The Spiritual Impacts of AI on Music
Over the past few weeks, two interviews have got me thinking about the increasing presence of AI in musical spaces: the first, CEO of Suno AI, Mikey Shulman, in conversation with venture capitalist Harry Stebbings; the second, Paul McCartney on BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg’s Sunday morning politics show. Like most people who work in the creative arts, I’ve spent no small amount of time considering this topic. Any concerns I already had have only been amplified by these recent additions to the conversation.
Where Paul McCartney is a household name, Mikey Shulman and Suno AI may be less familiar. I first encountered Suno whilst working as a musician in residence in a school in Sunderland. My colleague and I stepped into a classroom where children were working on their own whilst some fairly generic pop music played in the background. On the digital whiteboard was an interface that looked similar to Spotify. When we asked the teaching assistant about it, she told us that it was an AI service which had generated three songs with the prompt ‘goodbye year 6’, which, much to her dismay (and likely the pupils’, if the atmosphere was anything to go by) had been playing on repeat for some time. When we later enquired as to why the school, which benefits from both a pioneering musician in residence scheme run by Mishmash Productions and onsite music provision delivered by a specialist organisation staffed by experienced and active musicians, was suddenly using this service in classrooms, we received the vague response that they were being encouraged to do so by people further up the chain. Whether this means senior management within the school or actors who oversee education more broadly, the evident flippancy with which this powerful technology was being rolled out shocked me and seemed indicative of broader attitudes about AI.
Suno AI describes its mission thusly:
‘Suno is building a future where anyone can make great music. Whether you're a shower singer or a charting artist, we break barriers between you and the song you dream of making. No instrument needed, just imagination. From your mind to music.’ (About Suno, n.d.)
CEO Mikey Shulman in his conversation with Stebbings further elaborates:
‘Suno is a way for everybody to experience all of the joys of music, meaning not just background listening to music, but losing yourself in the process of making music, of sharing music, of editing music, of being a much more active participant in music… We’re not making music, we’re making musicians.’ (20VC with Harry Stebbings, 2025, 0’50” [hereafter 20VC])
At this early stage, it’s important to say that there are so many things wrong with Shulman’s outlook that it would take more than a book to begin covering the salient criticisms, so I will be sharing just a few of my thoughts in this article. Much has been said elsewhere about this interview (there are several video responses, and the comments section in the original video is an education in itself). Consider this a personal reflection on the topic, and a plea to start thinking more seriously about how technological ‘progress’ carries with it ‘embedded ideologies’ (M. Cardin, personal communication, July 27, 2024), and that these ideologies very plausibly pose an existential threat not only to our material lives, but to our spiritual being, in particular where AI meets art.
I would also add that I am not a luddite. I am not opposed to technological advancement, nor am I necessarily opposed to the idea of services that allow you to create new songs at the push of a button (issues of environmental damage and copyright theft aside). The concerns I feel and the criticisms I make are rooted in the narratives peddled by those who have a stake in the game, as well as lazy narratives which float uninterrogated in the invisible terms and conditions of our daily lives as subjects of late-stage capitalism.
Let me begin, then, by drawing an analogy: listening to Shulman talk about the future of music is like listening to a virgin talk about the future of sex. Take, for example, this already notorious snippet from the interview: ‘it’s not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice… I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music’ (20VC, 23’22”). Anyone who has ever spent any amount of time immersed in a musical activity will immediately recognise this as an absurd statement. If I take Shulman’s points in good faith, and indeed he does seem reasonably earnest, this demonstrates an astounding absence of embodied, grounded experience. Such unabashed arrogance is unfortunately not in short supply amongst the upper echelons of our collapsing society. This man is a false prophet of the highest order, and he doesn’t even seem to know it. Sex education from a virgin.
When Stebbings challenges Shulman (one of the only times he has the acumen to do so) on this point, making a case that running, too, is hard and often unpleasant but that people nevertheless enjoy it, Shulman replies that ‘most people drop out of that pursuit because it was hard’ (20VC, 23’53”). Seemingly without a hint of irony, Shulman is here channeling his inner Homer Simpson: ‘if something’s hard to do then it’s not worth doing’ (Martin, 1992). Prophetic as always, the creators of ‘The Simpsons’ satirised this feature of pockets of American culture in the early 1990s. In 2025, we’ve arrived at its conclusion. YouTuber chipteef gives a good analogy of this position by suggesting that if Shulman ran a climbing gym, he’d replace all of the boulders with an escalator (chipteef, 2025, 9’14”). No entrepreneur would rack up half a billion dollars peddling this take, so why does the equivalent in music get a free pass?
