Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future

This is Mikey Shulman. CEO of the generative AI music company, Suno. Suno is worth $2. 5 billion, largely because investors believe in Mikey's vision for the future of the music industry. He wants to model it after the video game industry. MIKEY: I think that the music industry is way smaller than it needs to be. What if the music industry can be as big as the gaming industry? The gaming industry is 50 times bigger than the music industry, and it's because gaming is super active. …if you make music interactive and you make music engaging, People will pay for it like they pay for video games. Look at the video game industry. These are rich and engaging experiences that people have. And music, today, is mostly just listened to. Too much music is just passive consumption. ADAM: Now, in contrast to the passive consumption of audio recordings, Mikey's vision is to take generative AI and use it to sell the idea of making music as a consumer product unto itself. MIKEY: We are best known for giving everybody the ability to create. The thing that is new here is certainly creation. We have opened up a new method of interaction, which is creation. ADAM: He pitches this idea to the many investors that he talks to on podcasts by using this analogy of a video game. MIKEY: It's a little bit like a video game. HOST: Why should it resemble a video game? MIKEY: In some sense music is a game. It is interactive, it is engaging. It is fun by yourself, but it's more fun with your friends. To me, it seems like just crazy that music should not be as engaging as Fortnite. ADAM: Now, in order to make music as engaging as Fortnite, Suno lets users create songs in a bunch of different ways. You can prompt the model through text, kind of like chatGPT. But you can also sing melodies into the app and then it will generate music and chord progressions that go with your melodies. You can also upload demos and then the app will realize a fully produced track around your demo. Suno does not think of these as professional workflows, but rather consumer experiences. MIKEY: We are in the business of selling pleasurable musical experiences to people. …super engaging digital experiences around music. …the new experiences that were never possible before… So many more experiences are possible! …engaging, meaningful experiences… …way more valuable and fun experiences… we’ll start to see a lot more around meaningful consumption experiences. ADAM: “Meaningful consumption experiences” might mean making music with other people, what Mikey calls multiplayer mode. MIKEY: The most fun experiences. will involve 2 or more people. For lack of a better word, multiplayer. everything multiplayer. People basically hacking multiplayer mode. ADAM: Now, Mikey is a businessman, and he wants to find ways of monetizing these …meaningful experiences. One option that he pitches to investors is to focus on super fans. MIKEY: If you read the earnings calls from The major rights holders. There's a lot of talk of superfans. The next wave of modernization is going to come from increased. interactions between fans and their favorite artists. So we did this contest with Timbaland where, um, fans could remix one of his songs. And to me, this is like an incredible part of the future of music. I will feel like I am co-creating with that artist. It is quite obvious to me that people will want to pay a lot of money for that. ADAM: These are what the video game industry might call whales. people willing to spend a lot of money on microtransactions because of a hyperfixation on the game. MIKEY: How do we get superfandom to be a daily activity? it will be more valuable to them, and they will want to do more of it, pay more for these experiences. You should be willing to pay more for it, you know if you want to just be cold and hard and calculating about it the amount that you are willing to pay for something is a measure of its value. Just in terms of the number of dollars or the amount of time people are spending doing music, both of those are going to go up dramatically. This is something that we should lean into. And so, like, there should be a billion people doing this I think… HOST: (incredulously) A billion? MIKEY: Yeah, why not? ADAM: And Mikey has big visions for this product. He wants billions of people to use it. MIKEY: We can get a billion people much more engaged with music than they are now. If we can bring those joys to a billion people, then we all have created a lot of value for them. We will have up-valued music for everybody on the planet. A billion people way more into music than they were before. That's gotta be good for music. I basically, I challenge somebody to explain to me how a billion people way more into music than they could have been is somehow bad for artists. ADAM: Challenge accepted. In this video, I'm going to painstakingly argue what should be obvious by vibes alone, and that is All of this is bad. 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 music lovers, and it will leave us feeling more alienated and alone. I should emphasize the fact that I don't have any beef with the technology of generative AI. I think people can do some really amazing things with it. I also don't think that people who use Suno are bad people. I think, you know, there can be great joy with the technology. I, for one, sometimes enjoy a good

Meaningful consumption experience. MIKEY: meaningful consumption experiences ADAM: In fact, I'm kind of uninterested in the general culture war of pro-AI or anti-AI. 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… MIKEY: Yeah, we know that there are some copyrighted works in our training data. ADAM: …and then sell you back the gamified experience of making music. MIKEY: It's a little bit like a video game. I'd like to make it very clear that I think this is wrong. This is bad, and the future of music is in bad hands. So say it with me, everybody. AI music bad. (quote) The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of the countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of those songs were composed without any human intervention whatsoever on an instrument known as a versificator. - George Orwell, 1984. ADAM: Oh, yeah. So on social media, I asked 3 questions of people who used Suno. This was not a particularly scientific survey, but I did get a couple hundred people responding, and I thought the responses were very interesting. The 1st question was, “what have generative AI tools, like Suno, empowered you to do that you cannot do with digital audio workstations or traditional musical instruments? ” The 2nd question was, “do you feel like you have a unique voice with your music when you create songs with Suno? ” And the 3rd question was, “who are some of your favorite AI musicians who have influenced you? What about them inspires you? ” I worded these questions in a way that I hope showed how Suno was being used in the real world by real people. And I think the results are pretty interesting. For example, The most common answer to the 1st question about like, What does Suno let you do differently from other workflows? Was by a large margin, “It saves me time. ” RESPONSES: It speeds things up. Speed and getting ideas out. Speed. It's so much faster if I just want to meme at my friends. It's faster than digging for loops or samples. Rapid iteration for sure. ADAM: “Move fast, break things” is the Silicon Valley slogan, and this technology lets you iterate on ideas very quickly, which is why Mark Cuban, and other tech billionaires can't see why people don't love AI in the arts. After all, it allows for much faster iteration. MIKEY: When you make it easier for people to conceptualize things, they can go through concepts more quickly, they can iterate more quickly. This is how music will evolve more quickly. ADAM: This language of iteration and productivity is the language of product design. It's the language of manufacturing applied to art and music. Through this lens, like the factory worker on the floor, The time a person spends making music has no intrinsic value. Why spend 6 hours making a song that's going to stream for the same amount of value on Spotify… When you can make the same song in just 15 minutes, or less! That's just a really inefficient return on investment, right? MIKEY: I know one person who is a songwriter who had a lull in creativity, and after finding Suno went from maybe making 50 songs a year to making 500 songs a year. HOST: Whoa! ADAM: Reducing the amount of time it takes to get to a minimum viable product is all that matters. and I say this because that is the philosophy behind Suno, the company, and how they think about their product. MIKEY: Like speed is obviously good. Ultimately, if you're trying to invent new consumer behaviors, which is what we are trying to do, You need to ship things very, very quickly to get feedback from people. How many experiments can you ship to your users and learn from? That is ultimately the thing that the company will live and die by. So speed is very important. ADAM: This mindset is instilled into the product itself. On Suno's website, alongside music, fun, and aesthetics, they list impatience as a core virtue, which I gotta say, doesn't really strike me as a virtue. DR. NOÉ: First of all… ADAM: yeah… DR. NOÉ: …it's not a virtue. impatience, it's not a virtue. It actually goes against all of the virtues. ADAM: That's virtue ethicist and Platonic scholar, Dr. Mariana Noé of the University of Arizona, who I talked to at great length about the deeper philosophical implications of the widespread adoption of generative AI. and, how these companies are instilling specific values through the use of their technology.

