Is Music Just Sound? A creative technologist's perspective on AI-generated music.

An essay in which the author, someone deeply invested in both music and technology, explores why AI music bothers him; he does this first by examining the status quo, then by attempting to steelman the pro-AI argument, and finally by explaining why he feels that argument is still insufficient.

There's a quiz near the beginning that A/B-tests you to see if you can distinguish which of two music clips is AI-generated and which is "human-generated". My degrees are in music, so I expected to do decently well, which I did (4 out of 5), but it was still tricky, even having encountered plenty of this stuff before.

Selected quotes and thoughts:

The steelman:

I want to make the strongest possible case I can for the other side. The technology is genuinely remarkable on a technical level, and music has survived every disruption people said would kill it. Why should this be any different? (...)

History shows an interplay between technology and art. It's true that technology does disrupt and displace, but it also creates new opportunities and new forms of expression. (...)

These disruptions have never been painless. (...) The interplay between technology and music is a constant tension, sometimes breaking barriers, and sometimes creating new ones. Good music has always found a way to survive.

Mikey Shulman, the CEO of Suno, describes their goal as "first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music". It's hard to dismiss that vision in isolation.

(...) The desire to make music is real and widespread. The barrier, for many people, is the difficulty of the craft. For some populations, such as those with disabilities, that barrier is even higher.

A tool that helps professionals work faster, amateurs create more easily, and enables people who might never otherwise make music is undeniably powerful. Just like photography ended up expanding the visual arts, new technology can expand music.

On why people make music:

"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 time they spend making music." - Mikey Shulman, CEO of Suno, January 2025

But that's not how making music works, at least not in my experience. The idea doesn't really exist in isolation before the process, just waiting to be expressed by a series of vague text prompts. You find it by playing, by making mistakes, by following something unexpected.

A tool that jumps straight to the output short-circuits all of that. The output arrives before any discovery can happen. This treats creativity as a productivity or "content creation" problem, where getting to the output as easily as possible is the goal.

This reminds me of the conversation around creation vs. maintenance. People want to be the ones who make things, not the ones doing the unglamorous work of making sure those things keep running day after week after month after year. The quote from Schulman seems, to me, to further clarify what the sentiment at work actually is - some people want to be the ones who have made things. Neither the first nor last step of the process (creation -> production -> maintenance) are valued by people who think as Schulman describes, yet all three are critical.

[a good visual illustration that you really should click through to see]

Responding to comparisons to previous revolutions in technology and the arts:

Advocates will sometimes compare AI music's effect on music to photography's effect on visual art as a way to suggest that resistance to new technology is just fear of change. But photography created something new and announced itself as such. Shulman has said it "doesn't make sense to have an AI world and a non-AI world of music". The goal is indistinguishability, not a new medium. And unlike photography, which built its own identity from scratch, AI music was trained on the entire corpus of human music without consent and now competes directly with the people it learned from. There's no reason to think that new technology will always yield the same positive outcomes as it has in the past. [emphasis added]

There's a clear difference in scale when we compare AI music generation to historic technological disruptions in music. Drum machines and samplers didn't autonomously generate 7 million songs a day and distribute them to streaming platforms with most of us being unaware.

On "everyone should be able to do everything" and the value of being a listener/observer:

Being a listener, a viewer, or a reader is its own complete relationship with art, not just a consolation prize for people who never learned the craft. The hunger AI music claims to satisfy might just be misdescribed. It's rarely "I need to be able to immediately generate my own version of this". More often it's "I want more of this feeling", and for that, human-made music already has an answer.

On creative atrophy:

Over time, it may accelerate our deskilling and make creative work feel more like playing a slot machine, prompting and regenerating until something sounds right.

This made me think of my experiences using city map generators for my D&D worlds. It's cool to have a fascinating product at the end, which I can then build on top of to expand the setting, but to be perfectly honest, the time spent rerolling the generators dozens of times (and then afterward deciding which result is least inaccurate) mostly just sucks. A much better arrangement would be having a tool that allowed me as much control as I'm able to exercise with my limited skills and then filled in the remaining blanks. I'd get to actually somewhat realize my vision and express myself, but not have to devote dozens or hundreds of hours of my limited time to developing a skill that isn't high on my list of things I care about. Flipping a few toggles (or, as in the case of Suno, writing a couple sentences) and hitting "generate" isn't going to do that for me.

AI music generation as Suno sells it is more like asking someone else to put a puzzle together for you entirely. If you have to "learn" the song after it's already made, something else created it.

On hyper-personalization and its effects on culture:

(...) "taste tautology", a feedback loop where recommendation algorithms reinforce prior preferences so strongly that listeners find themselves trapped in an endless loop of the same artists and the same sounds. UNESCO's 2025 report on AI and culture warned that these systems risk fostering monocultures, filtering out minority voices and experimental sounds that don't immediately match a user's prior data.

All of these generative systems have (to varying degrees) the characteristic that their outputs trend toward the average and smooth out all the wrinkles and blemishes that give things texture and resonance. It feels fitting that one of the peripheral systems in their environment (recommendation algorithms) does the same thing. "Average" will never work for enough people (especially if that average is not even the true average; see the recent "Women should be able to open jars" thread). Disregarding personal preferences/needs is damaging when it causes someone to trip on an inconsiderately-sized stair, and it is also damaging when it flattens and sterilizes culture.

I find this vision of music as a disposable commodity rather dystopian. Music has always been one of the primary ways humans synchronize with each other, be it through oral tradition, shared playlists, or the moment at a show when a room full of strangers feels like a collective. When everyone's feed is perfectly individualized, there is a potential cultural loss that's difficult to measure.

I wouldn't want to go back to a world where new music was reserved for the privileged or the especially curious. But an overcorrection into having no shared culture isn't a good outcome either. The goal should be more people finding more music, not everyone disappearing into their own perfectly optimized bubble managed by billion dollar companies.

In closing:

There is a version of music that is oriented around how sound makes you feel, and that it doesn't matter where the sound comes from. That is a valid relationship to music, and AI-generated music will likely be transformational there.

But there will always be a version of music that is more strongly tied to artistry and human expression. People want to know that the feelings behind the music come from another human's story and lived experience. In the same way that paintings aren't just colors and poetry isn't just words, I think the output of music is just an artifact of process that is irreducibly human.

My hope is that the current moment pushes us towards that version of music.