Enshittification? There are music AI apps for that.
Your new favorite song may not only be written by artificial intelligence, it will be produced, recorded and performed by a computer. All in a matter of seconds. And you WILL pay for it.
This isn’t speculation.
Rolling Stone reports that a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup named Suno https://www.suno.ai/ “wants everyone to produce their own pro-level songs.” Of course, it works with ChatGBT. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/suno-ai-chatgpt-for-music-1234982307/
Meet your new favorite band.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RobotsMODO.jpg AlejandroLinaresGarcia
According to Suno’s About page “Suno is building a future where anyone can make great music. Whether you’re a shower singer or a charting artist, we break barriers between you and the song you dream of making. No instrument needed, just imagination. From your mind to music.”
The “Team” section of the site says “We are proud alumni of pioneering tech companies like Meta, TikTok and Kensho, where our founding team worked together before starting Suno.” Personally, I think that line up of companies is more indictment than endorsement. But that’s just me. I’m not an admirer of any of those companies or their “products”.
Further, the web copy tells us “We like to ship code, make music and drink coffee. Our company culture is all about music and experimenting with sound — from lunchroom conversations to the studio in our office.” They’re just NOT about music created by humans.
Rolling Stone senior writer Brian Hiatt asked Suno to create a song based on the phrase “solo acoustic Mississippi Delta blues about a sad AI.” Hiatt wrote that within 15 seconds Suno spewed out this:
According to Hiatt, Suno’s business model goes like this: “Suno appears to be cracking the code to AI music, and its founders’ ambitions are nearly limitless — they imagine a world of wildly democratized music making. The most vocal of the co-founders, Mikey Shulman, a boyishly charming, backpack-toting 37-year-old with a Harvard Ph.D. in physics, envisions a billion people worldwide paying 10 bucks a month to create songs with Suno.”
A billion. At $10 a month. Uh huh. Ten bucks a month to “democratize” making music by dehumanizing it with artificial intelligence. Such a deal!
According to a post on it’s blog, https://www.suno.ai/blog/v3 Suno released v3 of its software on 24 March 2024. v3 is its “first model capable of producing radio-quality music. v3 enables you to make full, two-minute songs in seconds and is now available to all users at https://app.suno.ai. Make your own song with v3 today!”
“We’re still in the early innings of Suno, and we’ll continue improving along the axes (sic, maybe hire an English major to help you out?) of quality, control and speed.”
“v4 is already under development, and we’re working around the clock on some new, exciting features we’re looking forward to sharing with you soon.”
The blog post goes on to assure the world that “Suno is designed for creating original music, and our models don’t recognize references to other artists. We are not here to make more Fake Drakes.” Yeah, ok.
Oh, but wait. There are little software goodies that will track whatever comes out of Suno, the blog post says. “To further protect against misuse, we have developed proprietary, inaudible watermarking technology that can detect whether a song was created using Suno.” Sure. “Watermarking technology” in the software that does who knows what else.
Sorry tech bros. I reserve the right not to trust you. About anything.
I did want to try out Suno, but you can’t do that without creating an account. Sorry, not giving them my info.
I did check out the Suno song-creating page. https://app.suno.ai/ On the day I looked a number of the artificial intelligence generated songs were in Russian and Chinese. Synthetic Putin and Xi rock is not exactly the kind of music that instills confidence.
Suno is hardly the first music creating AI. There’s also Google’s MusicLM https://blog.google/technology/ai/musiclm-google-ai-test-kitchen/ , Jukebox – Open AI https://openai.com/research/jukebox , SOUNDRAW’s AI Music Generator https://soundraw.io/.
There are enough AI music generating website that there’s even one of those “10 Best” type stories on the web: 10 Best AI Music Generators (March 2024) https://www.unite.ai/best-ai-music-generators/
Nearly all of these articles about music-making AI, and often many of the companies making the AI software, often claim something to the effect of “it’s a tool, not a replacement for human artists.”
Yeah, right.
Just because technologists can do something doesn’t mean they should. But that never stops the legion of venture capital-funded tech bros from continuing their quest to “make everything better” with their technology while enshittifying all that their technology touches. And banking millions in the process.
What we have to look forward to for a mere $10 per month is music created by soulless software imitating soulful human musical emotions and experiences. This promises us a future of music from machines custom emulating emotions scraped from the digital artifacts of actual life that have found their way onto humanity’s hive mind – the Internet.
At least for now, AI-made music can’t mount a global tour with ticket prices manipulated by a monopolistic ticket company’s surge pricing algorithms.