Recently, AI music company Suno’s CEO was quoted as saying “I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music” in what sounds like yet another justification of Suno’s prompt-based (and very popular) generative AI music service. Like all good misleading statements, this one is partially based on truth: when we work at our favorite activities — cooking, gaming, hiking, music-making, writing (to name a few) — the process is often not easy or pleasant or smooth. Many musicians spend vastly more time in practice rooms than onstage; gamers willingly play punishingly difficult video games; hikers go up and down big mountains while dealing with blisters, mosquitos, and a host of inconveniences. All of these are arguably not “enjoyable” the majority of the time, and yet people still choose to undertake these activities. Why? Well, Suno quietly leaves out the part that the process (with its inherent challenges) is often what makes an activity ultimately meaningful and fulfilling. It’s like Suno telling hikers and mountaineers that clambering up a mountain is unpleasant business! Why not take a helicopter to the summit? Meanwhile, Suno is selling helicopter tickets.
Statements like Suno’s perfectly captures the prevailing public mindset about AI: that Artificial Intelligence is little more than a labor-saving optimization tool. This mindset tends to be good for #Capitalism, but betrays not only a lack of understanding of why people make music, but also a profound lack of imagination regarding how we could, or would want to live with our technologies in our lives. I, for one, would go as far as to say using generative AI for creative expression in this manner (“describe what you have in mind and AI will create it for you”) amounts to the least imaginative of use of AI that I can imagine. Such systems offer the promise of skipping the labor by bypassing the creative process and, yes, the difficulties, confusion, and frustration inherent in such endeavors, but…
What if the point of art is that we actually make it?
“What’s Your Story?”
I do not despise AI, per se, but I am forever wary of people who make and deploy technology in uncritical, culturally apathetic ways. I am pretty sure this makes me something of an Old Fart; or maybe I have always been that. But I do have some background in this topic. I am an Associate Professor of Music and (by Courtesy) Computer Science at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), where I teach “Music and AI” as a critical-making course, cross-listed in Music and Computer Science. I wrote the book Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime as a photo-comic manifesto of why we ought to build tools playfully, artfully, in accordance not only with perceived needs, but also with the invisible values that underly the needs; it probes the question, “how do we want to live with our technologies?” I invent things that nobody asked for and that solves no problems that quite exist; I direct laptop and VR orchestras. Once upon a time, I co-founded a mobile music company called Smule. I am a Senior Fellow and a Faculty Associate Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (Stanford HAI, for short). I sometimes write about AI and art, and offer my perspectives, such as they are. My wife and I backpack in the mountains. We are parents to a one-year old baby daughter; I think a lot about her growing up in a future I can barely imagine.
Making things that nobody asked for and that solves no problems that exists, Exhibit A: Ocarina for the iPhone.
Many years ago, I arrived at Princeton University to pursue my Ph.D. in Computer Science, with vague plans to build “the world’s most advanced algorithmic composition engine for music” (essentially GenAI for music, in today’s parlance). But before I even set foot on Princeton’s impeccably manicured campus, brimming with classic Gothic architecture, cherry blossom trees, and well-kept lawns — something, or rather someone, gave me pause on my aspirations.
On my drive up to New Jersey in that late summer of 2001, I stopped by a house party in Washington D.C. that featured a local cover band. The band was tight. After the performance, I went up to the guitarist and told him so.
“Thank you,” he said, “so, what’s your story?”
“I am going up to Princeton to start grad school in computer science.” I replied, “I want to build the world’s most advanced automated music composition machine.”
The guitarist studied me for a moment and asked, succinct and earnest, “What’s the point?”
It was a good question. No, it was a great question; maybe the question. It stopped me in my tracks and I did not give an answer. I did not have an answer. “I’ll let you know if I figure that out.” I grinned, as I pocketed the question for future rumination.
That brief exchange would domino into a “personal crisis of faith”, one that I would relish, for it would challenge my beliefs and continually beckon me to reflect on the role of technology for things that, like Music, really matter to us.
Over the next six years of graduate school, I worked on computer music with seriously playful characters like professors Perry Cook and Dan Truemen and fellow grad student Rebecca Fiebrink. I never did attempt to build “the world’s most advanced algorithmic composition engine” — because I never could answer the question “what is the point?” (without resorting to hand-wavy and frankly bullshit answers like “democratize music-making”). Instead, I built a tool, a domain-specific programming language for music; thinking maybe I could create one more expressive tool with which people can make music and, if they wished, explore “what’s the point?” for themselves.
