Adam Neely on AI Music, Musical Deskilling, and the Ethics of AI Training Data

Adam Neely

Yeah, I'm so happy to be here. Music is my profession, my avocation, but I'm an amateur philosopher, amateur lover of theology and beauty and art. I think AI is one of the most important technological innovations of the past century, and it really will interfere, in ways I'm very fearful of, with the musical culture and how we go forward with the wonderful tradition that we've had for many hundreds of years.

Adam Neely

There's two things. Disruption to the industry is very much at the foreground of my fears, but disruption to the industry has happened many times before in the music industry. Honestly, the invention of recorded music itself was a major disruption. The invention of the synthesizer was a major disruption. Many people lost jobs because of the invention of the drum machine. That's a process that's been going on for a long time.

The art form itself is something I'm also a bit fearful of. People talk all the time about deskilling, which is the process by which we lose our skills because we're automating them, or giving up our faculties to automated processes — like, in the case of the early twentieth century, the assembly line. You had all these skilled manufacturers of cars who were very skilled workers, but through the invention of the assembly line they all became deskilled. They didn't need those skills anymore. The art form of creating a car from scratch, or these mechanics, largely went by the wayside because of the processes that were automated.

I'm worried that's going to happen because commercial generative AI, like Suno and Udio and all of these platforms, automates the process of idea generation. Idea generation is one of the fundamental aspects of music-making — the ability to come up with an idea and then realise it through the long slog of trying out different voicings, trying out different things. That's fundamental to the creative process, and commercial generative AI automates it in a way similar to how industrial capitalism automated so many processes for assembly line workers.

I've been talking about what's called the chess problem, or at least the chess analogy, for the past three or four years — the comparison between how chess players and the chess world have been affected by artificial intelligence. In some ways it hasn't affected it, because chess is a game and music isn't as much a game — it's more of a product that people consume. But it's also presented quite a few issues with cheating, because now the whole industry is very much trying to prevent people from cheating through tiny mathematical edges in tournaments, gained through computer-assisted gameplay. So deskilling is a very real issue that I'm worried about, and that's at the foreground.

Adam Neely

It has MIDI functionality, yes. I can play a note and it's not actually a piano sound that's coming out — it's a digital recreation of a piano sound.

Adam Neely

Oh, for sure, for sure. [laughter] Well, I'll say this — my position on this has evolved quite a bit. I'd say there is no such thing as cheating in music, because music is ultimately not a sport. It's a form of self-expression, a form of community-building, a form of communicating emotion from one person to the next. As long as you're communicating that emotion authentically and honestly, who cares. Part of the issue is that music is also a product to be sold and consumed by a public. In pursuit of making as many products as possible, at the highest quality, to compete against other people making products, people use all these tools to sell an idea that's maybe not honest. That's the issue with autotune, the issue with quantising — the process by which you take a recording and perfectly align each beat and note to the grid so it sounds like you played it perfectly even if you didn't. We're at the point now where you can use autotune live in performances, and it's very common — so subtle that an audience probably doesn't know, when they're watching somebody perform in a big arena, that there's a fair amount of tuning happening on the singer.

It's not a competition, but at the same time it is a competition. I think a lot about the relationship between music and sports, and music and capitalism and the market economy, because they're related in ways people don't normally think about when they think about art. They think of art as this beautiful thing above the vagaries of the real world. But down here in the trenches, you really are competing with other people in a very real way. So — express yourself however you're going to express yourself, but there's a degree of honesty required in saying "this is what I did, this is what I didn't do."

Adam Neely

It's basically the ChatGPT of music. It's a company that does commercial generative AI, which involves many different processes, but basically they've taken these models and trained them on essentially every available audio file on the internet — they've admitted to it — and use the models to spit out whatever you type into a text box. Famously, on the website they say "make me a jazz song about house plants" or "make me a reggae song about something," and it'll generate it, and it's quite a bit more powerful than that. You can upload yourself singing and playing guitar and it'll realise a full orchestra around it. You can do all sorts of things in the studio. It sounds like I'm advertising for Suno right now, but it does do all these things pretty decently — I'd say, grading on a curve, if you submitted it as a music school assignment you'd get a D. A passing grade. But it's become the dominant commercial generative AI platform on the internet.