DR. NOÉ: There's 4 big virtues, which are justice, wisdom, moderation, and courage, points towards which we need to aim if we want to be good human beings. Impatience goes against almost all of them, not justice, but it goes against courage. It goes against moderation, and it goes against wisdom. If you're an impatient person, there's no way you can be a courageous one. A courageous person is one that assesses the risk, and knows when to attack, and also when it's just too rash. The same with moderation, of course, moderation is about like controlling your desires. Sometimes you just have to wait, and you have to control your desire to see results, right? And with wisdom, of course, impatience is also about like throwing yourself to some something without really knowing what's going on. So it will go against idea of like making a wise decision. So it's not a virtue. It goes against all virtues. That's important. ADAM: The most generous read that I have on this is that “Impatience” for Suno means prioritizing action over inaction, and there is sometimes real value in working quickly and not second-guessing your intuitions. That's why it's exciting to watch Rob Scallon and Andrew Huang do their 1st of October project and write and record an album in a day. They aren't precious with their ideas and they work fast for some truly special results. I did a similar thing with Ben Levin with our 24 hour album streams, making a couple of albums the same way. However, I think about how depressing it would be to watch the same video where Rob and Andrew simply generate their ideas on Suno. Both them and the audience would be deeply cheated out of something, something hard to put a finger on. When faced with creative friction, like a deadline, Suno gives you the excuse to be impatient with the process. You don't have to work out your feelings of indecision in that moment. Suno can just do that for you. DR. NOÉ: So the value of patience, patience is just the moderation of your own, um, motivations almost. No? it's like... Okay, I want to do this. that. I want to eat that, but it's like, but now it's not the time. Which is what makes us different from animals, by the way ADAM: Yeah, I was going to say, this is a very core feature of humanity. DR. NOÉ: Exactly! ADAM: It's our ability to control ourselves and plan for the future. DR. NOÉ: Delay pleasure. Delaid pleasure is what makes us unique. ADAM: Yeah, and a big important part of teaching music or musical instruments to young children is just to show this. “You get to do this cool thing if you put in hard work and wait for that reward. ” Another common answer to the first question about what Suno lets you do differently…. …was, “it saves me money. ” And…fair. I mean, it is genuinely a cheaper way of getting a final product where you don't have to pay a mix engineer or a producer, right? Suno's head of creators, Rosie Nguyen argued in a Twitter post that Suno is great for low-income accessibility and people who don't have access to music lessons. ROSIE: I really wish Suno existed 20 years ago when I was a kid in elementary school, showing strangers songs I wrote with no way to produce them. But I'm really, really happy that it exists today for all of the other kids who might need it. ADAM: This feels a bit cynical to me, and I think a lot of other people in that Twitter thread felt similar. Because, of course, there is no material difference between Suno, which requires an internet connection and a computer, to any of the other free resources out there, free digital audio workstations, sample libraries, educational videos on YouTube, etc. You could make the argument that the free time to dedicate towards learning those tools and honing your craft is itself a luxury that people without means don't have, but to me, that's a much stronger argument for a 40-hour work week and a living wage than it is for generative AI. So if you're broke, please just do what everybody in my generation did and crack a copy of FL Studio and get to work. The 3rd common answer to this 1st question was “it’s like a co-creator, a musical partner, I can bounce ideas off of. ” People have begun to anthropomorphize Suno to a certain degree. Calling it a creative assistant or collaborator or even a co-producer We’ve started seeing people say their music was co-produced by Suno. HOST: that copilot analogy. MIKEY: It’s exactly that. HOST: You've got this like songwriting assistant that's like sitting with you and like you're workshopping it together. TIMBALAND: It's like an assistant where I do a beat and I'm like, yo, how would you take these drums and rearrange it this way? And I'm like, oh, I would have never heard it that way. ADAM: This is a line that you'll often hear about the professional usage of this tool, in that it's not going to do the work for you, but it might give you inspiration and ideas that you wouldn't normally think of if you were just working by yourself. CHARLIE PUTH: It’s like another human giving a human an idea. This is, of course, what a musical collaborator is, or put it another way… A friend. DR. NOÉ: For Aristotle, a friend is an important part of living a good life. So in his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle basically shares his thoughts on how to be a good person and live a good life. And he dedicates one book and a half out of the 10 to talk about friends. A friend has to not only be someone who you have fun with

and who's like, whatever, useful because these are the tiers of friendship that he distinguishes, someone who's useful to you, like, when you get a ride from someone to the airport or whatever. someone who you have fun with, which is like when you party, but someone who can also, in addition to those 2 things, also keep you accountable and help you be a better version of yourself. So a friend is someone that has that power to teach you something, and at the same time, also be taught by you. ADAM: I have a lot of great musical collaborators, like Shawn Crowder, Ben Levin, and Lau Noah. They're very different people, and they challenge me in very different ways and bring out different aspects of my musicianship that I would never have if I had just made music alone. Sometimes there's even conflict, differences of opinion of where the music should go. But by resolving that conflict, We get some pretty special results, I think. I am a better person because of those musical relationships I work so hard to maintain both on the bandstand and in real life. Using Suno as a musical friend replacement might feed into some narcissistic tendencies, because you never have to negotiate with it. You just take the ideas that you like and discard the rest. Generative AI gives you an imitation of what it's like to have a musical collaborator, but somebody who does not hold you to high standards, musical or otherwise. DR. NOÉ: In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle talks about how flatterers, people that flatter you are not your friends, because they're not giving you correct information about yourself. So they're just lying to you. AIMEE: Well, what if Bernie Taupin... hadn't ever, you know, connected with Elton John, and he had the opportunity to just enter his lyrics into Suno or whatever, like, where, where would we be? ADAM: Now, zooming back a little bit and taking a look at the answers to this 1st question, we see that nobody answered anything musical, really. All the answers were about saving time, saving money, and replacing friends. In other words, Suno lets you make the same music faster, cheaper, and lonelier. I'm not sure if that's a good thing. The 2nd question I asked was, “do you feel like you have a unique voice with your music when you create songs with Suno? ” Some people said yes, but the majority of responses felt that the music that they made was not particularly unique to them. One possible explanation for this is that commercial generative AI can't really create anything new. It's just remixing old recordings. And so you can't have a unique voice with something that's just a remix of an old recording. Suno has admitted to have been trained on essentially all music files on the internet. What a lawsuit has called “copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale. ” MIKEY: Yeah, we know that there are some copyrighted works in our training data. That's not illegal. ADAM: The legal defense for this, at least according to briefs submitted to the U. S. Copyright Office by Silicon Valley venture capital firms, is that using copyrighted content to train AI models is fair use. Now, this smells a bit fishy to me, but I'm not a lawyer, so definitely check out Miss Krystal a. k. a. Top Music Attorney’s videos on YouTube. She does great work on this stuff, especially with the ongoing independent musician lawsuit against Suno. But beyond the legal defense, the moral defense of this is that AI is just learning the same way that humans do taking a look at what came before, detecting patterns in it, and then remixing it into new works. This is quite literally what I've been arguing on this channel for many years now with regards to all of those music plagiarism lawsuits, right? Human artists steal all the time. It's how culture gets made and passed down. So what's the difference when AI does it? Right? MIKEY: It actually functions very similarly to how humans do. I'm absorbing all of the things that I know, all of the music that I heard, all of the culture that I see out there, and I'm finding some way to express it. ADAM: Well, one, when you say a model learns like a human, it's like saying a submarine swims like a human. which is meaningless. It's a category error because the scale of theft is so far beyond what a human could possibly do. It's theft on an inhuman scale. Two, human creativity is a process that can and often does challenge the status quo, and it is unclear if generative AI can do the same. This was exemplified in a fantastic question that I borrowed from “A Call for New Aesthetics for the 21st century”, which is If jazz didn't exist, could you prompt Suno to create it? To me, I think the answer is no, because jazz, like any style of music, has a unique musical vocabulary that cannot be found from its influences. In other words, I can't imagine any amalgam of blues recordings and ragtime recordings sounding anything like… Sun Ra You know what I mean? Something pretty massive is missing in that equation there which is what Ethan Hein talks about in this blog post. DR ETHAN HEIN: I love 1980s hip hop because there's no way to predict it from projecting trends in 1970s pop. It questions basic assumptions. It's missing elements that you might have thought were necessary (like melodies) and it brings in elements you didn't know you wanted until you heard them