In order to answer this question, we need to ask what you are actually doing when you use these services. Suno works by turning prompts (‘write me a song about the spiritual threat of AI music creation’) into songs. There are a few options that allow you to tweak the process. You can upload snippets of your own audio recordings which are then incorporated into the output. You can write your own lyrics and specify stylistic choices. A little while later, out pops a freshly baked song. Congratulations! Shulman says you are now a musician.
What we have here is something like an updated version of one of those musical children’s toys, often shaped like a miniature keyboard, which plays a familiar melody at the press of a button, only now you get a ‘new’ tune each time.
As a friend, musician and legal scholar James Halloran, pointed out to me, an AI musician is, in fact, more like a patron who commissions art. A culture of state and private commissioning has been one way in which artists have been able to exist outside of the restrictions of wage labour, a culture which continues to this day, albeit much diminished. With services like Suno, for the annual cost of a subscription, everyone with access to the internet can become a patron, requesting output according to their tailored interests and desires. Once their collection of commissions becomes large enough, they can move on to the process of curating and exhibiting, sharing the efforts of their patronage with others. All well and good. We recognise intuitively, however, that the patron is not the artist. Nobody would name Francesco del Giocondo, the wealthy individual who putatively commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to paint Mona Lisa, as the artist (Plessis, 2023). This isn’t an argument against AI-generated music; only a criticism of the way in which it is framed. As Shulman is quoted as saying above, ‘[w]e’re not making music, we’re making musicians’.
So far, we’ve ascertained what Suno and similar services do, and what users are doing when accessing them. Let’s explore the flip side: what aren’t users doing? This list is far from exhaustive, but here are a few things that occurred to me. Users are not:
developing a sense of groove through embodied practice;
developing an awareness of how sounds change with acoustics;
attuning their aural perception;
developing empathy and understanding through listening to and working together with others in real-time;
able to make mistakes and build on them (as jazz visionary Thelonious Monk apocryphally decried after a gig, ‘no good—I made all the wrong mistakes’);
drawing intuitive connections between materials and their timbral qualities;
learning how to improvise;
learning by imitating the physical movements of others;
exploring the emotional nuances of subtle differences in expression;
learning how to access and focus a shared sense of time and rhythm;
learning how to collaborate and compromise, realising a shared ambition and how it changes through the unique synergy of multiple persons (as my friend, musician and producer Neeta Sarl, quipped, AI music creation is akin in some ways to masturbation);
discovering how movement (e.g. dance) and sound are intimately entangled;
entering into a shared space of sociocultural significance and ritual meaning (consider, for example, Gnawa religious songs; field hollers; Gospel; Fuke Zen shakuhachi; Sacred Harp; jazz jam sessions; Detroit techno; Ewe drumming; Nyege Nyege; lullabies);
learning about the materials of music (e.g. rhythm, harmony, melody, timbre, texture, counterpoint, form);
discovering their entirely personal mode of expression through which the totality of their experience and emotions up to and including that very moment can find voice (thanks again to Neeta Sarl for this point).
Of course, Suno users will be taking small steps in certain of these areas through their engagement with the service, but the steps are severely and irrevocably limited due to the model’s largely passive and immensely reductive design. Each of the points illustrated above is worthy of lengthy discussion, but I would like to home in on the subject of musical traditions.
In my nearly three decades of serious musical involvement, there are three principal cultural spaces in which I’ve been immersed: Western classical, jazz, and shakuhachi. Each of these terms points towards a vast constellation of connected stories, people, places, ideas, polemics, and so on. Notably, all three have a significant body of repertoire at their core, around which swirls a nebula in constant flux. Students of Western classical will cover works from a period of around 300 years (from around 1650 to 1950) and will have spent thousands of hours immersed in the music of composers from Purcell through to Shostakovich and beyond. Jazz musicians typically cut their teeth in social spaces wherein there is an expectation that participants will be familiar with, and be able to improvise on, a hefty chunk of the Great American Songbook, a collection of 20th century American popular tunes which have become informally codified as ‘standards’ (admittedly this culture has been complicated by institutionalisation and other trends, beyond the scope of this essay to discuss). The shakuhachi tradition centres around the honkyoku (本曲), a body of meditative pieces which take the breath as their rhythmic impetus, gathered from Zen temples around Japan into a loose collection in the 18th century. Students are required to work their way through these pieces in intense collaboration with their teacher, playing together and imitating the precise nuances of phrasing, timbre, and pitch, connecting the student to a long line of musicians through the ages.