I think what they've done with their training is highly unethical, and I think the processes people adopt with Suno aren't particularly musical. Typing stuff into a text prompt usually isn't a very musical action to me. Musical actions are either playing an instrument, singing, or going back and forth with a digital audio workstation, identifying musical elements and reacting to them. I don't like Suno. That's my thing. [laughter]

Adam Neely

If you're going to record something and put it out to the world, there's a social contract between yourself and the world — you know what that recording is going to be used for. Then Suno comes along and says, "we can use this to train our model," without the consent of the millions of artists it trained on, since the beginning of recorded music, with the express purpose of replacing those recordings and replacing the pattern of listening. To me that's unethical, or it feels slimy at the very least. I know they'll say in court that this is transformative, or fair use. I know they'll say things like "this is just how humans learn — they listen to recordings, process those patterns, then make music themselves." But I think that's a false equivalence. It's a bit like saying submarines are just like humans because submarines swim in the water too — it's the same thing, except on a very inhuman scale. Forklifts are very strong because they can lift things, like humans. Suno learns music like humans do, because it detects patterns — except it's detecting patterns and generating things off every single piece of music ever recorded, in a way that's very unmusical. Suno isn't identifying chord progressions, identifying fingerings on guitar, learning lyrics. It's doing things in a much more brute-force way. I don't pretend to know how Suno's model or any of these models actually work, but they're doing it in a way that's not human, not musical. Because of that, I'd consider it unethical. I'm not a smart philosopher or moral theorist, but on a gut reaction, as a musician, when I know my music is in its training data, I'm like — I didn't consent to that. That feels very strange and very weird to me.

Adam Neely

Yeah, and that's the big paradox with my opinion, because I can very clearly see the contradictions there. First of all, if you were to do that, that would be the highest compliment I would ever feel in my entire life. When other people learn my music, which happens sometimes, and post it — to me that's so beautiful. I love that so much, when they write music in the style of Sungazer, my band. It's the coolest thing. The reason it's so beautiful is because I know how much time it took. It's a lot of time — a finite, valuable resource — and it's not easy. So when people do that, it's so awesome, because the music, in a very real way, now lives in their body. Whenever I've learned another piece of music from somebody else, it's now a part of me, because muscle memory is a hell of a thing and it doesn't go away. Until I'm seventy, eighty years old, I'll know that piece of music. It's a huge honour.

I don't feel the same way about people imitating through Suno, because it's not the same musical processes that led them to do that imitation of my music. Instead, it's a brute-force calculation. There's no responsibility, no ownership, no actual attempt to grapple with the things I've grappled with when I learn other people's music. That feels lazy, and disrespectful. It's happened before — somebody sent me some music and said, "this was inspired by Sungazer." My gut reaction was horror. It was just, "this is awful," because I know people who've done it the musical way, which is to take the time and learn it. I don't pretend that this is an opinion I've intellectually examined that deeply, except to know it's coming from a place of strong conviction and deep reaction to what I'm hearing in the world. Maybe for me it's the amount of time. I respect time and dedication, and if people are spending a lot of time working on something, figuring out the details, and they're using commercial generative AI, I might respect it. I don't know. It's something I've been grappling with quite a bit recently.

Adam Neely

I'll say this — for the first case, I see that being how a lot of people will use it, and are using it: taking an idea in their head and realising it, Suno as a demoing tool. The slight pushback I'd have is that a digital audio workstation is exceptionally easy to use — GarageBand, or one of these very basic free DAWs, dragging loops into the timeline and recording essentially immediately. Ethan Hein, a wonderful researcher in music education and technology who's written quite a bit about AI and music education, says the barriers to entry are usually not nearly as high as people think, because these tools haven't been marketed as "this is the cheap, free version" of the professional DAWs. You could do it here in GarageBand, very easily. They were marketing it that way maybe fifteen years ago, but not so much anymore, and now the marketing is all through Suno, as "this is the cheap, free version, if you don't have the time or the expertise." To me it's like — GarageBand feels quite a bit more musical, and I've seen eight-year-olds create ridiculous beats in GarageBand in no time at all. So what actually is the barrier to entry here? It largely just comes down to people's familiarity with the tools.

The second thing I'd say is that for realising a full piece of music, that's how it's been used in a lot of professional circumstances, from what I've heard secondhand — in demoing circles in LA and Nashville, for pop singers, you have writers' rooms that traditionally pump out demos sent to artists, and now they're using these platforms to mock up a full version of the recording very quickly — putting session musicians who'd be recording those demos out of business, which is unfortunate, but that's kind of what's being used right now. I see that being okay, in a way — it's a bit like, you'd never say someone's a professional photo editor because they can screw around in Photoshop, but Suno gives the illusion of that being the case. I'm open to it, but of course I'm a musician whose career and craft is threatened by it, so I kind of have to play the role of the Luddite in this situation.

Adam Neely

For me, music is a communal thing, and it's always been a communal thing — the communication between human and human is essential, beyond just what the end product is. It's like using ChatGPT for therapy — well, what's the difference, if I can't tell the difference at the other end? It's because it's a very one-way conversation. In those situations where there's a musical artist who doesn't have the technical detail and is trying to communicate with a producer, there's back and forth. There's pushback. There's something profoundly human. So maybe the producers should be getting some of the credit here.