(like samples and turntable scratching) Now that 1980s rap exists, it's easy to feed it into an AI is training data and get more 1980s rap, but there's no way that AI could have produced 1980s rap if it was only trained on 1970s pop. ADAM: I think this is why people feel like they don't have a unique voice with the platform, because it’s so heavily weighted to the status quo. Now, the 3rd question I asked was, “Who are some of your favorite AI musicians who have influenced you? ” “What about them inspires you? ” Okay, so even though I kind of knew what the answers to this question would be, it still was really bleak reading them, because the vast majority of people, as it turns out, do not have influences. RESPONSES: I don't have any AI influences. I'm afraid I don't have any. At the moment, nothing. I don't listen to anybody else. I don't know any. I do not listen to AI slop. No influence. I don't know of any. Haven't heard any. No one. I don't know any AI relevant artist. Not applicable. I have no idea to be honest. I don't have an AI music influence. None. I do not religiously follow anyone. I don't have any AI music influences. ADAM: Why can't people who use Suno cite their influences? It's strange, right? because if you ask the same question to any musician, writer, or artist who didn't use gen AI, they would be able to go off forever… on their influences! I think about, you know, the bass players that inspired me, Jaco Pastorius, Victor Wooten, modern-based players like Tim Lefebvre - huge influence. I love Evan Marien. I don't know of anybody of any skill level who can't do that who can't just be like, mm, mm, “these guys are awesome! ” mm, mm, mm. What is going on here? I know some people might say that, “oh, generative AI is too new for people to have influences,” which on the surface makes sense, but I do have my doubts there. For example, there are people who have been using generative AI in their workflows for many years now, like Holly Herndon. She makes some pretty wild, amazing music. but it seems like the people who use commercial generative AI do not cite Holly Herndon as an influence. There are people who are using Suno, like Timbaland or Xania Monet, for example. But nobody seems to be citing Timbaland, right? It seems like nobody has role models in the space. No musician that they can point to and say, “I want to be like that person! ” which is strange. DR. NOÉ: So role models are tools that we use to make decisions. So for example, if you want to become a famous musician, say… ADAM: I use the example Victor Wooten, maybe too frequently, but yes, Victor Wooten is a great example here. DR. NOÉ: Instead of making every decision by yourself with the limited information that you have, you can also ask yourself, ADAM: What would Victor Wooten do? I’m going to get a bracelet with that on it. DR. NOÉ: Exactly. What would he do? Because what he did took him to the place where I want to get. So what would he do if he were in my position? ADAM: Right. DR. NOÉ: So we use role models to, um, reason our way through life. And for that, um, and for that reason, to, um, to make decisions in our day-to-day life that will lead us to the place where we want to go. ADAM: Art movements historically coalesce around influential artists - role models. Jimi Hendrix inspired a generation to pick up the guitar. Sophie make hyperpop music. This does not seem to be happening here. Why? There is an Aziz Ansari bit from 2010 about him being invited to Kanye West's house after a show. Aziz arrives at the house to find Kanye West alone on a couch listening to 808’s and Heartbreaks, which is Kanye's own album. AZIZ: I was like, yo, man. Are you listening to your own album in your own house, bopping your own head? And he goes, “yeah, these beats are dope. ” ADAM: The joke, of course, is that Kanye is being comically narcissistic. AZIZ: And I go, that'd be like if I had a stand-up album, you came over to my house and I was listening to it going, “HAHAHAHA” “these jokes are dope. ” ADAM: Who listens to their own music like that? Well, the answer to the question, “who listens to their own music like that? ” is People who use Suno. On r/Suno, when the question was posed, “who are your favorite artists as listeners? ” the answers were… Me. That's the point, ain't it? Me. I created new genres. To be honest, my favorite album is the one that I just finished making. Page after page on r/Suno is people being Kanye West. Reason number one for no AI influences - narcissistic music. Many people now, quite literally, only listen to the music that they themselves have created on the platform Suno, not other AI music, not non-AI music, but just the music that they themselves are generating. I know I'm not the only one that just replaced their own Suno songs 24/7. I think it's at least 80% of my music intake right now. Yeah, I just listen to my music 90% of the time. If you're not addicted to your own songs, no one else will be! Listen, I'm very proud of the music that I make. I think it's great. I think you should listen to it, and yet I do not want to listen to it at all. It's very hard for me to listen to, just the same as it's hard for anybody to listen to the sound of their own speaking voice in recorded form.

It seems like people who use generative AI aren't encountering the same problem. They genuinely are obsessed with their creations. It's so true. I mostly listen to my Suno songs now. HAhaah This tracks, I mean, we are making the music that we personally like to listen to. Yes, my songs are top tier compared to what's playing in the radio. I definitely listen to my own music most of the time now. Why wouldn't I? Mikey, to his credit, warns of this effect as a result of hyperpersonalization. He genuinely does not want this to happen. MIKEY: Imagine you would open an app and it would just stream you endless AI music that is so hyper-tailored to you. just hitting that nerve in your brain. It's like a drug. And this is extremely antisocial. I think that would also be a shame because it misses out on a lot more that's fun. ADAM: But the evidence suggests that this narcissistic listening pattern is the pattern that's developing from people who use commercial grade generative AI. When everyone can make their own music to his own taste, there are no reasons to listen to other people's music other than to get ideas and prompts for our own music. Welcome to the future of music. Have you ever been in a car where people are singing along to a song where you don't know the lyrics? It can kind of be alienating, right? Like you want to join in, but they have this shared cultural knowledge that you don't. And so you feel left out. It's way more fun to sing along with people when everybody knows the lyrics, especially in contexts where you're singing with strangers because that's a way of meeting people and engaging with new people that you didn't know before. When the culture that we consume is entirely personalized, however, this is impossible. This is one of the reasons why people have no influences. They never listen to any other music. Reason number 2 for no AI influences, Deskilling. PATRICK: There's the process of learning that is slow, organic. And it makes you feel good when you finally get it on the other side. There's a certain thing about that you don't get where you just generate the thing and it's just there. Relying on it as a learning tool takes away your onus from the decision making process. You need to, it's taking everything that you normally do in here, and it's putting it out here. So you don't have to do it. As a result, this gets weaker. ADAM: You should know this by now, but, uh, chatGPT makes you dumber. It atrophies your brain. It reduces your cognitive capacity because it offloads decision-making skills that your brain normally makes to the machine. cognitive debt accrues, and your brain stops doing what it used to be able to do just fine. This has led to a frightening process in the workplace called deskilling. When decisions are offloaded to generative AI skilled labor turns into unskilled labor. The people who have specialized training are cognitively stripped of that training, and we're starting to see this in the medical field. A recent study found that after only 3 months of using an AI tool designed to help spot precancerous growths during colonoscopies, Doctors were significantly worse at finding the growths on their own. They were, in fact, deskilled. We’re probably going to start seeing a similar thing happening in music in the next couple of years, given the ubiquity of generative AI in the field. HARVEY: I have not been in a session in the last 12 months that AI was not used. AI is being used and is omnipresent in the creative process right now, at least at the highest levels. ADAM: That’s songwriter and CEO of the Grammys. Harvey Mason Jr., who is a big advocate for musicians getting ahead of the curve and adopting AI into their workflow. HARVEY: There's not been a session that I've been in that somebody wasn't using AI. to come up with a beat, to write some lyrics, to figure out what some different melody versions could look like, to try different styles of production across some chord changes. ADAM: My prediction is that this will likely lead to songwriters becoming deskilled the same way that doctors are. They will rely on the tools much more to make decisions for them in the name of speed or impatience. And their decision making abilities will become diminished. All that time spent honing their skills, gone. ChatGPT brain for musicians. Now, you could make the argument that this could lead to the development of a new craft or a new skill. Much like laptop production became a skill unto itself, Prompt engineering might become the new frontier. There could be like new rock stars of prompt engineering who dazzle us with their prompts. Maybe. Call me an old man. I am 37 now. But I have my doubts on whether or not we will get this. Prompt engineering in music, anyway, goes against a foundational idea of what a craft, a skill, even is. DR. NOÉ: I’m thinking about the notion of craft, we talked a little bit about it. ADAM: yeah DR. NOÉ: but craft means, for Plato and for Aristotle, knowing what the outcome of your work — your production —will be. And I just realized that that’s…. ADAM: [agreeing noises] DR. NOÉ: 100% what is not happening here. ADAM: yeah DR. NOÉ: So the example that Plato gives us is that a good doctor is the one that both knows how to cure someone… ADAM: yeah DR. NOÉ: …and how to kill them.

