A brief explanation of Suno and Udio and AI Butthole Music

Plus explaining the Lil Yachty meme

AI music is having a moment. It’s been bubbling under the surface of generative AI discourse for years, with Spotify constantly battling AI-generated uploaders and listeners. But battle lines are now drawn between two big players in the scene: In the red corner, Suno, the grand old dame of the AI-music scene having launched in checks notes December 2023. And the blue corner, Udio, landed publicly on April 10, 2024. 

First, the obviously concerning things about the training data for both. Neither company has done anything to demonstrate they are being any less cavalier with training data than the other generative AI giants. Champion of creatives Ed Newton-Rex has been vocal on this and has not gotten any public engagement from their representatives.

Social media is full of what looks like pretty egregious examples of unpermitted artist use in the training data. If anyone sees all this and thinks these services are not for them that’s an understandable reaction. The case against both tools is laid and pretty clearly by Mat Dryhurst here:

But much like DALL-E and Midjourney and Sora, and any other AI tools that offer accessible creativity, the data concerns have not stopped a community mushrooming around both tools. An X poster recently demonstrated a typical use case for Sonu by making and uploading a disco song about New York City trying to use birth control to combat its rat problem, he wrote, “I'm not 100% sold on AI changing the way we work, but it is changing the way I waste time”. 

This tracks with my rule-of-thumb for most generative AI innovations, they will change many people’s working lives in the medium term, in the short term they are just a massive boon for shitposters. 

Take the nascent subreddit for SunoAI. Is the top post from the last month an example of someone using a new music technology to create something transcendent? Nope, it’s a guy (I am 99.999% sure it is a guy) making a 1950s-style song called I Glued My Balls to My Butthole Again.

Although, having listened to this song twice already today I don’t know, maybe it is transcendent. 

This community will deliver juvenile stuff like the above, and people creating musicial fan fiction where their favorite artist, against their will, continues to produce what they want. But it will mainly just be a replacement for royalty-free music with no clear path for earnings for anyone given how easy it is to create.

Of course, that has not stopped the AI hype bros. Social is awash with big promises about the game-changing influence of Udio. Whether it is forgettable pop culture mashups, pastiche film scores, genuinely awful AI stand-up comedy, there is no shortage of big claims about not-very-good creativity.

Into the mix, and this has already happened with images, there is a newfound mistrust of music without clearly identified creators. Any musician over the coming years looking to release stuff anonymously will likely get hit with an AI accusation. It’s not hard to imagine the music industry responding to this soup of AI-generated nothingness by focusing on incredibly produced music personalities over content.

So Suno and Udio are here. They are not helping original artists make money, they are facilitating the production of some sludge and some funny stuff, they are not solving a problem but creating many, they have many question marks over data usage. That feels about par for generative AI tools in 2024.

Small Bits #1: Why you’re seeing this clip everywhere

This video shows the rapper Lil Yachty walking out on stage in front of an adoring crowd. It’s a great clip, and it has become the latest template to be picked up for the AI meme treatment. If you have seen a random person superimposed on Lil Yachty on your timelime this week it was likely made using rotoscoping app Viggle AI. There’s a breakdown on how to use the tool in an X thread here, while the always reliable Know Your Meme breakdown the trend here.

Small Bits #2: New creepy type of AI guy just dropped

Across text-to-image and text-to-video tools since launch, there has been an undercurrent of creepiness. Most searches for Midjourney and Stable Diffusion images have an overrepresentation of sexualized women. And deepfake porn is a problem that might, but likely won’t, be tackled by belated regulation. Into that mess comes a new AI entrepreneur using the tagline AI Women are Women to promote a product called Orifice and slinging in some incel-friendly bromides to the mix (I’m obviously not linking to his socials). This is an area of AI that is going to get much worse before it gets better, if it even ever gets better.