One of the things I think about a lot is craft — what is craft, what is actually making music, what's the actual process of doing it? It's often very embodied. Learning an instrument involves so much muscle memory connected to your ear, connected to the songs you're playing, and even working in a DAW, your body is reacting to the sound you're creating — there's always a back and forth there. So I think a lot about craft, discipline, and when you have somebody in that driver's seat — the producer's role or the artist's role — dictating what the music should be, that's a question of taste. Your taste in music is dictating the end result. In AI circles, they make a huge deal about taste, and how it's the human element left because AI takes over the craft of it all. To me that's a bit of a horrifying future — this is the bad future I talk about in the Suno video, because there's very little inspiration to be had in another person's taste, whereas there's a lot of inspiration and direction you can gain from another person's craft. The role models I had growing up had amazing, beautiful musical crafts, and that's what I wanted to do with my life — develop the craft they had. I didn't really care what their taste in music was, I cared what they could do. I wanted greatness for myself because they were great, and I don't see how greatness can come from a tool like generative AI. It might, but I don't see the path — especially considering how much emphasis the people who run Suno put on consumer taste rather than the abilities you can develop through Suno. Your friend who rapped something into Suno and generated a demo — that's awesome, but effectively the only thing your friend did was rap, which is great, but beyond that there wasn't much technical development, no new skill learned. That's fine for a consumer product, but for the future of music-making, I see that as ultimately problematic. It's like having somebody play the game for you — the computer wins the game for you, which is fun, you get to experience the story, but there are no skills developed, and it's not as fun without going through the process of learning to beat the bosses. That's probably the best analogy — taste versus skill is like computer-assisted gameplay. It's fun, especially if you don't have the ability to play the game, but maybe not ultimately inspiring.

Adam Neely

I'll just go back to the digital audio workstations — there are so many free DAWs that have been used for the past ten to fifteen years where people can do that very easily. And I'll say — this is going to be my plug for Splice — Splice is a loop library, the professional loop library, very extensive with really cool sounds. I use Splice all the time, it's the standard. I agree that with hip-hop there's a huge amount of human intentionality to sample selection, record-diving, chopping it up on a drum machine. Some of the greatest musical achievements in recorded musical history come from people like J Dilla, who really expanded the rhythmic vocabulary of what was even possible, layering different time-feels and samples in interesting ways that could only have been done by sampling other people's music and arranging it into this beautiful collage. His impact on live musicianship has been huge over the past ten to fifteen years. And rappers — the lyricism, the wordplay, the rhythmic delivery — that's deeply musical on such a deep level, so inspiring. What they can do is awesome. The selection of a beat and the pairing of the rapping with the beat, you could say that's a wine-and-cheese pairing — there's something beautiful in that, a taste thing.

Part of why I don't find the same kind of inspiration in Suno is the slot-machine aspect of it — you keep going back, seeing if you can get something good, seeing if you can get a banger. The idea of craft being repeatable is important — when you have a skill, you want to know the outcome of that skill, if I do this, this happens. That's what a craft is, and the more you develop it, the more you know what the end result will be. My partner is a Platonic scholar, and she says Plato says you want a doctor to know whether they're going to kill you or cure you through their actions — a skilled doctor is necessary for that result. I want the result of my actions to be predictable, because that's inspiring, for myself and other people. With hip-hop, sampling and chopping up samples — there's a craft and a skill there that I look up to. But I hear what you're saying about taking these tools and inspiring other people to rap, write lyrics, sing — I can see that being a very useful tool. I don't want to make it sound like I'm completely against this. I just think this is maybe the wrong way of going about doing it.

Adam Neely

Oh, no, I love the pushback, keep it going, this is great. [laughter]

Adam Neely

Yeah, they're probably there, just not very good. [laughter]

Adam Neely

There's two things. If it's me specifically — if I were bedridden and unable to interact with the world, and only had computer technology with which to write my music — I'd probably use Sibelius, or a digital audio workstation, or some other means of writing. Honestly, a text document would do it for me, because I've trained myself to hear music in my head and work out ideas that way. There are ways of notating and expressing music through audiation — the musical term for audio imagery, audio visualisation. Most musicians train themselves, through many years of practice, to audiate very clearly. Because of that, I feel like for me particularly I'd use other tools, because Suno quite frankly doesn't do a great job of matching that audiation. But for somebody who isn't me, who doesn't have those tools, I can see it — I honestly suggested, in the video I made, that this was a possible means for people who, for whatever reason, aren't able to engage with music in any other way.