In order to have a craft, you have to know how, like, whatever comes out of it, you have to know how to apply the things, and you know you have to know the product of it. If you don't know what's coming, it’s like, “I’m going to cure it, I’m going to kill it, I don’t know! ” That is not a craft. It's just randomness. I don't think that the Greeks would appreciate the fact that anyone relates craft to AI, AI prompting because you never know what the AI is going to get you. ADAM: I guess the counter argument for that would be that in so much of music and so much of art great things are based on happy accidents, you know, like uh, “oh my god, this thing happened and I didn't expect it to! ” But then the counter to that argument is the great artist knows how to capitalize on that bit of randomness and knows exactly how to take that from that initial spark to the final product. Now, you could argue that the craft is lyric writing, which is an old craft, and sure. I actually think that's fine. You could make that argument. But Mikey believes that the future of music is not based on a person's ability, how well they can do a thing, but rather on their taste, how discerning they are in the consumption of a thing. MIKEY: Increasingly taste is the only thing that matters. And skill is going to matter a lot less because you're going to be able to make a lot of stuff and the people who are going to be recognized are people who are able to pick from the vast quantity of stuff and use, in the case of music, their ears to say that was good and that was bad. Now, I'm able to describe music and get something out, and increasingly, I'm going to have to use my ears to figure out that was good, that was bad. Increasingly, your fingers are less important and your ears are more important. ADAM: Mikey's vision for the future here is that craft, it's not going to be relevant. Deskilling, an issue, because, in a world with infinite music generated by Suno, taste is going to be the ultimate driving factor of music production. There is a Rick Rubin interview with 60 Minutes that came out in 2023 where Rick famously says that he has no technical ability and knows nothing about music. RICK: I have no technical ability, and I know nothing about music. ANDERSON: [laughs] You must know something. RICK: Well, I know what I like and what I don't like. ADAM: I think this interview had a lot of influence on Mikey, and therefore the direction of the music industry, because Mikey imagines a world where we're all Rick Rubins with no technical ability. But a strong personal taste that can direct music. MIKEY: I think that's actually a perfect analogy. Rick Rubin, you know, can have people actually do all of the stuff for him. I think about this as a continuation of that, where you need even less emphasis on skills and more emphasis on your ears. It gets easier and easier to create, and what that means is that you rely more and more on your ability to say, “I like that, I don't like that. ” There are a lot of people with great taste. great ideas in their head musically, and without the means to do it. Everybody has taste in music, even if they don't currently have mastered, you know, production software like Ableton. Everybody has taste and when you give everybody the ability to do that, Everybody likes to do it. ADAM: How good taste is cultivated or what it even means to have good taste is not even really questioned by Mikey. He just assumes that because there's so much music, there's going to be a lot of good music that gets to the top. This is the second reason why people don't seem to have role models in this world. It's because role models have skills that inspire us. We're inspired by Jimi Hendrix's ability to play the guitar like that. His taste in music is kind of irrelevant. When the craft is irrelevant on the other hand, so is the idea of the role model. There is no reason to look up to anybody when you can write prompts just as well as anybody else. There is no magic in what anybody else does. You don't get to look at another person and all the beautiful inspiring greatness that they might have because there quite frankly is no inspiring greatness here. And that's sad, man. I love having role models, and I love being a role model to other people. And I hate that this is the future that Mikey Schulman imagines for young people and for the broader musical culture. And I also hate the fact that the CEO of the Grammys. is now parroting Mikey Showman's line about taste. HARVEY: But to me, if you're making music, And you're using your discernment, your taste to decide what the AI should create for you. You're making music. being an arbiter of taste is going to be really, really important. MIKE: A human with great taste, learning to pull that out of the AI. And that is like a beautiful piece of music. You know, you could you can say that I had a part in that creation or you can say that I didn't have a part in that creation. HOST: What do you say? MIKEY: I almost want to say I don't care what you think. ADAM: There's something pretty sinister about musicians nihilistically embracing their own deskilling. All of that skill that you require, the stuff that your role models and your elders had and passed down from generation to generation, you're throwing out because Mikey Shulman told you to. BEN: If you look at like musicians like Wayne Brady who can improvise a song off the top of their head, and you just see how incredible that is and how cool of an art form that is. It's like the pinnacle of improv comedy is these people who can improvise songs that are coherent and funny and rhyme and like actually sound like music. That is a great, joyous experience to watch, and you're just like, “oh, how? ” But then when you generate that, it's

you get the, like, the yuks, “yuk, yuk, yuk,” but you don't get any of, like, the wonder of, like, “dang, ADAM: “How did that happen? ” BEN: “Humans are smart,” yeah. ADAM: “Yeah. ” MIKEY: It's actually an irrelevant question. It's like, I like that piece of music. It was good music. I felt like I enjoyed the process of making that piece of music, and maybe, like, does it count that I made that music or not is irrelevant. AIMEE: That's all you can credit yourself with in the end, if you use it to make your art, I think, you just have to say, I'm a really good prompter. Yay, me. ADAM: I didn't grow up dreaming of prompting. I grew up dreaming of shredding and, you know, all the fun stuff. That was my dream. I hope that, you know, I hope that people continue to dream of shredding instead of dream of prompting. AIMEE: Yeah, me too. [musical interlude] Okay, I'm done talking about Mikey Schulman for right now. Let's talk about somebody, maybe a little bit more interesting. Let's talk about. Arthur C. Clarke was one of the great science fiction visionaries of the 20th century. He predicted many aspects of our modern lives, including the internet, and email. He's probably most famous for writing 2001: A Space Odyssey, but he also wrote collections of speculative short stories, including 1957’s Tales from the White Hart. Now in this book, there's a short story entitled The Ultimate Melody where a researcher tries to find a melody that perfectly fits the electrical rhythms of the human brain. To do this, he builds a melody generating machine that he trains on, quote, “hundreds of the really famous tunes in classical and popular music” which sounds, honestly, a bit prescient, right? Maybe off by an order of magnitude or two, but hey, it's in the ballpark. Now, it's warned that this melody generating machine will put “every composer in the world out of business” Which hasn’t come true yet, but given Arthur C. Clarke’s track record, we may have cause to worry. Now, believe it or not, I have been on YouTube for 20 years now, longer than some of you may have been alive. And in that time, I've actually made quite a few predictions about how AI will change music in the future. Well, it is the future now, and so I thought it would be fun to look back at some of my predictions to see what I got right and what I got wrong. In other words, did I do Arthur C. Clarke proud? The 1st video I did was a Q&A from 6 years ago talking about copyright and AI, asking the question, “who gets to own the copyright to an AI composition? ” In that video, I had this spicy prediction. PAST ADAM: So I'm sure within the next 5 to 10 years, one of the rent seeking parasites that are the major music labels will figure out a way of owning the copyrights to AI music in a way that totally perverts the idea that copyright is a means of protecting labor. ADAM: Suno has recently struck a license partnership with Warner Chappell. Universal Music Group has struck a similar deal with UDIO. All 3 major music labels, Sony, Warner Chappell, and Universal Music Group, have signed a deal with Klay, a startup which uses generative AI to remix songs in real time. Most recently, Universal Music Group has paired with Nvidia. With all of these deals, it's unclear how much, if at all, artists will be compensated for their work. So yeah, when I warned that the major music labels would use AI to consolidate power in the music industry, uh, I think I kind of got that one right, unfortunately. The next video I did was a Q and A from 3 years ago talking about AI replacing human musicians. I did a brief overview of how technology has disrupted the labor force in the music industry for the past hundred years. And how AI would likely continue the trend of technological disruption. I ended this segment on a hopeful note. PAST ADAM: Just remember, we kept playing chess, even though computers reliably beat us every time, why? Well, because it's fun to play chess. And it's fun to make music. ADAM: It's a nice thought, right? I've seen this analogy repeated a couple of times because I think people like to have that hope in uncertain times. But unfortunately, after further reflection, I feel like the analogy is a bit too optimistic. You see, music unlike chess, is an industry which produces commodities in the form of recorded music. And so Deep Blue didn't put any chess players out of work

