The Problem With AI Is People

I’ve started talking to the media about my new AI music project, and will reveal more details as those pieces start to get published.

What I can say now is I’ve spent the last 6 or so weeks heavily using Suno AI. And while I’ve found ways to make the models (especially v4.5+) give results that I think can be pretty good sometimes, my experience overall is that the product and user experience side of the service are pretty terrible. Which is why I’m walking away from it and deleting my account. But also because that project is finished, and I like to be able to make clean breaks after things are finished, in order to open up space for new things to come along.

Apart from a pretty rough ride using the actual service, I’ve come to realize something somewhat unfortunate after observing and interacting with other users in the Suno community on Reddit. And this might come off as harsh, but I think might need to be said out loud. I’ve become as a result of those interactions fairly convinced that much of the problems we ascribe to AI are less about AI and more simply problems of the people using the AI.

To put it even more bluntly: I think the reason that so much of AI music seems to suck, is that, well, unfortunately, the attitude and aesthetic choices that the people are bringing to the creation of AI music, well… sucks. This applies equally I’m sure across other modalities and service offerings related to AI. It’s not strictly a Suno issue, but for whatever reason, that is where the issue became crystal clear for me: sucky people make sucky things, whether using AI or not. I don’t really like making such blanket statements about groups of people, and there are always endless exceptions to generalities like that. But the amount of weird dumb infighting and pointless belittling and smugness that I witnessed in that “community” when people bring up legitimate concerns around the product offering makes me not too keen on being part of that community.

Maybe this is a variant of “looking for love in all the wrong places” and I’m asking too much from an online group of people dedicated to making mostly to vulgar, joke, or derivative songs. But I think we as artists can do better, and that our discourse needs to be better. That we need to challenge the limits and each other to get to where we’re going, and rise to the next level of wherever these AI tools are leading us. Probably Reddit is the wrong place to do that, obviously. Probably much of the internet is, in fact, the wrong place for that. But what and where is the right place? Does it exist? Maybe it can and should only exist in small close knit friend networks, Signal groups and the like. Those remain near and dear to my heart.

But the sentiment remains for me regardless: people with annoying attitudes and bad aesthetics make things that are annoying and aesthetically bad. And the problem with AI is not merely the technology and its many issues (and I believe there are many real & important ones). But the problem, like everything, is people. And just like with anything, you get out what you put in. Garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes… So let’s maybe stop putting garbage in, and see what comes out the other side? Just an idea!