We’re probably going to learn to live with AI music |
Mikey Shulman, the co-founder of Suno, an app to create AI music. | Barry Chin/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
According to the French music streaming service Deezer, there are about 50,000 fully AI-generated songs uploaded to its platform every day. Many of these songs won’t reach a wide audience, but over the past year, a few have gained millions of listens.
Which raises the question: If our future is going to be filled with this kind of AI music, what does that future sound like?
Deni Béchard is the senior science writer at Scientific American. For the better part of a month, Béchard has only allowed himself to listen to his own AI-generated music using the AI music app Suno. He says the experiment is an attempt to think more critically about how we might engage with this kind of music in the future.
Béchard spoke with Today, Explained host Noel King spoke about what he’s learned so far and how his AI creations stack up to human-made music. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
There’s much more in the full podcast — including snippets of Béchard’s songs — so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Alright, so you’re using Suno, you said, to create the songs.
I come up with a prompt and I’ll plug it in, and each prompt makes two songs, and I’ll try to be as creative as possible. I’ll usually plug it in two or three times and vary it, add different kinds of instruments or different kinds of vocals, and just plug a bunch of........