There's a deep desire in essentially all of us to make music and connect with other people through music. There are theories about how human musicality developed through evolutionary means — Steven Mithen has this great book called The Singing Neanderthals, which suggests that before language developed the way we use it now, through grammar and semantic meaning, sung musical cues — rhythm, timbre, pitch — were very important means of communicating emotional states between early humans, or human precursors. We sang as a means of creating bonds in early social bands. There's a very deep need to communicate emotional states with other people through music, and we're profoundly alienated from that as a culture, at least in the West, because we didn't grow up singing, didn't grow up making music, usually — we may make music in schools, God bless the public school teachers, and church, if you're in church — honestly, to me that's the strongest argument for organised religion, the amount of music that's made in it. I grew up going to church, and that's the thing I took from it — I learned a bit about singing, a bit about music-making. There's something very deep in there, but most of us just never had that, and there's this really deep thing in the back of our brains, our bodies, saying we need to be making music. We need to do this, but for many reasons we're alienated from it. Recorded music gives us a little taste — a little taste of experiencing music, singing along, being close to other people because of shared musical tastes — but we don't have much experience making the music, and I think that's why Suno is so popular: it scratches that itch, an easy entry point for many people. That said, I think there are other entry points that are potentially better, that can connect us a lot deeper. Singing with other people is probably the big one — even shouting a football chant goes way deeper. I was at a Mexican restaurant the other day, and there was karaoke happening in the other room, and it was crazy — people were singing and screaming, it was great — and I remember thinking, this is the most profoundly human thing. It brings people together the way singing in church, or at sporting events, or just singing in general does, in a way people are cut off from if they're using AI to have that same experience, because they're making music, but there's not that connection with another person. So — yes, I think that's okay. But I'd prefer if we don't get to the point where we need it.

Adam Neely

I'd say no. We've been led to that point through exactly what you were saying — the Spotify algorithmic discover weekly, where we're fed music uniquely curated to our tastes. What's interesting is the pattern that's developed over the past ten years: people have stopped really looking at the bands. People don't follow bands, don't trust a band or an artist for that — they trust Spotify. So Spotify generates these playlists, but you stop having any kind of personal relationship to the band, understanding who the musicians are, who's the singer — it's alienating consumers from the people who make the music. Commercial generative AI is essentially the next evolution of that, because at a certain point you don't need that person who makes the music for you — you can be the person who makes the music for you, which creates a bit more of a sensation of ownership over your listening patterns. There's a tendency towards creating your own cultural experience through AI, and the people making these AI songs really love them, to the point where they're not listening to any other AI music, because why would you, when you could just curate your own? What's worrying is they've stopped listening to music other people make — classic recordings, classic pieces everybody knows and loves — because they're so involved in their own creations.

I'm worried about that because music is a culture — the cultural touchstone by which we interact with other people and find meaning. That's what culture does, it's a means of expressing yourself through a larger identity. If you're in a discussion with other people about a TV show, or a movie, or a song, and it's happening among people, and you haven't seen the show — people are talking about Breaking Bad or Severance or whatever — it's profoundly alienating, because you haven't seen it, they're making references, excited about something that happened, and you don't care, and maybe you vaguely want to join in but at a certain point you think, "eh, whatever, I'm not part of this." It feels so weird and wrong when your friends, people you were close to a second ago, are having a shared discussion about something different. When culture is so personalised, essentially every discussion about culture becomes the equivalent of people talking about Severance without you having seen Severance. That's the direction things go if you have this very fragmented culture. We were already headed that way, because we don't have pop stars in the same way, people's musical tastes are already so fragmented — but at least you can find a group of people who get excited about a piece of music in the same way. The danger, I think, is that hyperpersonalised music leads to total cultural isolation, which is a bad thing, in my opinion — assuming live music isn't a thing, by which I don't just mean live performance, going to see a band, I mean things like going to a nightclub, and they start playing a particular song, and everyone runs back from the bathroom because it's their favourite tune. That's something AI can't replicate, except insofar as people do listen to other people's AI music, because you need that familiar touchstone. If you're putting music on at a house party, or having a romantic dinner with your partner with music in the background, there's a role music plays for people that goes much beyond that inner listening.

Adam Neely

Yeah. The musicologist Christopher Small has this great term I love using — musicing — which tries to move music away from being a product, an object, and more into an activity. That's where the musical academic field is starting to think about music as a set of activities you do, and your relationship to other people, with sound, and the space you're in. What you were doing on the train, with the earphones in, having that cinematic experience — that's so fun, one of my favourite things, putting on some Dexter Gordon ballads and riding the subway in New York. Highly recommended. But that particular experience is a fundamentally different musicing of music from the DJ at the bar and everyone coming to dance, or putting on music at a party with friends. Those are different ways we engage in musicing different kinds of music. The AI thing is essentially the equivalent of just the headphones, and that's what music is. If you've used Suno and shared your AI music with friends and family, chances are they're not that interested — I don't mean that pejoratively, that's the experience I've heard from the vast majority of people, because that music was designed very specifically for you to listen to in your headphones, and that's the only musicing it was designed for. The shared social experience — check out this music from this band, or the DJ doing some crazy mashup of different styles — requires some kind of shared social contract between everybody, that these are the pieces of music we're going to do this thing to. There might be musical elements that make you want to dance, but usually it's some kind of reference, some ridiculous shared thing, and that's very important. I was in a wedding band for six or seven years, and we played all the hits — ABBA, Pink, Journey's Don't Stop Believin' — pop songs from very different styles, and everybody knew all the songs, all the lyrics, all the time. At a wedding, there's always music, and that human experience of everybody getting up on the dance floor, sharing these specific pieces of cultural knowledge, is such a deeply human thing. That's why the narcissistic listening pattern is a bit terrifying for me — that it's becoming the standard, or at least a lot of people are doing it.