These are examples drawn from my own life, but they represent are only three amongst an infinite tapestry of beautiful and complex traditions and communities. I would be the first to admit that I have enjoyed a life of privilege, and that I have had access to resources and spaces that are unavailable to many others, but there are innumerable traditions which predate or exist outside of systems of commerce and transaction. Indeed, many such traditions have functioned as a means of resisting those very forces of inequality and domination and continue unabated to this day. Sociologist Shoko Yoneyama identifies one tradition which brought the community of Minami-sanriku in Northeastern Japan together after they had lost everything in the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami, where ‘more than 800 people, or one twentieth of the population, lost their lives. The whole town was reduced to rubble, and the community was decimated’ (Yoneyama, 2019, p. 231). Local fisherman, Muraoka Kenichi, together with other members of the community, managed to retrieve from the mud all but one of the taiko drums used in their Deer Dance ceremony, as well as the costumes and outfits. What followed is a beautiful vignette of all that individuals like Mikey Shulman would discard in their pursuit of automated creation:
‘The 1st person keen to do the Deer Dance was a 12-year-old boy, Onodera Shō, who persuaded his friends, who were scattered amongst various shelters, to learn the dance together. When the revived Deer Dance was finally performed, local residents watched it with tears in their eyes.’ (Ibid., p. 232)
Where is all this richness in AI-generated music? Where is the learning? Where is the community and the resistance? Where are our shared stories? Historian and social critic Morris Berman warned about the creeping dangers of the fetishisation of information in his 2000 book ‘The Twilight of American Culture’:
‘…we are drowning in information; hence, what is required is that it be embodied, preserved through ways of living... The job of preservation and transmission at the present time thus consists in creating "zones of intelligence" in a private, local way, and then deliberately keeping them out of the public eye.’ (Berman, 2000, pp. 133-134)
Berman here offers advice which directly counters the pestilential potential of AI in art, identifying certain dialectical tensions between human art and AI art: ‘embodied, preserved through ways of living’ versus disembodied, existing irrespective of ways of living (or even destroying ways of living); private and local versus public and global. This latter is significant. In attempting to migrate creation from the local to the global, rather than connecting people and fostering community, AI music creation has the opposite effect: people are atomised, hyper-individualised, entering a space where the only measure of musical success is understood as the perceived quality of the commodity (i.e. the song output).
An obsession with content is on flagrant display throughout the Shulman/Stebbings interview, most succinctly captured in one of Stebbings’ comments: ‘an infinite supply of music’ (20VC, 33’22”). Recall Suno’s mission statement above—‘we break barriers between you and the song you dream of making’—as though the music exists outside of the self, something to be captured once the ‘barriers’ crumble, like a Pokémon in a Poké Ball. Shulman and Stebbings both understand music rather like a substance, a thing to be consumed. The creation of substances involves work. Once the process of making music (the activity that most people recognise as the meaningful bit) is identified as work, people like Shulman feel they do us a great service in doing away with the need for that work. We don’t want to work; we just want loads and loads and loads of songs for ever and ever and ever that we can inject into our ears for maximum stimulation.
Shulman further extends this monstrously ignorant perspective in this cracker:
‘Increasingly, taste is the only thing that matters in art, and skill is going to matter a lot less because you’re going to be able to make a lot of stuff and the people who are going to be recognised are people who are able to pick from the vast quantity of stuff and use, in the case of music, their ears to say that was good and that was bad.’ (20VC, 51’54”)
If music is all about content, then it makes sense that taste is all that matters. What Shulman fails to understand is that taste and experience are entwined and constantly changing. If your taste has stopped changing, then you have stopped changing. If art and music are about anything, they are about personal growth in community, and therefore transformation in the community. This comes about through being a body amongst other bodies in a space (even if that shared space is virtual) through time. Taste changes as a result of this situatedness. To suggest that taste is the point itself is to completely divorce art from any context whatsoever. What then will become of taste in this new universe of absolute meaninglessness?
Welcome to the culture of quick fixes, in which a glorified ON/OFF switch is the exciting, rad new replacement for making music. In a recent video, essayist Alexander Avila draws a connection between the primacy of content and de-humanisation:
‘Addiction and substance abuse is a process of self-dehumanisation. Substances allow you to chase hyper-concentrated feelings that you would otherwise have to attain through life experience. Happiness, excitement, serenity: why pursue human experiences when you can consume all the good parts of it in one pill? Of course, you pay the price. Addiction chips away at your humanity. The substance delivers exactly what it promises—good feelings—without having to go through the work of experiencing the pain of the human condition. Why grind life out when you can just hold the good feelings in the palm of your hand?’ (Avila, 2024, 41’16”)
Shulman is selling us the ‘good parts’ (i.e. the musical record/object), which we ‘would otherwise have to attain through life experience’ (i.e. committing to and spending time immersed in a musical practice). Although the dopamine may run steadily at first, this ‘chips away at your humanity’ (and, I would add, gradually isolates you from community). Yes, learning an instrument is hard. Yes, it can be enormously frustrating when you don’t understand chord symbols; when you can’t copy what you hear; when your coordination is all over the place. But leaning into these challenges, alone and with others, is the life experience, is experiencing the pain of the human condition. Within this struggle is an awesome, boundless joy to be discovered; a profound and transformative way of being, one that has enraptured souls for millennia and will continue to do so as long as people are around. Let’s not allow spiritually stunted pound shop Messiahs like Shulman to pharmocologise music and sell it back to us as though they are doing us a favour.