but Suno and generative AI certainly will put musicians out of work. An economic study from CISAC suggests that generative AI will lead to a massive disruption across the industry. Because music is an industry, it's also subject to the effects of deskilling. If musicians want to compete in an industry where AI is the standard, they run the real risk of losing the craft that they have developed. So even though I'm sure people will continue to make music in whatever capacity, generative AI will affect the musical community in much more profound ways than it ever did in the chess community. So I don't think I really quite got this one right. I'm sorry, Mr. Clarke, but can't win them all. My most recent video on AI came out a year ago and was all about how AI will inevitably fail the musical Turing test. It will never be confused for human music. Now, on the surface, it seems like I got that one really wrong. One study suggested that 97% of listeners cannot distinguish between AI generated and human composed songs. The actual point of the video, though, was more about real-time jamming with AI. Current real time jamming with AI is pretty pathetic, to be honest. But the broader thing that I was getting at in the video is that because recorded music is a commodity, it ultimately does not matter who makes it. Kind of just the same way as it doesn't really matter who made this mug for me as a consumer because I just need a caffeine delivery mechanism. If it works, it works. PATRICK: Music is a commodity for people. Music is an item to be consumed that helps them get through their day. What matters is good enough. And good enough is enough for most people. Most people don't think about... all types of products, even like phones and whatever, computers, everything. It's not like, “oh, John Coltrane's masterful solo! ” You know what I'm saying? This is, “yes, like, AI can never create this” Yeah, people threw tomatoes at John Coltrane at Village Vanguard. They ain't want that either. ADAM: Back in October of 2025, there was a viral dance pop song called I Run, making the rounds. It was revealed that the lead vocal recording was Suno generated. Some people felt betrayed by that fact, but some people kind of genuinely did not care. SOME GUY: It does not matter [that] this song was made using AI Like, I'm so sick of the purists on the for you page, talking about some... “Oh, my God, I can't hear it the same. ” ADAM: In fact, it went a bit further than this. When some singers covered I Run, It seems like people generally preferred the AI version over the human version. Now, you could say that the aesthetic standards that have been set up for this hyper-edited, auto-tuned, electronic dance pop music just set humans up for failure in the marketplace competing with AI. AI can do things that humans just can't without those tools. And so ultimately for certain styles of music, it might make a better product, a better musical commodity faster and cheaper. ANOTHER GUY: “No, don't listen to AI music. Support the real artists. ” I don't care. It sounds good. I like it. I’m going to listen to it. It's a scary world, Mr. Clarke. It's a scary world. ARTHUR C. CLARKE: Probably before the end of this century, we will be able to construct computers or artificial intelligences, which can go out on their own and develop lines of thought, irrespective of any programming, and which may, in principle, be more intelligent than we are. ADAM: You know, there's this overwhelming sense I get right now from headlines and from, I don't know, how people are talking about this, that AI is here. It is omnipresent in society and that we must adopt it, and people who think otherwise are just being Luddites, and they will be put in the dustbin of history. The people pushing this narrative, of course, are the ones who have the most financially to gain from it. That’s why you see articles in Forbes insisting we must adopt AI quickly, otherwise we will become obsolete. And you know, this idea works quite well on the musical community. We know that every 10 to 20 years, there is this disruptive technology, like MIDI or drum machines or whatever, that comes in, and the people that survive are the ones who quickly embrace the new order, and the people who don't survive, don't. TI: If everyone else has access to it and they're using it and you're not, HOST: Then you're going to be left behind. TI: And when I, you know, when I thought about it from that perspective, I kind of understood it. We often view technology in these discussions as this force of nature which cannot be controlled and ultimately cannot be stopped. This is a view called technological determinism. It's a view that ultimately absolves us for building systems which might be unideal for society, because if the technology was inevitable, if it was always going to happen, then there's nothing that we can really do about it except to embrace the technology as a means of survival. Which I think is particularly ludicrous, because as a society, we get to decide what kind of tech tree to invest in.

For example, in his 1962 book, Profiles of the Future, he spends an entire chapter dedicated to what he calls ground effect machines, what today we would call hovercraft. amphibious vehicles that can work just as well on land, as well as water. He thinks that we will restructure society around adopting hovercraft, and abandon cars altogether. He writes, “there will clearly be enormous savings in road costs, amounting to billions a year, once we have abolished the wheel. ” Now we do have hovercraft today. We have had them for over a half century. They work, they work totally fine, and yet we have not restructured society around abandoning the wheel. Large car companies had a strong interest in roads not becoming obsolete. And so technology was not inevitable. Instead, monied interests controlled how technology interacted with society. So generative AI is not inevitable. It's only coming because people want it to. DR. COTTOM: When people try to sell you on the idea that the future is already settled, it is because it is deeply unsettled. ADAM: That is sociologist Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom, talking at Urban Consulate in Detroit this past December, Providing some very incisive context here. DR. COTTOM: you know, this promise of like an artificial intelligent future, as we talk about future, is really just a collective anxiety that very wealthy, powerful people have about how well they're going to be able to control us in the future. If they can get us to accept that the future's already settled. AI is already here. The end is already here. Then we will create that for them. Part of the way that Suno is trying to steer discussion of AI and make AI feel omnipresent and inevitable is through a robust social media marketing campaign. MOHINI DEY: AI is not a trend. It's not going anywhere, and pretending that it won't exist anywhere, it's not going to stop the progress. It's only going to leave you behind. ADAM: That's Mohini Dey, lending her weight as one of the great modern bass players to promoting this idea that the future is here and inevitable with Suno. Suno's marketing department spending a lot of money trying to make their product feel like a part of the zeitgeist. Including some money going towards cringey astro-turfed AI-generated instagram meme pages, for some reason. This is bleak. But, you know, I want to be fair to Mohini Dey and any of the other social media influencers who have worked with Suno. Clearly, there's something in the platform that they think is cool and worth promoting. And I've been thinking about this actually for a while. I know for me personally, I would never really use the platform, but I do think that there are some potentially ethical uses of the platform that I want to highlight. I know, it seems like this has been one long hit piece on Suno, but I do want to give credit where credit is due because I do think that there are some potentially good uses of Suno. So, let's get into it Maybe good use of Suno number one, music therapy. If you're a Suno creator who wants to make music that truly matters, we want you. Help us bring healing through music to more people who need it. Anecdotally, I have heard from some music therapists who have used Suno in their practice to positive results. Now, I can't say what the field of music therapy in general thinks of this, so please take this with a grain of salt, but I think that could potentially be a good use for this technology. MIKEY: We've partnered with a charity, um, who was already using Suno connecting volunteers to make personalized songs for sick kids. ADAM: Suno itself has partnered with Songs of Love a charity that pairs songwriters with both children with serious illnesses, and now older patients with dementia and Alzheimer's. Kenneth Aigen says that a song with biographical elements says that you're being seen and you're being heard by other human beings. if this weird Doo-Wop music can get patients with Alzheimer's to reconnect. with their memories, I mean, I could see how this could be a good thing. Maybe. Songs of Love has been a charity for a long time, actually, and used to do it the old fashioned way with songwriters writing 46,000 personalized songs prior to the adoption of Suno. David Lee Roth recorded a song for seven-year-old Ashley battling leukemia. which is an honestly pretty charming song. And she’s starting to rock! ADAM: I love this because it's actually David Lee Roth singing to a young Ashley, and he's clearly having a lot of fun with it. The question now is, would it have been the same if it was an artificially generated David Lee Roth? Would Ashley have felt as special? Maybe? You could get into some utilitarian arguments about maximizing joy, like, yeah, maybe Ashley is not going to feel as special, but now, many thousands of other sick kids can feel a

little bit more special with this uncanny David Lee Roth singing at them, I guess. It's not very convincing, but hey, you could make that argument. Maybe good use of Suno number two. Memorization tool. There's this goofy AI channel on TikTok that creates pop songs that list technical information about a variety of very specific topics that likely would not have had wide appeal as pop songs. He made a 20 ton machine, create 60 tons of force The inventor of the road roller is a genius. And also apparently have inspired people to make their own non-AI technical songs in the style. so easily remove the dirt from your hands. My question is, is this a good thing? Do you think that is a good use of AI? DR. NOÉ: Um, I think it's actually a very fun use of AI. ADAM: Yeah, I mean, it's fun like, I can't deny that. DR. NOÉ: Yeah, it's it's very... interesting to me because it's, um, something that tracks the way in which the Greeks used… ADAM: It always goes back to the Greeks. DR. NOÉ: …songs, rhymes. The reason why, um, bards or rhapsodes could remember the Iliad and the Odyssey, which these which are very, very long poems. It's because they were put into a rhythm, in the rhythm and they had like a basically a rhyming, a verse. Some scholars think that this is the way in which the Greeks shared information among themselves. Someone wrote something, a passage, made it part of a poem. and then basically spread it around through rhapsodes or poets. Scientists hypothesize that earworms have an evolutionary benefit for memory, a means of remembering information, and then passing it down from generation to generation. Like the Griots of West Africa, the Norse skalds, and yes, the Greek rhapsodes. We have maintained our oral history using music as an information delivery mechanism. Some people seem to be using Suno as a study tool. Hoping to manufacture earworms to remember important information. Essentially using Suno as a fancy text to speech. If you repeat something with a melody, you are more likely to remember it. Repetition legitimizes. There are, of course, problems here. You could easily weaponize this with misinformation. You could get the wrong information stuck in people's heads, which almost seems like an information hazard. But that was the case before AI, too. We should always be careful with what songs we listen to and get stuck in our heads, AI or otherwise. Food for thought. Maybe good use of Suno, number three. Democratizer of music. Much has been said about how AI will democratize the arts. You don't have to be a member of a privileged class now to make music. MIKEY: There's the artist class, and then there's the rest of us. There's the creators and there's the consumers. Anybody can make music. Power to the people. There are two obvious objections here. The first is that the people do not own the means of production. Suno does. If Suno's website goes down, the people are powerless. Truly democratizing music would be investing heavily in music in the public schools so that everybody has access to quality music education. But beyond that, though, The second objection here is that the barriers to entry are often not that high. Again, Ethan Hein has some great insight. DR. ETHAN HEIN: What about lowering technical barriers to creativity? The thing is, those barriers are one inch tall. If you can play the black keys on the piano, or play a single chord on the guitar or ukulele, or select loops from the Garage Band loop library, or pound out a steady rhythm on a table, that is all the instrumental backing you need to get going. The obstacles to musical creativity have nothing to do with equipment or money or education or anything else. They are 100% psychological. The challenge of music education is to help the kids give themselves emotional permission to be as musical as they were when they were toddlers. Everything else is extra This term emotional permission, I think, cuts to the core of why Suno is so popular. Generative AI gives people the emotional permission to make music that they didn't have before. Young children, of course, have no shame when they make up songs and are artistic, but that somehow gets beaten out of us. BEN: If there isn't, aren't enough instances of casual, familial, or communal art making in somebody's life

