Why I Deleted Suno
Last night I deleted Suno from my phone. I didn’t do this because of some noble idea about struggling musicians, nor because I realized that huge tech companies are evil. It began merely as a gut feeling that the app was doing something bad to me. Now I have to figure out what and why.
You know, while I wouldn’t call myself a musician, I do have a rather long history with music. I was 15 when I first became passionate about writing something that wasn’t assigned in school. This took 2 forms: journal writing (I am still journal writing after 33 years) and writing song lyrics. At the time I probably would have said that I wanted to get a job writing song lyrics for musicians, and the idea of doing it professionally really appealed to me. Music itself really appealed to me in general, and I begged my parents for a year for a keyboard and for piano lessons, but we could afford neither. But lyrics I could write. I saved up money from odd jobs and bought a typewriter. I typed up finished versions of the songs I wrote and hung them on my wall. I also made photocopies of them at the post office and sent them to musicians I liked, such as Soul Asylum (none ever wrote back).
At 15 I dreamed of making my words sing. Over the course of time I learned to play a few instruments in an amateur way. As an adult I bought a keyboard and took lessons. I was in choir. I had a vocal coach. I learned treble clef, bass clef, and even alto. I took a class on music composition. I wrote instrumental songs on sheet music. But music, you might say, came too late for me. By the time I had the means to develop myself musically, I was already on a path to become an English professor, I was already writing prose. My lyric writing eventually evolved into poetry, and then even this got absorbed into my prose.
I say all this because it isn’t as though I just picked up Suno with no background or interest in music. I have no regrets in life, but I have often felt that there was an alternative life where I had chosen to express myself and my words musically.
Some of this I talked about in my video, AI and the Creator, where I felt uncertain after making my first serious AI song. I say serious only in the sense that I worked hard on the lyrics and in trying to make the AI create what I was hearing in my head. Even though I ended up with over 30 versions of that song before I was happy, I certainly didn’t work hard in the musical part of the song.
When I made that video, I was uncertain. I liked the song. It gave me pleasure. I wasn’t trying to take any credit for the music part and was open about it being from Suno. But there was like this lurking suspicion.
I went back and forth, and both sides of the argument seemed reasonable to me:
Using AI to generate art is anathema to the act of human creation. Even if you do not claim ownership over the music itself (only the lyrics), it is a slap in the face to every musician. It is a shortcut, a cheat. And even the lyrics that you wrote are now tarnished and suspect, because they have become enmeshed into this generative, machine creation. If you are proud of the lyrics, great. Share the lyrics. Find a musician. Sing them yourself or collaborate with humans. This is the pure path of art. This is the way things should be. Do not fall into this trend of AI garbage.
I enjoyed making the song. I have had songs stuck inside of me for over 30 years. It is allowing legitimate expression that would otherwise be trapped. There is something good in merely creative play, in making things for the fun of it.
But this is the issue. “Making things for the fun of it.” I didn’t make that song. Even though there is a part of my brain that keeps telling me I did. If I had handed those lyrics to a musician, a real one, and told him what I envisioned, and he came back to me with this amazing musical interpretation of the lyrics, and sung his heart out on the words, would I say I made the song? Would I claim the song? I think I would feel the song was more his than mine, but that I had played a part in it. I had made something with another human. With Suno, there isn’t another human that can claim part ownership. And there is a VERY REAL temptation to claim the song as my own creation. I am not going to pretend otherwise. There is the urge to say, oh yeah, I made the music digitally (I didn’t...this isn’t even Fruity Loops we are talking about).
And this raises a lot of questions about the way digital tools have been creeping into music for a long time, but I won’t get into all that. Because here is how I slice it.
Let’s think about Johnny Cash. I love Johnny Cash. He was an amazing musician and singer. And then in his later life, he sort of had a second version of himself, a second musical career. And this version was stripped down from all the big music elements. It was just him and a guitar. And in many of those songs, the guitar part is very sparse. It is mostly just his voice. And his voice is not as strong as it was when he was younger. And still. And still!
What he made was brilliant. Some of those songs, even after hearing them hundreds of times, can bring tears to my eyes. They send shivers through my body.
See, Cash didn’t need anything. He was an artist. You take me, you take away Suno, what am I? A guy that can write some lyrics. I can sing okay. I can clumsily play a chord progression on a piano (probably, it has been ages now). I do not have the talent. And that is okay. I didn’t earn it. It is a fake simulation of talent.
But that again makes it sound like I deleted Suno for noble reasons. Do not put any nobility upon me. I deleted it because last night I had this nauseous feeling in my gut.
I was becoming obsessed with making these songs. The payoff was so fast! I could come up with an idea for a song, and within an hour it would be fully realized. Amazing! And the technology really is amazing in terms of its ingenuity. So are hydrogen bombs.
It began to affect my writing. That was the blasphemous line for me. I was slowly working along, crafting my words, and then I would have the thought, hey, you could make a song out of this idea, or this scene. It became this itch in my brain. I don’t know if it is the dopamine hit or what.
Now, I will admit that I am very sensitive when it comes to art and creation. After all, I have dedicated my entire life to it. And my chosen mode of expression (books) is very slow. One of my books took four years. That is a very slow payoff. But for all of my books, when I finally completed them, when I knew the final-final-final draft was finally done and I could turn to publishing it, there was a deep feeling of satisfaction.
And I think Suno was stealing this.
Not to be overly dramatic, but I think the feeling is similar to the way that drugs can create an artificial high and joy that we do not find elsewhere in our lives. I have, unfortunately, seen drugs eat up people I love. And outside of the drugs, their lives are often dull and shadowy. Because the drugs kind of eat the joy from the rest. I think AI may do this to us, or at least to me.
And I am talking here specifically about using AI for generating art. I still will happily use AI to help me find books on a topic, or for other utilitarian purposes.
Suno is a fake substitute for musical creation. Some people use GPT to fake writing articles or even books. It is no different than students who use AI to cheat through school. We want the results, the praise, and none of the hardship. None of the work.
But I keep coming back to Johnny Cash. He didn’t need a machine. He was an artist. Years of thinking about music, playing, composing...it changed him fundamentally. And I know this is true of me also. Years of writing and studying writing and teaching writing, it has completely rewired my brain. Without Suno, I am musically impotent. But give me a pencil and a notebook, and I can write you an essay or a novel. My brain, unconsciously and consciously, knows how words work.
I’m not trying to convince you that Suno is evil or anything like that. This is merely my experience as I continue struggling with this AI world I find myself in. After deleting Suno, I suddenly had the urge to “touch grass,” as the young people like to say. I wanted to paint a Warhammer miniature. I wanted to go hit the gym. Take a walk. Play a board game with my son. I wanted to write in a notebook, or at least in a simple program. I wanted to strip down.
And I am still feeling this way. I spent the rest of my evening reading a book. A paper book. I underlined things that jumped out at me. I wrote in the margins. No one would see these things. They would make no claims of grand creation. No money or clout would come from my annotations. But I felt...the activity was better for my soul.
Now, time to go spend hours painting a space marine no one will ever see.
