Here’s a little rant. Over the past fifteen years, I’ve seen so much nonsense by tech executives talking about education that I’ve partly built a worldwide career from the Urban Myth books. So, I should almost be grateful to those tech gurus who proclaim the most stupid things with great certainty in the media (and on LinkedIn).

But… I read this interview with the man behind Suno, and too much is too much and too much is too much. Suno is an app that lets AI make music for you. I’ve tried, like many new apps that come out. This Mikey Shulma now claims the following:

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

This is almost the inversion of the argument that every musician has heard over and over again when they dared to ask for money for a performance: oh, don’t you do it because it’s fun?

The app itself now also ensures that there are enormous additional problems, such as copyright infringements, musician incomes, and fewer cultural and art experiences. Well, that’s secondary, surely?

They often don’t see the paradox in their statements: on the one hand, they praise their own expertise while minimising the importance of somebody else’s expertise.

Zuckerberg once had the motto, “Move fast and break things”. In the meantime, we know how much can get broken.

Oh yes, this music was not made via AI. It did indeed take a lot of effort. And yes, I also cursed to learn to play an F-chord, for example. But then you also get something. Besides (hopefully) beautiful music, you also get something like satisfaction.