Adam Neely

I got a lot of pushback on that one, and I actually agree with what you just said. There's quite a lot of detail in my own relationship to this. For my own music, I like it, but it's not my favourite — there's a difference between my compositions and my recordings, and that's one of those things we need to separate sometimes when talking about music. The composition versus the recording — which is actually what the copyright industry does anyway. I love my compositions. They're honestly my favourite music. I like what I write, and I like to play what I write — it's honestly why I do this, I love writing stuff and playing it. Recordings, to me, are a kind of capture of the composition, sometimes an imperfect capture of the truer, platonic ideal of the composition — I can hear the things that aren't quite right — but for the most part I love the stuff I write. For people who don't perform their compositions, the recording is the best reflection of the composition, so they make that correlation, that recording and composition are the same — especially in styles like electronic dance music, where they really are the same. When I made those statements about people becoming self-obsessed with their own music, they didn't quite understand that distinction.

I want to say — I love my music, and I think it's awesome that people love their own music, that's beautiful, and you kind of have to have that self-assuredness that what you're doing is necessary for the world. But — what's stopping you from listening to other music? I listen to my own music, sure, but I certainly listen to Stevie Wonder, or Victor Wooten, the bass player who really inspired me. I listen to all these other musicians, check them out all the time. Part of what makes it exciting to be a musician is listening to other people's music, because you get ideas for your own stuff, but you're also inspired by their greatness. I was talking earlier about craft — there's something very inspiring about greatness, and looking towards other people for greatness is one of the things I do all the time, so I can try to be as great as I possibly can be. If you stop looking outward, and everything becomes self-referential, there's no room for growth. Artists — anybody, honestly, not just artists — constantly want to be growing, becoming better versions of ourselves, and to do that we have to both look inward and outward. So thank you for pushing back on that, because I wanted to clarify — I love my own music, and I think everybody should. It's just that there's another step: you have to love other people's music, too.

Adam Neely

Yeah, I agree. Some of my more controversial statements — I've said AI music is not music, which I think isn't necessarily true. Sure, you could define it as music. Musicality to me is more defined by interactions with other people, and your ability to communicate an emotional state from yourself to another person, which — like I was saying earlier — is a fundamentally human thing, with an evolutionary basis. Your ability to communicate an emotional state from person to person is your artistry. Great artists communicate great things, and communicate them very effectively, from person to person, maybe to many people at the same time. So to me that's artistry, that's musicality. I was thinking about definitions of music — it's one of those things that bumps up against language very frequently. I use the language analogy all the time, because the more you think of music as a language, a means of communicating from person to person, the more it makes sense — even though it's not a language, it's certainly not the universal language, which is something people sometimes say, but it's very language-like, and it's a useful way of understanding how music functions, how we learn music, our relationship to music. With that in mind — listening to your own AI music is like having conversations with ChatGPT all day. Sure, you can do that, fine — what's going on there? I'm not saying listening to your own AI music will lead to some form of AI psychosis, which is what happens sometimes when people have conversations with ChatGPT all day, but it's certainly not healthy, not human, and not musical, in my opinion.

Adam Neely

I'm cautiously optimistic. Bandcamp has already banned AI-generated music. There's a huge pushback, and it's interesting — there's a youth pushback, which typically you don't want in your new musical movement. Typically that's not how culture is disseminated, because the people in Gen Alpha who currently use "that's so AI" to mean something fake or bad are going to be the people using musical and artistic tools for the next thirty to forty years. Their formative years are spent thinking of this technology as something fundamentally uncool, and I don't think that's good for the future of this technology as a cultural item. It will change things — I just don't know how. But I think adoption has been lopsidedly from older generations rather than younger ones, especially in music and art, for a couple of reasons. Older generations, who felt locked out of the musical process, now find a very easy way in. Younger generations, who are maybe more technically savvy, or otherwise know a lot of the other tools available, have been using them up until this point, so they don't feel as locked out of the musical process, or of culture, as older generations do. Older generations always feel locked out of culture — that's what happens. I'm a millennial, I'm starting to feel very locked out of culture, which is fine, I understand I'm not going to be "with it." But AI, as a means of grabbing something for yourself, is very alluring there.

I think human-generated music will carry a premium — we're already seeing that in how advertisers think about using AI-generated art in ads. Coca-Cola uses AI all the time in their ads, they've gone all in. Other brands, like Porsche, make a big deal about using human artists for their ads. So it's become AI for the masses, humans for the elite — the prestige version. I imagine that happening more and more, human-generated becoming a sign of class, almost. There's a wonderful creator, a DJ I believe, who has a video essay called "the chronically online will be the new underclass," about people who are online and require AI tools becoming engaged in the AI slop generated over and over on the new internet — whether music or art or whatever — and being profoundly disadvantaged compared to people who have the ability to touch grass, to log off. I see that really being the case in music — the ability to go see a live musical performance, to engage with live music, using "live music" the way you did, including a DJ performance, being in a room with other people sharing a musical experience, is going to be seen almost as a class signifier, because for many people they're unable to join that kind of experience. That's maybe part of the bad future I'm talking about in my video, because live music, experiencing live music, was never a class signifier before — every social class across history made music in some regard — but now being able to perform, or engage with that, I think is going to be seen as a lot rarer, more premier. That's my fear, and I think where things are headed. But the good thing is, like I said, the younger generation isn't on board, and that's not normally a good sign if you want to show how cool and awesome your product is.

