4/25/26
After about a year of using ChatGPT and Suno, and after watching numerous videos by Adam Neely, Rick Beato, Crystal Delgado and others regarding how AI learns and what the impacts might be on the music industry I’ve concluded that Artificial Intelligence is indeed artificial, and certainly not intelligent. What do I mean?
AI is great at memorizing. It can be very good at sorting through what it’s memorized in order to present what appears to be logical and well informed info. Sometimes it is. Other times it’s not. But it always presents the information as hard fact. It also can’t give you information you couldn’t get on your own with your own research. That’s because it’s using the same sources you would use when gathering information. It can certainly do it much faster because all that information is housed in its neural network whereas you have to go out and search for it yourself.
But one problem is that it’s the same information. It’s gathered (scraped) from the internet. As most thinking people know, the internet is chock full of misinformation. And another bigger problem is that AI doesn’t have the human intelligence to tell what’s true and what isn’t true. Where you might take a chunk of information with a grain of salt, considering its source, AI can’t do that. It could have, and certainly some attempts were made during training to help it sort out true from false, but the speed and breadth of the scraping prohibited any comprehensive attempts to validate information. The race to gather up as much information as possible prohibited reasonable validation efforts.
AI has no conscience. That can be valuable at times, but not at others. AI doesn’t have the ability to accurately synthesize information to make quantum leaps of understanding, as humans can. For example, if you see a video of an artist creating a design, you can recognize that you can use a portion of that design to create a whole new design, all without copying the original design verbatim. Your mind sees the potential for a whole new design, just from the inspiration of a few pen strokes you watched another artist do. AI can’t do this. It can only copy what’s already been done. It might be able to break a design into elements that it can reassemble into a new design but there will be no new elements in the design. It’s simply a rearrangement. Of course humans can do this too, and many do. But more creative people see the possibilities for something new and can go off in entirely new directions and come up with something new, using, perhaps, that one element as inspiration.
There is a great danger of people coming to rely on AI to do tasks that, with a standard high school level education, can be done by humans. I’m talking about basic math and language skills. The ability to write and speak coherently, to understand how numbers add up in the grocery store, etc. There is nothing wrong with using advanced tech to assist with advanced tasks, but relying on a LLM to write Facebook posts for you? C’mon.
Now let’s turn to AI music generation. I have had a yearlong love affair with Suno.com. It started slowly, as I initially rejected its origins, processes and results. But I was seduced by how quickly it can turn a nascent song idea into a finished sounding recording, I have used Band In A Box (BIAB) for decades to produce backing tracks for my original songs and have been very happy with the results. Suno’s seduction began when I uploaded a 30 second clip of a very rough idea I’d recorded on my iPhone over a decade ago, tried a few styles, and was amazed at the quality of the output. Rough recordings are never inspiring or encouraging. I wonder, is there really a song in there? Suno always answers YES! Very emphatically. So I began to upload more snippets and was encouraged enough by the results to actually finish writing over 20 songs over several months, all starting with fragments I’d recorded on my iPhone over a decade ago.
All along, though, I wrestled with the ethics of AI training methods. Large Language Models (LLMs) scrape text, image and video content from every possible legal and illegal (copyrighted) source. Music generation models do the same with audio, scraping streaming services and websites for content. In the process copyright holders are not acknowledged and therefore not compensated. As a songwriter who has over 50 original songs registered with the U.S. Copyright Office I’m certainly sensitive to how unethical this process is, and I’ve been wrestling with my conscience the whole time I’ve been using Suno. I have registered one song thus far using Suno tracks as backing tracks for the song. It’s my chord progression, my melody, my melodic rhythms, my lyrics, but Suno’s tracks. I documented just how much AI was involved in the process but I haven’t received word from the Copyright Office that it’s been accepted. We’ll see.
I love the collaborative relationship I have with Suno. And now I’m thinking that’s the way I’ll use this tool moving forward — for feedback, for encouragement, for production ideas. Then go back to my DAW (Logic Pro) and my backing tracks generator (BIAB) to finish the song production. BIAB uses real humans to play real tracks and real humans to write code that can combine the real tracks into useable styles. BIAB was my tool of choice until a year ago and now I return to it. They (PG Music) come up with a significant update each year. There will be no danger of AI detectors flagging my songs, and no danger of the Copyright Office rejecting my songs.
Addendum (5/20/26) - Another issue with AI-generated music that's cropped up: it can be mass produced. Therefore it can be mass uploaded. Streaming services pay based upon percentage of overall listens to their entire catalog. The more AI listens there are, the less money is available to pay real musicians.
I've very recently found a new (to me) tool that uses human studio musicians, much the way that BIAB does. It's called Tonalic. No AI. Just brilliant ways to assemble musical patterns to create human music inside a DAW. So now I have two tools that celebrate human musicianship.
7/15/25
There now are lots of apps and websites that will create songs for you. Until recently I haven’t used any of them to create the songs on this website. I used ChatGPT to help me break out of a lyrical rut once. That was for the song Sidetracked, and I didn’t use any of the lyrics it generated verbatim, but more like a songwriter circle where other songwriters suggest lyrical directions you haven’t thought about. For Sidetracked, the ChatGPT lyrics had an uplifting ending, and when I read those lyrics I realized that there was an uplifting ending implicit in the story already, I just hadn’t been thinking about it.
Artificial Intelligence is a tricky subject. Any computer app, be it a word processor, spreadsheet, internet browser, photo processor, video processor, etc., is a form of AI that we’ve been using for decades. Not generative like the new large language models, but artificially intelligent enough to do lots of mundane tasks for us. Even hand-held calculators, smartphones, and similar devices contained forms of AI in their operating systems, even before AI has became the hot ticket it is now. That’s what makes them such valuable tools. In fact, Bandzoogle contains a tremendous assortment of powerful time-saving tools that I use to create, expand and maintain this website. I couldn't do it without their tool set.
On the musical side, I’ve been using an app called Band-In-A-Box (BIAB) since 1995 to help me generate backing tracks for my recordings. Some of these recordings only contain BIAB drum tracks while I played all the other instruments. Many more recordings contain mostly BIAB backing tracks, or all BIAB backing tracks. This link will take you to a page on this site that explains this in more detail. And my Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) of choice, Logic Pro, gives me the power to sit in my home studio and produce high quality recordings with its level of AI.
Now I’m at a point where my curiosity about AI song generators has gotten me to try one: Suno.com. I’ve been blown away by the audio quality of the music it generates. There are legal aspects that are being explored these days, with class action lawsuits aiming to get AI generating businesses like Suno, Udio and others to somehow pony up and compensate music creators for the unfair or fair use of their content in the training of the AI neural networks. I'm happy, at this point, to let the courts work all that out. After all, my music is also online and subject to being scraped and used for training.
With Suno's latest update to version 4.5 I can now upload up to and 8 minute audio track. This now allows me to have full control over the chord progressions, lyrics, melody and melodic rhythm that Suno will base its “cover” versions of my song on. I'm really happy with the quality of the output, and though I'm using BIAB to create the instrumental tracks and adding a scratch vocal track to the audio I upload, the final resutls are much more dynamic than what I can normally get BIAB to produce no matter how much I manipulate BIAB's output alone.
So my current position is that the genie is out of the bottle and there’s no going back. AI music generation is here to stay. But I'm a stickler for being as original as possible and I expect I will always want full control over the copyrightable aspects of songs, so I'll continue to exercise full control over the chord progressions, lyrics, melodies, and melodic rhythms of my songs, using AI as just another tool in my toolbox.
- Paul Fifield