then it seems like this thing that's reserved only for the blessed few who have like this divine like, “yes, you're the one! ” kind of thing put on them. “You’re the one who gets to do this! ” ADAM: There's this idea promoted by Stephen Mithen in his book singing Neanderthals, which suggests that we developed the ability to sing songs to each other before we developed language as we know it today. It's an interesting idea, which suggests that there's this deep evolutionary need to sing songs to each other, to make sense of the world around us. MIKEY: This kind of basic human instinct to want to make something beautiful and show it to people. And if technology can be a means to that end of making a song that sounds beautiful, that sounds like you, even if you don't have the best voice right now, like, why wouldn't we let people do that? ADAM: So, you know, maybe Suno democratizes music in the sense that it gives people permission to make music to make sense of the world around them in a way that society, for whatever reason, has denied them. And I don't know, maybe that can be a good thing. very healing for people, and maybe it can lead them to other musical exploits away from generative AI. I don't know. Mikey, in this case, is very good at identifying a social problem. We deserve to feel like we are safe in making music without being shamed by society or our friends or our parents even. MIKEY: And there's an element of shame here that, you know, I think about this a lot having young kids who actually don't have, you know, that element of shame. Like, kids will just sing for no reason. And I think it's beautiful and somehow culture beats us out of us that, like, it's okay to sing wherever you are, and we can bring that back. ADAM: However, because he is a capitalist, his job is not to solve the issue, but to find a way to sell you a solution to the issue, even if there might be a better solution out there. This is what every tech capitalist does, by the way. There might be a social issue, like horrible traffic and terrible urban design, and the solution is trains. Because of course, the solution is trains, something that is old and proven, and we know how to do. But since the idea is old, it can't be sold to venture capital, the idea needs to be new and fresh and exciting. So as a result, as society goes on, we get dumber and dumber solutions to problems that have already been fixed. There is a social need for people to make music. the solution is investing in music in public schools, and the dumb solution is Suno. This is why Mikey spends so many hours talking to investors, not musicians or educators or public policy advocates. He wants to get money, not improve society. And one way to get money is to sell your ideas to investors who think they themselves can get money. But I will give it to Mikey, though. I don't think that he's in it purely for the money. I think he genuinely is passionate about music. He recognizes the responsibility of Suno and other companies to try and build a better future for the technology. MIKEY: We have an incredibly lucky and privileged position to be at the forefront of shaping the future of music and AI. And we should not take that for granted, and we should be a little bit, um, intimidated by that, but we should also really believe in human agency and our ability to shape it in the way that we want it to happen. ADAM: I would hope he considers a future that focuses more on craft and not just taste, but, you know, maybe, maybe it'll be okay. I don't know. There are a lot of passionate people who really care about music working at Suno. And maybe it's gonna be fine. I don't know. MIKEY: We are hiring primarily people who have thought about what the future of music should be and how technology can enable a better future and who are not agnostic or... Or music decels, if you want to use like a weird term. ADAM: Wait, wait, hold on, hold on. MIKEY: music decels if you want to use like a weird term. ADAM: music… d…ecels? (heavy sigh) FUUUUUUUUU The year was 1909. And the world was brimming with exciting new technologies. The automobile and the radio were only a decade old, and aviation was even younger. A young Italian poet by the name of. Filippo Marinetti, giddy with the possibilities of this technology, penned a manifesto, outlining the tenets of what would eventually become known as Italian futurism. MARINETTI: We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed. We will sing of the multicolored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals. The nocturnal vibration of the arsenals, and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons. The gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents. factories suspended from the clouds by a thread of their smoke. ADAM: Italian futurism advocated for artists to break from tradition entirely and embrace the future, embrace technology

as an aesthetic, something that could be beautiful, and was aspirational. They held that “a roaring car that seems to ride on grape shot, is more beautiful than the victory of Samothrace. ” And yeah, when you look at futurist paintings of cars, they look absolutely sick. Boo Italian sculpture. Yeah, Italian cars, am I right? Futurists created these bright, garish, heightened versions of the trendy cubist style that was so popular at the time. everything was about showing how awesome progress was. For example, Marinetti published a cookbook that argued against eating pasta. Yes, an Italian arguing against eating pasta. Because pasta was passe and turned people into heavy brutes. Progress was ultimately everything. Tradition was a trap. Now, fast forward a century. And we have another manifesto from some very forward thinking folks. 2023's Techno-Optimist Manifesto, written by Marc Andreessen embraces a very similar worldview to the Italian futurists. ANDREESSEN: We believe in the romance of technology, of industry, the eros of the train, the car, the electric light, the skyscraper, and the microchip, the neural network, the rocket, the split atom. In fact, Andreessen directly cites and paraphrases Marinetti and his futurist manifesto. Andreessen is clearly fond of the aggressive, forward thinking ethos of the Italian futurists. Borrowing a term from the accelerationist philosopher Nick Land, Andreessen uses the phrase Techno-Capital to describe…. The engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance. Andreessen argues that technology, and its relationship to free markets, is the thing that will solve all of humanity's problems. Any attempts at restricting technology or restricting markets will ultimately be harmful. ANDREESSEN: We believe that any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder. ADAM: Now, Andreessen is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, so it would make sense that he thinks along these lines. He was a co-founder of Netscape and is a co-partner at Venture Capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z. For the past 2 decades, he has had an enormous influence on Silicon Valley culture. He has been called the Obi-Wan to Mark Zuckerberg's Luke Skywalker. So, all that to say when Mark Andreessen writes manifestos, people take that seriously. Now one of his recurring ideas that relate in some ways to his manifesto. is something called Reality Privilege. ANDREESSEN: it’s called Reality Privilege. “A small percent of people live in a real world environment that's rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks reality privilege. Their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environments around them in the, quote unquote, real world. For the. 0001% of the population of the world who gets to do all those things, then this internet thing is a big step down. For everybody else, the internet is a giant step up. ADAM: Now, Andresen identifies inequality in the world, and to him, remember, technology and capitalism can fix everything. So the solution here is technological. The world can be fixed with a digital existence. The metaverse, in other words. ZUCK MARKERBURG: Today, we're going to talk about the metaverse. ADAM: The techno-capitalists’ solution to inequality in the world was Facebook's hard pivot into building the virtual world of the metaverse. Marc Andreessen is on the board of directors at Meta. Which probably explains why Mark Zuckerberg suddenly thought building a crappier version of Second Life was a good idea. Technology, of course, solves all problems. Now, Andreessen knows that all of this kind of feels bleak, but he has a response for you. ANDREESSEN: The reality privileged, of course, call this conclusion dystopian, and demand that we prioritize improvements in reality over improvements in virtuality. To which I say, reality has had 5000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people. I don't think we should wait another 5000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build, and are building, online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they should find themselves in. ADAM: So Andreessen finds this inequality a matter of natural law, something that we simply cannot change. Some of us are reality privileged and not. Some of us have great and amazing skills, like the ability to make music and make art, and some people don't. Some people are reality disprivileged. MIKEY: We are in the business of selling pleasurable musical experiences to people. ADAM: Thank God for consumer grade generative AI. Technology will save the day here. If, like Rosie Nguyen says, you did not grow up with music lessons or if

