SUNO: Music and AI, a Rant

AI as it relates to music has been on my mind lately. I’ve been seeing tons of ads for a new AI driven music app called SUNO which has been lauded by users as a ‘powerful creative tool’ and advertised as something that will let you “make thousands of songs that you’re proud of”… There are many things which I have found AI useful for - I enjoy having ChatGPT as a copy editor to help me punch up booking emails and press releases, or as a research assistant to supplement/augment my google searches, I’ve leaned on Microsoft Designer to generate accompanying images for my newsletter, so I thought I’d give this a try…

Not 2 minutes later and I had ‘made’ an upbeat R&B jam about USB drives and spaghetti, a 1970s disco banger yearning to be Amish and celibate, and a country-pop anthemic confessional about peeing in the shower. The word ‘made’ is doing some serious heavy lifting here in that the sum total of my creative input was typing a sentence into the prompter and then the AI did everything else. There is a kind of novel fun to be had here, but after ten minutes or so I was left with the pretty firm conclusion that this application is not at all what it is advertised as. Rather than being a creativity tool, this is a creativity killer that promises to rob our artistic pursuits of meaning for those foolish enough to take it seriously.

SUNO and Creativity

“…reimagine your sound with powerful creative tools”

“Make music that matters to you…”

“Discover what’s possible when anyone can make music.”

These are snippets taken from SUNOs marketing materials from their own website and they speak of a tool that invigorates creativity and democratizes it by breaking down the barriers of entry into music creation.

I am creative for a living, so it’s worth asking: is SUNO an important addition to my creative toolbox? Such a box currently includes:

• the piano

• my voice

• pencil and paper

• a recording device (microphones, or just a phone)

• Finale (notation software)

• Logic (sequencing program)

• Protools (digital audio workstation)

Everything on my current list is something that allows me to directly express musical ideas from my mind, record them some form (written/audio), and allow me more flexibility to examine, edit, and manipulate recorded ideas after their expression. Through this entire process these tools help to organize, clarify, and polish the raw thoughts that go into a new creation, but the ENGINE that drives each of these tools, the thing that is actually creating things… is my mind.

SUNO contains some of the functionality of tools that are already in my toolbox, but the unique thing that it brings to the equation is the ability to reduce or remove my brain from the equation. This strikes me as badly even fatally missing the point. I’m not sure anyone has ever thought to democratize the ability to make music simply by replacing its definition with a more voyeuristic and vicarious version. While I’m sure some people can get their jollies by sitting in a corner watching the missus reach her ‘chorus’ at the hands of a cold and calculating machine, I (and my missus) rather prefers that I actually do things myself.

I am a little concerned for those poor corner-dwellers that even this may ultimately be too much to handle and I would implore SUNO to release a ‘beginners’ version where users can consult an AI to generate pithy prompts to aid in their song generation. Perhaps there even ought to be a feature enabling the entire process to be fully automated. Honestly in 2026, the year of our lord the flying spaghetti monster (may you be touched by his noodly appendage), the phrase “create thousands of songs you’re proud of” feels a little quaint; small potatoes even. Just as when JJ Abrams’ death laser destroyed 5 planets in ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ vs George Lucas’ pitifully singular contribution in ‘A New Hope’, it’s just common sense that impact and meaning would scale with the raw number. Why make thousands of songs that you’re proud of when you could make…

…billions?

Some of you may be detecting faint tones of sarcasm and contempt while I describe this musical cuckoldry. There is a not-so-subtle implication that SUNOs absence would doom vast swaths of the human population with an inability to create music, and this is just wrong. I teach music for a living and I have taught hundreds of students from all ages, walks of life, and abilities. EVERYONE can create music. Not everyone can be the next Herbie Hancock, and not everyone cares enough to build the skills required to create music, but everyone has some ability that can be honed and nurtured. The barrier for entry has and always will be the work one is willing to do. SUNO doesn’t change that, it just does it for you. How delightfully patronizing.

The Death of Innovation

It is the year 12,067 G.E. (galactic era) and the galactic empire that has stood for 12 millennia is dying. Technological progress has halted and the pool of workers with the knowledge and expertise to even maintain the current systems is quickly shrinking as quality of life deteriorates and large swaths of humanity loses the ability to progress.

The downfall of the great galactic human empire in Isaac Asimov’s seminal work ‘Foundation’ wasn’t the result of a greater enemy, a lack of resources, or a great calamity - it was a gradual, almost invisible decline of innovation.

SUNO cannot innovate, it can only create music that is directly derivative of the music it was trained on. One may argue that this is how humans do it too and while there is some truth to that, the spark of true intelligence and consciousness that every human being holds as a birthright is completely missing from SUNO. The human brain has created a history of music that has seen innovations, styles, techniques, and sounds that did not previously exist. 150 years ago there was no such thing as jazz. 50 years ago there was no such thing as hip hop. We are capable of evolution. It’s slow and harder to spot in the day to day, but upon viewing the tapestry as a whole you can watch dinosaurs become birds.

Every time we substitute SUNO for our own creative engine - our minds - we stunt ourselves. We deprive ourselves an opportunity to evolve and to progress. Not by much, but little by little our creative muscles atrophy. Let there be no mistake, creativity is a muscle. The fanciful notion that creativity strikes spontaneously when the muse inspires a great work upon some lucky chosen is utter horseshit. Every flash of inspiration comes as a result of the grind - sitting and trying whether you are inspired or not. I heard that Stevie Wonder was once asked in an interview “how do you write so many great songs?” and his response, “well, I write a whole lot more terrible songs, I just don’t show you those ones.” This story may be entirely apocryphal, but it is still true to its core.

Creation is hard. Ask any mother. Value and meaning come in part from the sacrifice and hardship that produced it. Our creative muscles are already beginning to weaken. This isn’t the time to prop them up with a delusional abdication of effort, this is the time to take risks, to be bold, and to actually GIVE OF YOURSELF.

As I mentioned in my first paragraph, I am not anti AI by any stretch, there are many places in which it can serve as a useful tool. But we must show wisdom in recognizing when our tools enable us to achieve more and when they simply substitute that achievement for something cheap and meaningless. If we don’t, many generations from now this promises to be the death of us. Assuming something else doesn’t get us first.