Adam Neely

For sure. The reason is that when you're doing music, there's so much more than music in the doing of it. You're trying to make a connection with people, trying to understand another human being — that's a very fundamental thing, you're trying to understand emotional states so you can feel closer, feel in community with another person. The second you know something is AI, that part of the brain shuts off — it sounds good, but I'm not learning anything deep in here, even if you don't understand why, your brain shuts down, thinking, I'm not making any kind of connection here, because there's nothing at the other end.

Now, your point about making something perfect or beautiful — I don't know about that, because our individual reactions to music are so personalised, what makes you cry might leave me thinking, "that's not really it, I don't get it." And that kind of interaction — you're crying, thinking this is the most beautiful thing, and another person doesn't understand it — is alienating, and I think that will push a lot of people away from AI music, towards finding something that both people can find at least some value in, even if it doesn't have the same emotional reaction in one person. I'm a huge fan of Nina Simone, for example — there are recordings I can't help but have an emotional reaction to every time I hear them. But if I played that for one of my Sungazer bandmates, they might not have the same reaction, because they don't know Nina Simone's story, the history behind the song. I probably won't have that kind of interaction with them until we come to some discussion, learn a bit more together about the story, the history, the backstory. With AI, what is there to learn about the song? What's there to learn about its history? It might make you cry because the lyrics are beautiful, but who's the person doing it, and why did they write it? To me, that's ultimately why I find value in recorded music — because of that kind of connection.

Adam Neely

I love the painting The Kiss, because we had a poster of it in my parents' house growing up, so I remember seeing it every day — I don't know anything about the painting, but I think I really liked it, and it's part of my story, in the way music is part of so many people's stories. I remember growing up listening to the Beatles — my father was really into the Beatles, and Baby You Can Drive My Car, for whatever reason, when I was five years old, I screamed that at the top of my lungs. That's part of my story, a big part of growing up, my relationship to my family. My mother is a musician, her family are musicians, so I have a relationship to all the pieces of music I had to learn playing piano — Clementi, and all these composers who wrote these little piano pieces. A long part of my life is defined by these pieces of music and my relationship to them, and the world around me, and that's vitally important.

Now, I can see how pieces of AI music could be important to people. One of the big things Suno loves to tout is, you know, funny meme songs among friends — you do something really stupid, go out, and make a little song and text it to each other, and that could be part of your story, this funny meme song stuck in your head, shared among friends. In a way, I think that's okay — I think it ends up being a means of connecting people together. If the only way you have to connect with a relative in hospice care, before they pass, is to reference something you've shared together, and now you can create a piece of music very easily and give it to them, and have that moment — that's something I think is valuable, too. It's these stories, these individual moments in time, that make music so valuable, art so valuable, culture so valuable, because it becomes part of yourself in a very real way — the memory, burned into the back of your brain. As long as it continues to be that, and as long as we cultivate it in ourselves and our society, I think there's a good future for us. So — not to be all doom and gloom — I think there's a good future, just knowing that story is very important in how we shape ourselves and the world around us.

Adam Neely

I'll say a couple of different possible answers. The first is a very interesting one from Timbaland, the legendary producer who's worked a lot with Suno, creating AI compositions. In an interview, he — a big advocate for the technology — very interestingly suggested it shouldn't be for everyone. You have to know your craft before you can access these tools, which is almost completely contrary to the stated mission of Suno. I wish more people made a big deal of that statement, because to me it's very interesting, and not what's in the common narrative — this being a specialty tool that only people who've passed a certain threshold of skill, craft, and dedication to the culture can access. I know that's impossible, but it might be a good thing — it would mean there's less slop, in theory, less low-effort stuff polluting the internet, specifically designed as a grift. If you've spent enough time dedicating yourself to making music, you can then use these tools for other things. I'm only half-serious suggesting that, but I thought it was interesting.

I'd also push back on the idea that it's inevitable. Nuclear energy seemed inevitable, seemed like the future in the 1950s, but at the same time, it's here, very tightly controlled, because we recognise the danger it poses to the world and society. I think safe nuclear energy is worth considering, the same way safe AI is worth considering — nuclear power is profoundly dangerous and profoundly powerful, and it wasn't inevitable in the way we thought it was. I think AI is very similar — profoundly powerful, profoundly dangerous, profoundly potentially good, but we're going to need to be very, very careful with it moving forward.