you didn't grow up with a musical community or a musical family, if you're somebody who just doesn't have the skills to make music…it’s okay, Music is no longer the domain of the reality privilege. You too now can make music. You too, my reality disprivileged friend, can now have Meaningful consumption experiences. Michael Mignano of the venture capital firm, Lightspeed Ventures, writes about fictional reality, where online tools let people who are reality deprived live heightened versions of their offline selves. MICHAEL: people are crafting new versions of themselves online for positive reasons, such as to express creativity, gain confidence, or to share a part of their identity or interest that they aren't able to showcase in the offline world. ADAM: Venture capitalists like Andreessen believe in this vision of using consumer generative AI to bridge the gap between the privileged and the disprivileged. They have a real stake in this, Andreessen Horowitz is one of the lead investors in UDIO. the other popular commercial Gen AI company. Fictional reality buff Michael Mignano is one of the lead investors in Suno with his firm Lightspeed Ventures. In fact, that is Michael interviewing Mikey Shulman in this podcast. Which brings us back to the phrase that Mikey Schulman used, which was “music decel. ” MIKEY: or music decels if you want to use like a weird term. Mikey has used the term decel several times in the podcasts that he frequents. MIKEY: …they don't want to sound like decels, They hermits. ADAM: Decel is a portmanteau of decelerationist and incel. It's a derogatory term much like the term Luddite used in text circles for people who advocate for AI, safety, and ethics. ADAM: The term decel is most associated with effective accelerationism, or e/acc, for short. decels are despised by the e/accs, who advocate for an extreme acceleration of technological development. MICHAEL: e/acc, the movement that is advocating for rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence. ADAM: That's Michael Mignano interviewing Beff Jezos. a. k. a. Guillaume Verdon, CEO of Extropic. Beff Jezos is listed at the top of Mark Andreessen's patron saints of Techno-Optimism. alongside Adam Smith, and Ada Lovelace Beff Jezos is a Twitter personality who writes very frequently about e/acc. BEFF: Effective accelerationism, e/acc, is a set of ideas and practices that seek to maximize the probability of the technocapital singularity, and subsequently the ability for emergent consciousnesses to flourish. ADAM: E/acc is obsessed with this idea of technological advancement, to the point where they very seriously start talking about creating new life. It's very Frankenstein. BEFF: Technocapital can usher in the next evolution of consciousness. Creating unthinkable next generation life forms and silicon-based awareness. Borrowing again from Nick Land, this movement thinks that capitalism itself is sentient, and capitalism is artificial intelligence reaching backwards in time to construct itself in hostile territory. Some truly insane shit, honestly. Nat Friedman, by the way. Investor in Suno. Now, I can't say if Mikey Schulman believes any of the wackier ideas of e/acc, but I can definitely say that he is part of this culture that despises decels and worships progress at all costs. Which reminds me. Whatever happened to those Italian futurists, which loved the future and progress at all costs? Hopefully something good. In 1919, Filippo Marinetti published another manifesto, the manifesto of the Italian fasces of combat, better known today as the Fascist Manifesto. This laid the political groundwork for the rise of the Italian Fascist Party and Benito Mussolini. Futurism and its love of progress over all else, provided a very useful aesthetic cover for the fascists. It created a sharp aesthetic contrast between the backwards old liberal order and the exciting new technological order of the future. I mean, that race car really did look cool. Aesthetics are convincing. Marinetti himself served in Mussolini's government. The futurists made art with political aims. For example, that futurist cookbook, the one that argued against pasta? That was part of Mussolini's Battle for Grain, a campaign to get Italians to consume less grain, less pasta, to establish economic independence. So you have the futurists aligned with the fascists creating art in service of a sociopolitical agenda. Mark Andreessen and much of the Silicon Valley billionaire class have aligned themselves with ascendant right wing populism in the United States. Much the same way the futurists align themselves with Mussolini. Andreessen thinks of Marinetti as a patron saint of Techno-Optimism, and has largely modeled his trajectory into political power.

Andresen served as a quote unpaid intern at Doge in the early days of the 2nd Trump administration. ANDREESSEN: How might you apply AI to solve, yeah, for example, the fraud scandal, And it's like, oh, okay, well, I need to think and think about how to have AI solve this I'm like, well, wait a minute, why don’t I ask the AI? [laughs in billionaire] He is currently serving in the Trump administration's Homeland Security Advisory Council. Advising Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem on, quote, “sensitive discussions regarding DHS operations”. Technocapitalism is all too happy to align itself with right wing authoritarianism if it means the future can come faster. Accelerate or die is the motto of this movement. Great and terrible things are sometimes necessary if the future can be made to come faster. ANDREESSEN: The AI thing was very alarming. We had meetings this spring that were the most alarming meetings. I've ever been in, where they were taking us through their plans. Full government control. JOE ROGAN: Now when you leave a meeting like that, what do you do? ANDREESSEN: You go endorse Donald Trump. [laughs in podcaster] Now, part of the techno-capitalist political project is the establishment of what are called network states. These are anarcho capitalist startup societies ruled by philosopher king CEOs. Basically turning major cities in the United States into fiefdoms ruled by techno-capitalists. A big proponent of this network state idea is venture capitalist Garry Tan. Who is famous for battling the San Francisco political establishment for local control of the city. GARRY TAN: We can't allow the political machine to just, you know, get the worst possible outcomes. Let's create more technological process. We have to accelerate through this. ADAM: An important aspect of this is building an alternative political apparatus that circumvents the democratic process, establishing techno-capitalists as barons of fiefdoms. GARRY TAN: We've talked about how we've replaced some pieces of that political machine. Specifically, we have a parallel media now with Elon's Twitter or X. Getting a parallel media was a key piece. And it wasn't done through voting, it was by building. ADAM: Generative AI is important in the establishment of these new political systems. GARRY TAN: We need to replace the unelected parts of the system as well. Building parallel education, nonprofits, media, unions, and that's what the network state conference is about. ADAM: One of the parallel education systems that Garry Tan is invested in, is Oboe, a generative AI company designed to generate personalized courses for individuals. Oboe was founded by fictional reality buff Michael Mignano. It recently had a series A investment from Andreessen Horowitz And oh, would you look at that? Mikey Schulman. Now, I'm not sure if Mikey Schulman is aware of any of the illiberal political machinations of his co-investors. But what I am sure of is that money that goes to Suno and these companies in the commercial generative AI space in music goes towards building this techno capitalist idea of a parallel musical system, the same way that they are building parallel education systems and systems of government, which means that after today, I no longer want to hear anybody make the comparison between generative AI in music and any of the other disruptive technologies in music. Because the fascists, or at least the people that have taken great pains to show that they are indeed the spiritual successors of the Italian fascists, have selected their tool of wealth extraction and political coercion, and it isn't MIDI. You feel me? There is a clear right and wrong here. This is an unprecedented time in the music industry. And so the question that I have to the musicians who continue to advocate for these kinds of companies is quite simple. of all of this, it can be a bit overwhelming, and I can see musicians going one of 2 ways.

