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

[highplainsdem]

Source: 404 Media

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.

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Read more: https://www.404media.co/ceo-of-ai-music-company-says-people-dont-like-making-music/

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Go ahead, Mikey. Tell the world you don't know anything about music and musicians...

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. Playing music is already a super power. May become a rarer super power. . . . nt

[maxsolomon]

23. No, it's not a "super power"

Everyone can learn to play an instrument - most just don't get a chance.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

24. Everyone can learn cursive handwriting. Yet now, it is a superpower boomers use to impress youngsters

Except the youngsters are not impressed.

[speak easy]

2. Misleading headline.

The actual quote is I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.

Many serious artists would agree. It's hard work, and AI won't make it any easier.

[highplainsdem]

4. No, it isn't. If the headline had read "No one ever enjoys making music" it would have been

misleading.

Instead, the headline generalizes (as they often do) from what he said.

[speak easy]

9. Nope.

" don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music" is in no way the same as "people don't like making music" People do like making music - some of the time.

The clear implication of the headline is people don't like making music, so AI will it for them.

[EarthFirst]

3. Creating music; poetry; art is at the center of human existence...

Sounds to me like Mikey is attempting to market his own product by denigrating the arts in a very misguided way…

[bullimiami]

5. I feel like this will eventually lead to a renaissance of the live performance.

[Clouds Passing]

7. Stupid little manchild

[Lulu KC]

8. As my stomach churns

"It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice...."

[Basso8vb]

10. Bullshit.

[PJMcK]

11. He lost me at, "I think..." (n/t)

[CaptainTruth]

12. If you're using AI to "make music" you're not making music.

The AI software (computer, code) is putting together bits of audio stolen from songs by real artists & that's not "making music."

[Igel]

19. My analogy is a homeowner who has great landscaping.

And accepts all the praise for how great it looks.

The people that designed it, grew the plants, landscaped and installed it and maintained it ...? Shark chum, I guess. (Oddly and at a complete and total tangent to pretty much anything, why did "Dexter" never dispose of a body that way?)

I have students who turn in projects that are AI generated. "But I wrote it." "No. You gave my project description and rubric to an AI. It wrote it--building on the backs of thousands, none of which were you. You fail." "But I'll lose athletics eligibility." "I'll be sure to tell your coach that when he said 'go big or go home' you were texting and thought he said, 'Fail big and go home'."

[CaptainTruth]

22. That's a great analogy.

From an engineer with extensive architecture studies, including landscape architecture.

[JoseBalow]

13. ... says a person who doesn't make music.

[Rocknation]

14. Working at creating something worthwhile isn't SUPPOSED to be fun

"...It takes a lot of time (and) practice...(Y)ou need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software..."

Well, yeah, duh dot com -- that's why it's CALLED "work."

To paraphrase the writer Dorothy Parker, "I hate the PROCESS of creating, but I love the OUTCOME of it." Whether you're trying to come up with a song, a photo, a photo book, a cake, a touchdown, a cost/benefit analysis, a nation, plumbing that no longer leaks, an illegal drug, or a tire rotation, ANYTHING you aim to create as well as possible requires work. It's the END PRODUCT that you get to take pride in and possibly earn money from -- the destination, not the journey.

...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...

And with all due respect to the music industry's reaction to AI music, shouldn't the actual music creators get an equal slice of the pie?

IS it merely a coincidence that AI can also stand for anti-intellectualism?



Rocknation

[xocetaceans]

17. Or perhaps AI is...

...Autocomplétion Insipide (i.e., bland autocompletion)?

[FakeNoose]

15. He is so full of s-it

Musical tastes are circumscribed (dictated) by what gets played on the airwaves. Who are making those decisions? Mostly older, wealthy white males. What gets selected, recorded and pressed onto vinyl (so to speak) determines what will be played on the air. Who are making those decisions? Mostly older, wealthy white males .

Of course there are exceptions ... but the exceptions prove the rule: That the music business is profit-motivated. So many artists and performers have been overlooked all these years, because they didn't fit the mold or the demographic that the music business executives wanted to push onto the public.

Don't tell me "Americans don't want to write music." Music is being written all the time, you're just not listening because all you care about is making money.

[xocetaceans]

16. The part of the podcast interview that is mentioned in the article's headline is within a few of minutes of 22:17 in...

...this video. The actual quote is shortly after 23:17, but starting at the earlier time index gives more context to the answer:

When Shulman talks about game theory and all of the players, it seems that he is really saying that his company should not be destroyed (i.e., it is all about his self-interest, not about giving people the joy of creating music).

It may seem alarmist, but the future of AI runs the risk of flooding the arts with insipid and uninspired trash in the form of boilerplate poetry, literature, and music. So much of that could be created at such a low cost and with such rapidity that it might nearly completely devalue the art that some artists are struggling to make and from which they also hope to make a living. People have a limited capacity to experience music and other arts: if all potential listeners are overwhelmed by AI-generated trash, that might be another way in which human art may be destroyed and displaced. This seems to be headed in the same direction as Lyft/Uber/Airbnb in that some people have decided that there is a market to disrupt and that they should be the ones to profit from the destruction of whatever conventions currently apply in it. It might not be enough to prevent the flooding and saturation of the art world, but perhaps no AI-generated object should be granted any form of IP rights: that might be enough to take the profit out of endeavors such as Shulman's.

[Igel]

20. Ah, what even I would call "flooding the zone" with, um, yeah. n/t

[LudwigPastorius]

21. "...the future of AI runs the risk of flooding the arts with insipid and uninspired trash..."

The future is now. Uploaded AI songs are eating into the pool of royalties available for musicians.(which were already meager)

What a scam! Crank out an albums-worth of AI songs, leached from real artists, then sit back and let the money roll in.

https://dailyai.com/2024/05/ai-generated-songs-rack-up-thousands-of-listens-on-spotify/

[Blue_Tires]

18. AI is cancer

And we should be wary of ANYBODY regardless of politics who seems to be in a rush to bring in a day where humanity turns off their brains and creative impulses...

[IA8IT]

27. Agree

[electric_blue68]

25. As a Visual Artist: I -often enjoy- my Art Making, as well as the Results...

Of course, sometimes it's somewhat hard to (more rarely) quite hard to achieve the results I want; so I keep learning, and try to practice new things/approaches.

Some easier creating either happens because I have a natural affinity for certain aspects, or, I've practiced enough through earlier decades to have it emerge easier now. 👍
_____________________

I remember a ?FB item where an artist had ?a video showing them drawing ?water droplets on paper with the light coming from one direction, shadows going in the opposite one.

Someone commented how easy, and fast it was.
The artist replied something like: how many years of practice it took to make it appear easy. 👍🖊

[Mosby]

26. I'm sure Elton John just hated composing music.

Link to tweet

[patphil]

28. There's magic in the creative process, whether it be music, literature, art, design, or any other creative expression.

There is no magic in AI, except for the programmers who built it.
There's entertainment in having AI product a song for you, but very little creative soul.
Yes, the creative process can be hard work; filled with struggle and the ups and downs of birthing something truly wonderful.
AI can never give that sense of fulfillment that a person feels when they finally get it right.
How sad for humanity if true artistry gives way to a clever toy.

[sdfernando]

29. What a fucking MORAN!!!! /NT

[chowmama]

30. Does he know any people?