If I were on the board of Suno, the first thing I'd insist on is spending some of the marketing budget compensating the musicians they essentially stole from. That's the number one thing — I don't think that's ever going to happen, but it's the big thing I'd insist on. The other thing I'd insist on is that the tool is geared more towards music-making and sharing music with other people — by music-making I mean making musical decisions, understanding where downbeats are, where chords are, not even names of chords, just where things are — so it becomes more of a music education tool, as well as a creation tool. That's maybe not the best business decision, but in terms of what I feel is the best outcome for the world — if the technology is there, music education is the way of channelling it, teaching people, "this is what I'm generating, but with a bit more friction," because that friction is the thing that gives people ownership over it. I don't know, it's a good question. I'd honestly maybe shut the company down, and if I were going to work with a generative AI company, I'd pick a different one — there are people doing great things with more ethical models that I'd want to work with instead. [laughter]

Adam Neely

The narrative Suno loves, and everybody loves to tell themselves, is that this is just the next progression of technology — people said the same thing about the drum machine, about synthesizers, about all these things, you're clearly just Luddites, you don't know what you're talking about. And I'm going to say — yes, but also, every time those technologies came about, people created new crafts, new skills. A new body of work, a new skill, a new craft associated with these new tools. I really want to see people using generative tools in a way that's craft-based — trial and error, input-based, doing an action, receiving feedback, modulating your response based on that feedback, which is how we learn. I don't see that yet, but it could happen. To me, that's the fundamental thing that's different about this technological revolution compared to previous ones — the shift from craft to taste, from being a doer to being a musical director, the person ordering. It's the classic DoorDash order — just because you can customise your DoorDash order doesn't mean you know anything about cooking. You're just creating the thing to your taste, which might be delicious, but saying you're now someone Anthony Bourdain should come and interview is ridiculous. It's the same idea — there's such a divorce from the actual doing of the thing.

I know people in the comments will have a variety of opinions, but the fact of the matter is — the war has almost already been won, in terms of popular opinion. It feels almost gloating to say that, but popular opinion, especially in the past year, has shifted pretty radically. I know I'm preaching to the choir frequently, and the people who haven't already been convinced are probably not going to be convinced by anything I'm saying right now, but that doesn't mean I need to stop saying it. I was at a conference recently about AI and music at Indiana University in Bloomington, and I was amazed that the student body was universally against AI — every single one I talked to was extremely skeptical, for a variety of reasons. But I was amazed by how many faculty were very pro-AI, very optimistic about it. That was a strange course of events, in terms of how technology interacts with culture and generations, where an older generation is enthusiastically adopting it and a younger generation is not. I don't know what that means for the future, but it's certainly unusual, certainly a difference from previous technological revolutions, like the electric guitar.

Adam Neely

It's shrimp music.

Adam Neely

And that's really been the case. I don't see much course correction — there might be, we might see some really cool, hip people doing radically different things, but I don't see it yet. Please, if there are people doing cool things with commercial generative AI, let me know, leave it in the comments, because I want to know, I always want to be open to learning, new workflows. But I haven't seen it yet.

Adam Neely

I'm going to call this the Rick Beato argument. Rick Beato, of course, is the great patriarch of music YouTube, with a reputation for being the old man yelling at clouds, "kids these days, pop music back in the day was better" — which, of course, is very easy to argue against. He isn't really that, but that's his reputation. He made an argument, maybe two or three years ago, that I keep thinking about — that the prevalence of autotune and quantising in the pop industry, how everything everybody hears is either autotuned or quantised, has prepared the listening public for AI slop, because essentially people have been hyper-correcting all the humanity out of musical recordings, and have been doing it for decades. We've been listening to the aesthetic equivalent of AI slop for a generation now. When he made that argument I thought, that's ridiculous, sure, Rick, whatever — but I've been thinking about it a lot recently, about how it's hard to tell whether an AI-generated pop song is being sung by a human or not, because it's affecting the same autotune aesthetic pop songs have had for quite a long time.

I was a wedding musician for a while, and I remember very distinctly playing a lot of top-40 pop songs I thought were kind of garbage, and I couldn't exactly say why. There was one song in particular — I think it was Justin Timberlake's Can't Stop the Feeling, from the Trolls soundtrack. I don't normally comment on other people's music, but that song felt like AI garbage ten years before AI garbage existed. I played it night after night, and on paper it seemed like it should be a good song — funky bassline, some interesting chord progressions — but at the time it felt like something generated specifically to make money. Now we're in the equivalent of that, that generation of pop music has given us this new aesthetic of slop, a regression to the mean. I think about the Rick Beato argument a lot — we've been prepped for this for a while, humanity's been sucked out, and the next generation's job is to put it back in. I imagine there'll be aesthetic qualities in the next generation's music that people really connect with. There's a French Canadian band — I believe they're a microtonal band — that's gone quite viral on the internet recently, and they're very weird, with a weird aesthetic, but it's radically different from other pop music people hear these days, and they've had this viral moment because it's genuinely different, something that hasn't been heard in the mainstream, for many reasons.