The 1st option, and the option that I think a lot of musicians will take is what I'm going to call the Harvey Mason Jr. approach. To protect musicians, we need to embrace the technology at every moment so that we are not made obsolete. We all want to work. We saw what happened with MIDI sequencing. the adoption of digital audio work stations. And so we need to survive. We need to adopt generative AI workflows and them right now. We have no option but to bend the knee to Marc Andreessen and fictional reality and e/acc and all of that, and just accept it, right? But there is another option. Which I think is maybe a bit more hopeful. DR. COTTOM: The proposal for a posthuman future is one where there will be human beings who will just be treated inhumanely. We're not gonna stop making people or humans. They're just saying we're not going to treat you as humans. And I refuse. And I think that we all can. I think that being Black is an act of refusal. I think we know how to refuse. I think everybody else needs to learn it from us. I think refusing is actually the more hopeful, expansive vision of the future than the one that is telling us that the future is already settled and decided. That's my daring idea. Just say no. ADAM: Now, one way of refusing, of course, is to refuse to use AI tools in music and the arts, which, sure, you can do that, but I feel like that's not quite, it's not quite it. I think for me, though, a more meaningful approach would be to take a look at the values of our techno feudalist overlords and invert them, change them to be something more meaningful. Going back to the values on Suno's website, we see music, impatience, aesthetics, and fun. Now, music to me is not a value. It's a reflection of a deeper value. I think about why I do music. You know, it's exciting. It gives me purpose, direction. And also, I find enormous value in sharing that excitement with other people so that they too might have that kind of burning drive that I feel. I think about how important it is to serve a community in pursuit of this meaningful art that is called music. And so for me, I think I'm going to change music as a value to service, service to a community. Impatience as we've already discussed. Is not a value. Speed to its own end leads to alienation and yeah, we don't want that. So I'm going to change impatience to patience. Moderation seems like something that I value. Aesthetics is a tricky one because I place a lot of value on beauty. And trying to bring beauty out into the world. But to me, the way that is done, that attention to detail, that dedication comes mainly from craft. I held craft and people who dedicate themselves to the pursuit of craft in such high regards. And so instead of aesthetics, I think. And fun, well... Focusing so much on a techno-capitalist view of what fun is how we get… “meaningful consumption experiences” An approach to music that is so utterly devoid of life and soul. Instead of fun, I offer beauty. Beautiful things can be fun, can be joyful, but they can also be sad and depressing. They can really hurt you too. But ultimately, that unbridled joy that I get from a dedication to community, patience, craft and beauty is the thing that I am trying to cultivate in the world. So yeah, service, patience, craft, and beauty. That is how I am going to... articulate my values in contrast to the techno capitalists. In 1911, an early Italian filmmaker by the name of Ricciotto Canudo, Wrote a slightly less evil early 20th century Italian manifesto. Those Italians and their manifestos. You gotta watch out for them. In this manifesto, confusingly called Birth of the 6th Art, because he eventually amended the number of arts, but anyway. Canudo classifies the arts. First, there are the rhythmic arts, which are music, poetry and dance, then there are the plastic arts, which are architecture, sculpture, and painting, and finally, there is the new art, cinema. This is a very influential idea in art theory, but it is a very Eurocentric one. For example, there are many cultures like in West Africa, which view music and dance as kind of a continuum of the same thing. And in fact, even within contemporary Western culture, there's some odd discrepancies here with how we classify the arts. For example, and I've been thinking a lot about this one with regards to AI, why are live music and recorded music considered a continuum of the same thing?

whereas cinema and theater are considered 2 separate art forms? Like think about that. Cinema and theater both tell stories. There are actors who act, there are scenes where things happen in them. There are costumes, there are sets. There are directors, sound people, lighting people. There are scripts with narrative form that usually last between 2 and 3 hours. They're honestly very similar art forms. So what is the difference? Well, of course, they are different crafts because of the technology of the camera. Cinema actors have to perform to the camera, which requires a more subtle sensibility than theatrical actors who have to perform to the rafters, which requires a more heightened approach. The craft of editing gives filmmakers a huge amount of control over the pace of the action. It also gives filmmakers the ability to show things that theatrical audiences simply could not see. Live theater, on the other hand, is much more intimate from an audience's perspective. You're actually seeing the actors perform there with your own eyes. The performance can change night to night. There might be mistakes. There's this kind of thrill in the impermanence of what you are seeing before you. This is the exact same dynamic between live music and recorded music. When you see music live, like theater, it feels raw and intimate. Whereas recorded music, like cinema, lets people do things with sound that they would never be able to do in a live situation. There is such a fundamentally different craft to recording and production. Just because you're a great producer doesn't mean that you can put on a great live show. And just because you can play guitar really well doesn't mean that you know how to write a song and create a great recorded piece of music. But despite this, we generally think of seeing like the live version of a recorded song. They're kind of in the same continuum. We don't think of going to the theater as seeing like the live version of a movie, really. I don't actually have a good explanation for you. I think somebody much smarter than me can trace the history of the recording industry in the movie industry of the past 100 years and find the real answer. But I do have a prediction here, because just the same way that the camera is the inflection point between cinema and theater that separates them into two separate crafts, I think generative AI as a technology will be that inflection point that separates live music from recorded music, into two fundamentally different, but related, art forms. Generative AI will accelerate the commodification of recorded music in new and strange ways. It will fulfill Silicon Valley's desire to turn music making into a game, a video game. MIKEY: It's a little bit like a video game. But live music utterly resists this trend because that technology of generative AI is simply not present in live music the same way that cameras are not present really in live theater. will. i. am: We're going to get to a point where live is the place to be. It's going to get to a point where you truly have to improv, you truly have to, you know, perform. Theater is going to be like, Did you see that play? You cannot generate a live performance. And so, the craft of live performance will still have great value. Especially in small and intimate spaces where technological aids like live AutoTune are not possible. will. i. am: As much as I love technology, we're going to get to a human made, that's the value. Fictional reality is possible in recorded music, but it is not possible in live music. If you don't believe me, our Silicon Valley overlords tried the fictional reality version of live music and they tried it very, very hard. The global COVID pandemic. Five years ago, during the lockdowns, live musical performance was impossible, but the virtual versions of live music were certainly possible with Twitch concerts and. in Fortnite. Every musician on the planet was laser focused on trying to make Mark Andreessen’s fictional reality a reality in this virtual world. And we all came to the conclusion, after 2 years of trying that shit, that it sucked. Virtual reality sucks. Everybody tried to replicate what it meant to be in a room and experience music together. And it just didn't even come close. It turns out that people actually really love the real world when there is music and art in it. People really love having the real world around them if it can be filled with the joy of music and community. This is the hopium for this video, guys. You experienced it along with me. We were locked indoors, and we hated it, and the second that we were able to go outdoors and experience live music safely, by the way. We took that opportunity and ran with it because the real world is a beautiful space when there is room for music and the arts.

And Suno and generative AI is not the replacement for it. When people were presented with the bleak reality of Mark Andreessen, they refused. The craft of live music will be fine. I have no doubt about it, especially in small and intimate spaces. There is simply no substitute for what live music is. People who focus on the craft of live music making will not face the same existential crisis of deskilling that people who focus primarily on recording might. will come to rely more and more on AI tools as they become the industry standard. This will cause a fundamental separation of the crafts between live music and recorded music. Recorded music as an art form, I'm becoming more and more, quite frankly, doomer about. Because even if you don't use generative AI in your music, The art form itself is starting to become quite suspect. I have stopped believing what I see on social media. There has been such a fundamental breakdown in trust of recorded media in general. I predict there's going to be more and more a breakdown of trust in terms of what we are even listening to in recorded music. There will become more and more a barrier between the people who are listening to the music and the people who create it. And that barrier, quite frankly, is just not there in live settings. I foresee that some people will just reject the medium of recorded music altogether to focus on live performance because that is the only arena in which you could actually showcase your craft. Live performance will become the prestige art form in contrast with the slop of recorded music. Like the Beatles saw no future in touring. Many artists will simply see no future in recording, and so live performances will be the ultimate refuge from artists from the disruption of generative AI. I had this thought about the Beatles and the separation of live performance and recorded performances, watching the breakup, McCartney after the Beatles, by Mark but Evil. It was a really nice, well thought out video essay on the trajectory and end of the Beatles that happens to be a Nebula Exclusive. Now, nebula itself is an interesting meta case here, because nebula as a platform really is the prestige alternative to social media, which has been dominated by slop and will continue to be dominated by slop. Much the same way that I think live musical performance will be the prestige alternative to recorded music, which is being overrun by slop. Nebula, unlike other streaming platforms, is extremely committed to this idea. You can read CEO Dave Whiskis's blog post from 2 years ago committing to this. Billions of dollars have been spent on technology designed to steal from creators, replace us and use our work to replace artists in other fields. Even now, they openly admit that their businesses cannot function without theft. This isn't okay, a nebula can't be part of it. Our official position, nebula will not use any generative AI tools known to be trained on unethically sourced data in the creation of our original content or in the production of our software platform. Now, in pursuit of that, nebula funds tons of great, thought-provoking, and just plain fun videos you can't find anywhere else from your favorite creators. No ads, early access and a growing library of exclusives guaranteed to be human made. I am proud to have my videos on there, including many that you cannot see on YouTube or elsewhere. It is a community of like-minded creators that are dedicated to a similar pursuit of craft. If you're interested in joining with my link, you can get nebula for 50% off, which is $30 a year or $2. 50 a month. You can go right now to go. nebula. tv slash Adam Neely and start watching fantastic exclusives like the ones from Mark But Evil. But if you are really committed to supporting human-made art and the platforms that are committed to funding interesting and original projects, Nebula is offering $200 off a lifetime subscription. You can get access to everything that Nebula will ever produce from now until the end of time for only $300. And you'll never have to think about managing your subscription. I'm very excited for the future of nebula, and as long as there is a nebula, you too can be part of this community that engages the world in a thoughtful and meaningful way. Sign up today for either 50% off annual plans are now $300 for lifetime access. Thank you guys so much for watching.