More than twenties years later, I am a tenured professor at a so-called “elite university” in the heart of Silicon Valley, ground zero of Big Tech. Meanwhile, my personal crisis of faith persists. I still ask, “what is the point?”. I still do not have an answer that satisfies, but I have come to profoundly appreciate the question, which I now help my students to ask in all that they do, especially in shaping technology. Ever the contrarian, I task my “Music and AI” students (many of them engineers) to build “useless things that are interesting to you” as a way to playfully work with technologies like AI, and to probe for both capacities and limits. They respond by by making things like auto-rizz.ck:
auto-rizz.ck uses AI — not “generative” but interactive. It detects “seductive” glances and plays cheesy saxophone music (yes, that is all it does). It’s whimsical. It’s absurd. It fit the assignment brilliantly. I always ask students to ask themselves why they chose to build what they did. Matt, the inventor of auto-rizz.ck, had this to say (excerpted from his reflection):
“I really enjoyed this assignment. I think its easy to adopt this toxic capitalistic mindset that everything you do or make has to be productive or “for” something. But when we follow that dogma, we forget to make beautiful things just because they’re beautiful, do funny things just because they’re funny, or make stupid projects just because they’re stupid. There’s so much beauty in doing things just because. It was nice to take a pause on life and make something just for the sake of making it (and for a grade, but that’s more of an afterthought).” — Matt
I ask my students to look for interesting questions in everything. I tell them that the power of a good question is not in the answer, but in the question’s capacity to regeneratively invite more questions, and to construct lenses for examining the world — and ourselves. It’s like the question, asked by the ancient Greeks more than two millennia ago, “What is the good life?” We are still asking ourselves this today.
A Labor-creating Machine?
Ruminating on AI and art and the point of it all, I am reminded of a John Cage sentiment:
“What we need is a computer that isn’t labor-saving, but which increases the work for us to do.” — John Cage (from “Diary: Audience 1966”)
I first learned of this quote through CCRMA Ph.D. candidate Nick Shaheed’s Qualifying Exam. Nick’s interpretation of its meaning in a world nearly 60 years later:
“So, why would I want to increase the work I need to do? Well, because it’s fun and it’s work I want to do! For me (and many many other artists), doing the work and the work itself are largely the same thing. Speaking personally, my creative practice is about as far from the idealized depiction of Mozart shown in (the film) Amadeus, a fully formed concept is not being put onto the page as the first draft. Beginning with just the most basic seed of an idea, and then the process of trying it out, realizing it, tweaking things, all these bits of effort are the bricks being laid that form the actual piece itself. Without the work being done to make the music, the end result would be very different (and probably, worse).” — Nick Shaheed (from “CCRMA Quals Exam 2024”)
I resonate with Nick’s position — that the process not only shapes the outcome invariably, but constitutes an unalienable part of what the outcome is. It is the idea that art is to be made, for it is during the making that we realize what we are truly trying to say, far beyond the initial inkling of a concept. It is the observation that process brings its own intrinsic rewards, not despite of but because of the inherent challenges in making things for ourselves. This is all to say, process is not an obstacle to be removed on the path of creative expression. It is the path.
Any process of creation is simultaneously a process of learning, beset by setbacks, confusion, and frustration. Yet, such frictions can, if one sticks with the process, ultimately give rise to something fulfilling: a deeper understanding of how a thing works and how to work with it, accompanied by the feeling that we have learned a bit more about ourselves and what we are capable of achieving. Skipping the process makes about as much sense as “playing” a difficult video game by asking someone else (robot or human) to take the controller and play it in your place, while you verbally offer general prompts about what to do and where to go from the couch. That would still be an experience, maybe even an enjoyable one, but it would be a fundamentally different experience from undertaking the process for yourself.
Reflecting on these ideas only makes me sadder that voices such as Suno’s (who received another venture capital funding round of $125M late last year) continue to dominate and shape the public imagination on AI and creative expression, drowning out other voices that would also have something to say about what we truly want from this technology, and how we might want to live with it moving forward.
The technology is new, but what GenAI music companies like Suno are doing is not. Like the recording industry before them (and without whom, ironically, there would be no training data for GenAI), companies like Suno commodify creative expression as part of an aesthetic economy based on passive consumption. Thus it is in Suno’s core interest to usher people away from active creation, and toward a system of frictionless convenience that strives to lower the effort of production — and the effort of imagination beyond vague concepts to type into prompts — to zero. And while no doubt prompting-AI-systems will be a new kind of “muscle” for us all to build, one has to ask: what other muscles will atrophy? There is always a price to pay; the danger of living in a world of frictionless convenience might well be cultural and individual stagnation.
This brings us to the most misleading part of GenAI companies like Suno: they purport to be tools for creating art, but by making every effort to dismiss and eradicate the process of learning to expressive ourselves, what they are actually creating is a new generation of consumers. While these endeavors might make a few individuals a lot of money in the meantime, it is unlikely to be good in the long-run for culture — or our soul.
I am not philosophically in opposition to generative AI, even for artistic creation. For one, I don’t know what “AI making art” evens means at this point; I barely, if at all, understand “humans making art”. I am inclined to say, therefore, “there should be room for that, too”. At the same time, I am committed to preserving and protecting the room for humans to labor profusely, unenjoyably, illogically to creatively express themselves. The former may happen more and more as AI entrenches itself further in our lives; simultaneously, there is something at stake in the latter. “There should be room for that, too” should apply both ways.
I once gave a talk at Stanford HAI’s conference on AI and Creativity, where I put forth my own “crisis” question for others: “What Do We (Really) Want from Artificial Intelligence?”. The talk offers no answers, but a set of lenses to think about AI and creative expression. Give it a watch, if you would like, and figure out for yourself the questions that matter to you.
What I (Really) Want
In these days of profound uncertainty about the future, I look at my daughter, who just turned one, and every fiber of my person tells me this: as she grows, I would want her to learn to value and even embrace the difficulty, confusion, frustration that come with learning, and that reside inherent in the craft of creatively expressing oneself, whatever form that may take — and for her to come to know the sublime joy hidden in the process…with or without AI.
