AI and Artists
Part 2: The Matrix
If you are hoping that the human face behind AI music software would be passionate about actually creating music, or at least sympathetic to musicians who do so, don’t look to Mikey Schulman, the CEO and co-founder of Suno, the AI music company. Here’s his take on it:
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. [1]
Is this what they taught him at Harvard? Taking “a lot of time” and “a lot of practice” were things that were a point of pride in my musical development, and still are, for myself and many others. Yet in Orwellian fashion, CEO Mikey implies that working hard at something is ignoble. It’s tempting to think: This guy is just ignorant. He’s someone who simply doesn’t care or know about music that much himself, and who has no emotional investment in whether it’s good or not. I don’t hold anything against someone who is ignorant about music. It’s different, though, if you are the CEO of a company whose product is, well, music.
After all, if you knew anything about music, what would lead you to make such a negative generalization about the supposed “majority” of musicians who don’t enjoy the act of creating it? Would you not know the simple truth that the joy and ecstasy of making music is self-evident in the musical output? That might sound idealistic, but it’s not really. It’s just logic: If people don’t enjoy making music, they can do something else. There are plenty of other career choices. I count myself fortunate that I do not have to financially struggle to make ends meet, but plenty of people do as musicians, and nevertheless stay musicians in spite of that, because they love music too much to abandon it.
My first thought when I hear someone say something like that is: this guy’s either really stupid – or really cynical. I imagine in Mikey’s case it’s a kind of satisfied, cynical ignorance. It’s an Ivy League, start-up kind of ignorance that will never know that it’s ignorant. Nevertheless, we need to stay aware of the big, shitty lie that Mikey Shluman is telling us to push his product. The lie – and the lie of commodified AI more generally – is that human beings do not like to strive towards something. We don’t like effort. Now Mikey, I know what I’m going to say won’t fit into your transactional kind of logic, but, with musical artists like myself, and with artists more generally, you’re dead wrong. We like to strive.
We love it. It’s how we grow. We learn something about ourselves as artists and human beings. That’s the first reward – a win-win, entirely self-contained. But there is a second aspect of striving: we are hitting our head against the wall, chasing after something and missing it, eating away hours and days, because we believe that it’s worth it for our public. We don’t want to give them a plate of warmed-up turd. We don’t even want to give them something that’s passable and status quo. We want to try to change the world with music. We may fail over and over again at that; we may fail our whole lives, but we believe that what we are doing has a higher purpose, because we believe art has a higher purpose. Making music for you might be jerking off with an app on your phone, Mikey. For us, it’s something more. Don’t oblige us to jerk off with you, and pay you for it.