Where Suno claims to be a tool of empowerment, exactly the opposite is true. Through peddling these narratives that tell us that music is inaccessible, that it’s not worth learning, that it’s too hard, Suno is, in fact, locking people out of their birthright as creative beings. There is music to be made at every moment of every day, as long as there are people in your community who can take your hand and gently guide you the first few steps. Suno have taken on the role of inverse gatekeepers. They propagate the idea that music isn’t yours in order to convince you that your only chance of becoming a musician is through using their platform. Once you’ve internalised this logic and are strapped in to their version of music making, you become a slave of the software, your only musical choices dictated by the user interface, most of the ‘creation’ happening through algorithms hidden behind impenetrable hardware walls. The ultimate disempowerment.
Suno promises something rather like the scene in the film ‘The Matrix’ where protagonist Neo has various martial arts ‘installed’ in the space of minutes, except that with Suno you don’t actually learn anything (The Wachowskis, 1999). Nothing changes. You just receive a pale facsimile, a fake record of an activity that never happened. A participation certificate for an imaginary course you never attended.
All of which brings me back to the aforementioned interview between Laura Kuenssberg and Paul McCartney. Here is the opening exchange:
Kuenssberg: ‘Paul, as computers become more and more sophisticated and suck in more and more content that humans have created, the government’s got a big decision to take about whether they protect the copyright of musicians, actors, artists. What are you worried about?’
McCartney: ‘Just that. Just worried about the copyrights not being protected, ‘cause if it gets a bit like the wild west, then the people who created these copyrights don’t benefit and I think that takes away a lot of incentive, you know, because when we were kids in Liverpool, we found a job that we loved, but it also paid the bills. So it allowed us to be creative, more and more creative, go out in the world and bring joy to people, so it allowed us to do that. I think if you take that away, and you take the incentive away, by not protecting the copyrights, I think it would be a shame and I think you’d see a loss of creativity, which is a great pity, because that’s what brings so much joy to the world.’ (BBC, 2025, 34’40”)
I don’t disagree with this take. The question of copyright theft is humongous, although that ship has arguably long since sailed. What gives me pause for thought is the framing of the conversation. The terms of the debate are dictated by capitalism, and therefore centre primarily around questions of property. There are important tensions to be considered where music and property are concerned, but the point I want to make here is that there is scant discussion in the mainstream about the spiritual impacts of AI in the arts, some of which I’ve tried to illustrate above. The technological progress that has led to the emergence of AI as a creative utility has been driven in no small part by the economic motivations of neoliberalism. If we allow the terms of the debate to be generated also according to the logics of those same systems, we don’t stand a chance of resolving the dilemma of AI in art, nor of ensuring that our rich traditions and cultures of artistry are preserved and passed on to future generations. The issue gets to the core of what it means to be a creative being, and the current speed of change demands of us a unique urgency.
To close, I’d like the reader to consider the question of where this all leads? What future lies in store if AI becomes the predominant site of creation? Is that a future that we’re happy to co-sign?
References
20VC with Harry Stebbings. (2025, January 10). Mikey Shulman, CEO @Suno: The Future of Music, What is Gonna Happen? | E1244 [Video]. Retrieved February 03, 2025, from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0YL83U5VWk
About Suno. (n.d.). Retrieved February 03, 2025, from Suno AI: https://suno.com/about
Avila, A. (2024, November 21). Brat and the Culture of Addiction [Video]. Retrieved February 03, 2025, from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyg-p-NZx8w
BBC. (2025, January 26). Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: Boosting the Economy, AI and Paul McCartney [Video]. Retrieved February 01, 2025, from BBC iPlayer.
Berman, M. (2000). The Twilight of American Culture. London: W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
chipteef. (2025, January 18). Suno AI's CEO Hates Music... [Video]. Retrieved February 03, 2025, from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR-Ktw2Bz7Q&t=901s
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Plessis, A. d. (2023, August 01). “Mona Lisa” by Leonardo da Vinci – Facts About the “Mona Lisa”. Retrieved February 03, 2025, from Art in Context: https://artincontext.org/mona-lisa-by-leonardo-da-vinci/
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Yoneyama, S. (2019). Animism in Contemporary Japan: Voices for the Anthropocene from Post-Fukushima Japan. New York: Routledge.