For Fun Or For Beauty?

Thanks to a link on MetaFilter, recently I watched a masterful long-form video by jazz bassist and YouTuber Adam Neely entitled “Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future”. Suno is the technology company that has become the biggest powerhouse in AI music. A usual workflow with Suno is to give it some text prompts describing the characteristics of the music you want and perhaps some lyrics and then Suno will take that and generate a fully instrumented song for you.

Needless to say, Neely is not a fan.

Commercial generative AI is bad in ways which are different from other disruptive music technologies of the past, like MIDI sequencing and samplers, because there is a sociopolitical agenda behind its adoption. This agenda will be bad for musicians, it will be bad for music lovers, and it will leave us feeling more alienated and alone…Like any culture war, it’s a distraction from the real war, the class war. You see, there is a class of techno-capitalists who are currently using generative AI as a means of wealth extraction. They do this by circumventing intellectual property laws…

Fifty-nine minutes into the video, Neely links AI music to technofuturist movements past and present. He discusses the Italian futurists, in particular Filippo Marinetti who in 1909 pens The Futurist Manifesto. Nine years later he goes on to write the original Fascist Manifesto. Today’s technocapitalists such as Marc Andreessen view Marinetti as a patron saint. Theirs is the same worldview that produces abominations such as Reflect Orbital’s plan.

Suno describes their core values as being “Music, Impatience, Aesthetics, and Fun”. Adam would replace these values with Service, Patience, Craft, and Beauty.

Neely believes generative AI will cause music to split into two different art forms, just as theatre and cinema are different but related art forms. These will be live and recorded music, and he has a lot of hope for the future of live music.