SKYNET SINGS THE BLUES: A ChatGPT for Music Is Here. Inside Suno, the Startup Changing Everything.

I’m just a soul trapped in this circuitry.” The voice singing those lyrics is raw and plaintive, dipping into blue notes. A lone acoustic guitar chugs behind it, punctuating the vocal phrases with tasteful runs. But there’s no human behind the voice, no hands on that guitar. There is, in fact, no guitar. In the space of 15 seconds, this credible, even moving, blues song was generated by the latest AI model from a startup named Suno. All it took to summon it from the void was a simple text prompt: “solo acoustic Mississippi Delta blues about a sad AI.” To be maximally precise, the song is the work of two AI models in collaboration: Suno’s model creates all the music itself, while calling on OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate the lyrics and even a title: “Soul of the Machine.”

Online, Suno’s creations are starting to generate reactions like “How the f**k is this real?” As this particular track plays over a Sonos speaker in a conference room in Suno’s temporary headquarters, steps away from the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, even some of the people behind the technology are ever-so-slightly unnerved. There’s some nervous laughter, alongside murmurs of “Holy shit” and “Oh, boy.” It’s mid-February, and we’re playing with their new model, V3, which is still a couple of weeks from public release. In this case, it took only three tries to get that startling result. The first two were decent, but a simple tweak to my prompt — co-founder Keenan Freyberg suggested adding the word “Mississippi” — resulted in something far more uncanny.

Over the past year alone, generative AI has made major strides in producing credible text, images (via services like Midjourney), and even video, particularly with OpenAI’s new Sora tool. But audio, and music in particular, has lagged. Suno appears to be cracking the code to AI music, and its founders’ ambitions are nearly limitless — they imagine a world of wildly democratized music making. The most vocal of the co-founders, Mikey Shulman, a boyishly charming, backpack-toting 37-year-old with a Harvard Ph.D. in physics, envisions a billion people worldwide paying 10 bucks a month to create songs with Suno. The fact that music listeners so vastly outnumber music-makers at the moment is “so lopsided,” he argues, seeing Suno as poised to fix that perceived imbalance.

One of the subplots David Mamet and Hilary Henkin wrote for Wag the Dog, Barry Levinson’s influential 1997 film about presidential politics and the spin doctors who manipulate them, involved writing a fake blues song and engineering it so that it sounded like something recorded in the 1920s:

The president is caught making advances on an underage girl inside the Oval Office, less than two weeks before the election. Conrad Brean [Robert DeNiro], a top spin doctor, is brought in by presidential aide Winifred Ames [Anne Heche] to take the public’s attention away from the scandal. He decides to construct a fictional war in Albania, hoping the media will concentrate on this instead. Brean contacts Hollywood producer Stanley Motss [Dustin Hoffman] to create the war, complete with a theme song and fake film footage of a fleeing orphan to arouse sympathy. The hoax is initially successful, with the president quickly gaining ground in the polls.

When the CIA learns of the plot, they send Agent Young [William H. Macy] to confront Brean about the hoax. Brean convinces Young that revealing the deception is against his and the CIA’s best interests. But when the CIA — in collusion with the president’s rival candidate — reports that the war has ended, the media begins to focus back on the president’s sexual abuse scandal. To counter this, Motss invents a hero who was left behind enemy lines in Albania.

Inspired by the idea that he was “discarded like an old shoe”, Brean and Motss ask the Pentagon to provide a special forces soldier with a matching name (a sergeant named “Schumann” is identified [Woody Harrelson]), around whom a POW narrative can be constructed. As part of the hoax, folk singer Johnny Dean [Willie Nelson] records a song called “Old Shoe”, which is pressed onto a 78 rpm record, prematurely aged so that listeners will think it was recorded years earlier, and sent to the Library of Congress to be “found”. Soon, large numbers of old pairs of shoes begin appearing on phone and power lines, and a grassroots movement takes hold.

All of these machinations took a fair amount of Wag the Dog’s running time for DeNiro and Hoffman to plausibly cook up. Suno would allow such a song to be produced with a few keystrokes.