Adam Neely

Yeah, they do a lot of fun metric tricks. I like them a lot, actually — I haven't made a video about them, but there are plenty of music theory YouTube videos about them, David Bennett's done one, Steven Wigle is a great microtonal transcriber who's written out these pieces. I think people are excited about it because it's not in that hyper-polished aesthetic — it's a little weird, a little raw, a little rough. Maybe that's where we go, something more in that direction.

Adam Neely

May I interest you in some jazz? The entire point of jazz music is being in the moment, experiencing improvisation, reacting to things in the room. This is my pitch for jazz, for the improvisational art of jazz in small spaces, because it genuinely is that. It's obviously not for everybody, sometimes a very opaque genre, but it's also a very exciting genre specifically because it places so much emphasis on spontaneity, realness, the environment, and it's typically best experienced in small venues. Part of what you're talking about, the hyper-processed autotune and choreography, is usually for big stage shows, a very different kind of experience than being in a basement with thirty people, listening to jazz, or a rock band, or some small group of people. There's something very special about that, something so awesome about a bad sound system, a bunch of amps on the floor — you have to wear earplugs, protect your hearing — but something about that kind of environment is so cool.

I think about the pandemic — such an insane time for the world — and the thing I think about most is that it was the longest time in human history, by far, that live music didn't exist on the planet. During the Spanish flu of 1918, I read newspaper articles where they cancelled concerts for two weeks, then immediately went back to playing, in the open air or whatever — even though millions of people died, people were still rushing back to make music, or listen to music. Because of the internet, we could connect with each other and experience music over the internet, so we didn't have that burning social need in the same way. But the second people were able to experience it more safely, after lockdown, they rushed back. I remember very vividly the first concert I had, in Nashville, Tennessee — one of the most incredible experiences I've ever had, the sheer joy, the sheer electricity in the air, after people hadn't experienced this thing for more than a year, a year and a half. It was awesome. I think AI will clarify that even more — the more you polish away the humanity, the sweat and gunk, the more disconnected people feel from it, and the second they can experience the real thing, oh baby, you reconnect with your humanity in this really beautiful way.

Adam Neely

I have great memories of a bar in Hoxton — one of the places I've come through when I've been in London. It's a memory you make with other people in a space, and when you're physically in a space, it's different from listening to a jazz recording on headphones. There's food, drinks, conversation, you're half-listening, you turn around and see somebody do something crazy — whoa — and then you go back to conversation, and somebody else comes in and sits in. That's the essence of jazz culture, to me. It's exciting to be part of it, to experience it both as a musician and as a listener, someone who just does it because it's fun. Often it's in these ridiculous rooms, some bare, whitewalled room — there are beautiful, plush, famous jazz bars, but a lot of the time it's like these guys just found the most convenient small venue they could. There's one in Brixton, the Ritzy, above a cinema — I don't know, there's something so charming about being in a random space like that. It's like a bar, some drinks, and you're watching musicians play things you didn't know were even possible. Why isn't this person the highest-paid musician in the world right now?

Adam Neely

And I'll say — they're often very highly paid musicians, off doing crazy pop tours, and then on the weekends, when they're home, they're in a crappy bar. In New York, that's the thing — the most amazing musicians you'll ever see, playing to ten people, and that's the hang. I grew up in the Washington DC area, and DC has a really killing jazz scene — I played in the house band of a jam at an Eritrean restaurant, with amazing East African food, and I remember that being the formative experience — music, food, and community, this is everything I always wanted, I want to do this until the end of time. I still do that — whenever I'm on tour, one of the big things is, you play the gig, and afterwards you go find the jam, the real event, the community hang, where everybody goes and plays music and does whatever.

Adam Neely

With chess, I keep going back to it, because chess is a game, and the point of a competitive game is usually to test your skills against another person's skills. Most athletes, or people who play games — I guess a chess player is an athlete, that's a debate I don't care to have — will say that although you're testing your skill against another person, really you're testing yourself, it's all about self-improvement, through that exchange between another person and yourself. You can learn from playing against a bot, certainly improve your own skill against a bot, but people don't find the excitement in that — there's no spectacle, not in the way there might once have been, because it's now so clearly the case that the bots are so much better than humans that it stops being interesting, because there isn't that friction, that story to tell. I don't know if that's a great analogy for music, because you're not really challenging — how are you going up against the AI? The AI isn't adversarial, necessarily, because that's not how music works — we don't have adversarial relationships with other people, and I say adversarial in a positive sense, because the adversary is the thing that makes us grow, and that's where greatness comes from. I find chess so fascinating because I can find parallels between the same kinds of pattern-matching, skill, dedication, and focus in my own thinking and my own music-making. But it's one of those things where I keep going back to it because it seems like I should learn more from how the chess world reacted, but I don't quite think it's the same thing with music and art, and I don't think it ever will be.

Adam Neely

Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to see how this comes out. I'm a huge fan of your channel too, and I've learned a lot, so it really means a lot that you'd invite me.