about her? Conversely, who will want to listen to the AI slop you have personally produced when people can produce their own AI slop any time they want? In this broken future, there will be no market for individual creators to sell their art — maybe we’ll all be trying to sell to each other but nobody will be buying, and nobody will be able to build an audience of thousands or millions. When we’re all Taylor Swift or Rihanna, nobody is. The numbers just don’t work because this is an incredibly selfish and stupid way to think about art.
And where does it end? Say we develop an AI music generator that is so powerful and so energy efficient that one person can command it to produce every song that could ever exist using the entire spectrum of sounds that it is conceivable to create and be heard by human ears. After all, when you boil it down, music is a mathematical arrangement of sound waves that can theoretically be calculated in all possible combinations. Just press a button, and within a few hours or days, you have a database of every possible permutation of music that could ever exist. Well done, amazing, but what’s the fucking point? You just made human life more boring. You just took something that humans have been using for thousands of years as entertainment, inspiration, and therapy and turned it into an algorithm that leaves us with no more mystery to explore, no more mastery to achieve, and no more magic to be conjured. Do you call that an achievement? I just don’t get it.
Unless you’re a nihilistic billionaire playing a game of chokepoint capitalism, of course, in which case, the whole point now is to control all the means of production, horde all the wealth and defeat all your competition in a race to secure obscene levels of corporate power over every citizen, resource, and process on the planet. To what end? Who knows? Who even cares? Our tech overlords certainly do not seem to care when they appear in interviews openly laughing about layoffs or the possibility that AI will one day annihilate us.
I’ve listened to many AI-generated songs and frankly, they are mostly uncanny crap lacking substance. They’re sometimes hilarious and entertaining for five minutes, but these are not quality productions worthy of destroying music culture as we know it. The kids might love it because they can create songs that mirror social media memes and shitposting — songs that contain asinine stuff that would never make it past censorship into mainstream media. An AI-generated song can have a catchy tune but be devoid of texture, will have weird voice glitches, and lyrics that seem to come from another dimension. It’s so fun and laughable that it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that this is all built on copyright theft and is designed to shift power and earnings away from artists and into the bank accounts of tech oligarchs. And I wish I could say that AI-generated music will always be shit, but the more money and expertise we pour into this rotten endeavor, the better it will probably get at emulating real human music, until it poses a major threat to the future of the music industry as we know it.
There’s not much we can do about all this except to push back on corporate stupidity and greed. Don’t use the tools. Criticize those that do. Use your voice on whatever platforms you inhabit to reinforce the magic and utility of real human-made music. Keep listening to the music you love and share that appreciation with the artists so that there are reasons and motivations for them to continue.
I’ll end this with some links to songs by inimitable artists that I hope will never fade because of the childish, incomplete thought processes of selfish, self-destructing accelerationist techbros.
Lose yourself in the soulful riffs of Black Pumas:
Connect with the emotional resonance of Teddy Swims:
Float away on the dreamy, powerful soulfulness and epic sound of Celeste:
An older song by Michael Kiwanuka, perfect harmony and rhythm and a song that’s deeply meaningful:
An older one by Paolo Nutini, which always inspires me and makes me want to start a revolution:
The awesome smooth jazz of Yussef Dayes:
Another on point article. Greta music. Never heard of any of them before.
The first one was at Abbey Road. If you ever get a chance, check out the old TV show, Live at Abbey Road. That place is magical. There were a bunch of great performances.
Coincidentally I’m listening to Shulman right now and creating a transcript to get quotes!