The tech world has a way of promoting what business wants in ways they make sound like you want it. For years it’s felt like everyone pushes you to download their app in what I suspect is a move to get your data, which is then leveraged for marketing or other commercial purposes. Everybody kind of knows this, the suspicion is old. Yet the world carries on as if apps exist for the customers’ sake, to improve their experience, not the company’s. Same with AI.

It feels very much now like people deeply invested in AI need mass buy-in to cash out, and a technology with no real usefulness is being promoted by people who know it’s obviously garbage. I know people have found a range of useful applications, like help in coding or planning an itinerary, but the gap between AI’s alleged usefulness and its hype is so enormous, I’m comfortable saying it’s useless.

Nowhere is it more useless than in making music. One comment from an interview doing the rounds on twitter made my stomach sick, and I’m far from alone. Mikey Shulman an executive from suno AI, said this about making music:

“It’s not really enjoyable to make music now… it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you have to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of time they spend making music.”

What is said here that isn’t true about everything? There isn’t a discipline on Earth that doesn’t take time to get good if you want to do it well.

Anybody who has really wanted to play an instrument can’t take their hands off it. It’s not a slog! It’s anything but! It’s not work! Maybe I’m wrong, but I can feel this CEO and others dying to insert in this conversation the idea that limiting music to musicians, or people playing instruments, is elitist, that anybody should be able to play music.

But the thing is, anyone can play music! A decent guitar costs a small fraction of one month’s rent. At some point, making music involves doing something, and so long as you can do that, you can make it.

I’ve thought a lot about how music incorporates new technology, and how there’s always a pushback from old fogeys who resist modern change. Am I doing that? I don’t think so, but here’s what I mean…

When the piano first came out, people thought it was a form of cheating because the player only has to hit a colour-coded button (white for natural notes, black for sharps/flats) to pluck the string. With piano, the keys activate a hammer which strikes the strings, there’s no contact between the strings and the fingers.

When hip hop started sampling music, people wrongly thought that was just plagiarism. Let’s be clear about something every knows: rock stole blues, or grew out of it, or whatever you want to call it. There’s nothing new about taking older forms of music into your own; sampling just made it more direct. From an artistic standpoint, there’s no difference between copying someone’s guitar riffs and stitching a bar of their music into your song. These only differ on a technical level. The copying is automatic instead of manual. There’s an old joke about jazz I like that goes like this:

“Maaan, that sax player is just stealing Charlie Parker riffs.”

*Sax player walks over, hands him the horn*

“You try it.”

If anything, sampling is more honest because it’s more direct and there’s no cover-up or masking going on. People thought Led Zeppelin or whoever wrote those Robert Johnson songs, but De La Soul never claimed to have invented P-Funk, even if many people didn’t recognize, say, the Knee Deep sample on Me Myself and I.

My favourite musicians eagerly incorporated new technology right away. Jerry Garcia had an ultra-sophisticated custom guitar with crazy built-in mods in the 80s and 90s, Tiger. Sun Ra jumped at the chance to play any new keyboard instrument (rocksichord, wurlitzer, clavinet, minimoog, farfisa, the list goes on…) and like many he used odd ball recording techniques on albums in places.

Music is about making sounds, not labouring on the rudiments and working on an instrument until you advance and pass a test and get sanctioned to play. You don’t need to log 10,000 hours to play punk or even rock. So I can’t help think that this AI music movement is designed to produce lots of place-holder “content” music so companies can use it in videos or ads or whatever without paying for the rights. They’re not promoting AI in music for musical reasons, just self-interested commercial reasons.

I can’t help but notice that the people pushing AI in music aren’t musicians, but executives and investors. Maybe Brian Eno can find a cool way to make music using AI and I’m not really saying AI is totally useless, but even if you ignore all the absurd amounts of energy and water AI consumes, I am an enormous skeptic that AI will make music sound better and bet it will only make life for real musicians even harder, not easier.