I'm probably going to be flammed over this...I don't feel that using non-ethically derived and largely uncompensated source data is in the least blameless. I feel the same way as supporting any company or person that I know cares not one iota about being ethical in regard to their employees, sourcing materials or the ecosystem.

 

You go to the flea market and there's this shady guy who has neatly laid out these very obviously stolen goods for potential buyers.

The cogwheels start turning in your head.

"Damn, that's cheap. Must be stolen though.. for that price. I couldn't possibly.."

But instead of admitting to yourself that yes, this stuff is stolen and that no, buying any of it with legal tender won't make it any more legal, you keep rationalising and mulling it over in your head.

"Well, SOMEONE is gonna take take this deal, might as well be me then."
"I didn't steal any of this, I'm innocent here, I can't possibly know the source of this stuff."
"Guy could be a legit businessman who's fallen on hard times, very hard times."

Until you've managed to fully deceive yourself and the last of your ethical barriers crumbles.

You open your wallet and buy yourself a backpack's worth of too-good-to-be-true items.

Six weeks later. The police knock on your door. You have to return the stolen goods and you're to come to the station and make a statement.

"But I paid for this!"
"Are you kidding me? Are you, like, expecting a refund or something?"

Claiming stupidity / ignorance / naivety / "everyone else does it" doesn't make anyone innocent. Innocence makes innocent. When it's obvious what's going on and you go ahead anyway, you're complicit.

 

Like 40 years ago I really needed a keyboard stand as I was living part time away from home in rural Pennsylvania and had no obvious surface to lay it on. Boom, at the Canal Street Flea Market a new bunch of dudes had one for sale for like 10 bucks, and it even had Tito Puente's name written on it in indelible black marker which I thought was really, really cool. It only dawned on me months later that I was most likely in possession of stolen property so I contacted his management and returned it.

 

"when used correctly, it's just a different easier approach for the same thing:
You get melody or progression ideas, you can make any sample or humming become an instrument, and some even prompt their way to an almost full song."

Sure, if you dont care about granular level detail. Its the detail and the pschoacoustics that make good songs special. You will most likely never be able to create 1:1 quality tracks with ai alone. The tech isnt there. Saying "isnt using my daw and telling my daw what to do the same?" Is a very amateur way of thinking. Theres no way I could ever get suno for instance to make exactly what I want. So why use it as a crutch? Its only useful to you if your knowledge of producing and bar for excellence are so low that you accept whatever it craps out. The thing is, its nothing like telling siri what to do in your daw. THAT could actually be useful. This is not that. If you think it is, you dont understand post processing, sound design, and psychoacoustics. No offense, but the credentials you listed at the bottom of your post mean nothing. If you were at a pro level, you wouldnt be here posting this, because you would know that AI generation cant get you the granular control that you need as a pro.

If I were you I would forget AI exists and focus on developing your skills.

 

Ok so let's stay i make a song, and exports stems.

All the effects that you requested, or DIDN'T WANT, are baked into the stems.

What if I want the delay feedbacj on one channel shortened and the effect moved in the chain to after distortion, instead of before it? Actually make that parallel processing. Oh, and I want a perfect sidechain, to the snare, but only in this frequency band, and with a very specific attack and decay. Oh and now I think the gain is too high on the disto. Oh and I want the disto parallel but at 40/60 wet/dry.

Lol yea, try that and let me know how that works out for you. For professionals, thats only the tip of the iceberg of the level of control thats needed.

Youll spend hours trying to prompt that correctly and possibly never achieve it. when I can do it in abelton in 5 minutes or less.

If you disagree you're probably not a professional producer and if you're not then maybe you shouldn't be suggesting What kinds of tools will work for a professional. In other words, AI has no place here. Its a scam operations targeting ametuers with a false promise of pro level quality

 

The AI Suno story is a business idea, and a business aims to generate money and profits.

Are serious musicians the target audience? Probably not. Are non-musicians the target audience?
Probably yes. And of course, companies that want to save money on musicians.

Therefore, Suno has a real chance of eventually generating profits.
It's also possible that Suno won't achieve its profitability goal and will then disappear from the market.

Is Suno just another superfluous toy? Definitely yes. There are many curious people who love the feeling of trying something new because it keeps them occupied until it gets boring and they need a new toy.

I feel sorry for the people who don't utilize their creative potential and succumb to the gaming and AI distraction industry.

 

Why cant both exist? A pro user that wants a gospel choir backing track generated as a stem in suno studio to match their lead vocal?

Or some kid in the middle of America that wants to make a rage trap meme song of the current internet slang and get a laugh from his discord server?

There is nuance to everything in life. There doesn't need be a line, or a side. TBH make music how you want to make it with the tools you want to make them with. So much flaming of products and ways that people create the music they want online. If i use ableton and you use logic who cares?

Its funny because all of this has been said over and over every few months for the past 3 years of suno being around on this forum. Same talking points towards the same subject. The funny thing is a lot of people looked at suno as a toy when it dropped in early 2023 while they keep building more and more tools for pro musicans and the sound quality keeps improving. They are working out deals with lables and artist to get them compensation. Every week there is some wild technological advancements. No one is forced take the time to understand a and approach a new tool in a way that could help their flow state and creative vision. Use tape if you dont want to learn a daw, use a sampler if you dont want to play an instrument. Buy a guitar and learn how to play it so you dont turn to a sample. Type in "90s House pianos" into splice and dig around so you dont have to go to suno generate one to match your track by using the same text as "90s House Piano" in the prompt box.

Ive said this to you many times on here but how do you think any company keeps the lights on? pays for bug fixes? server use? etc. Business run on paying customers. There are many type of users that are willingly paying for tools to use how they want to. We just saw the fate of native instruments not being able to keep up with their bottom line.

 

All I really have to say about "the line" is this. When I create a track it takes time. Why? Because I am working within my individual psyche using my creative process to figure shit out, create, try things out, shit-can the dumb stupid shit I come up with, and keep the good stuff. Then massage it around for a bit, listen to it, add this, remove that, and eventually I have a track that at the end of the process that I am proud to say is MY FUCKIN WORK. I didn't just feed a "AI" algorithm a line of bullshit and have it spit out some regurgitated, redundant flotsam from a database of samples that a million other monkeys are already using and calling the results "their work"... The work is MINE and for better or worse it will be mine until it isn't.

I mean if you're really needing to bounce ideas off of something maybe ask a actual human for an opinion rather than a database full of canned answers? Just a thought...

Maybe "AI" has a niche to be useful in belching out background garp for commercial radio and tv ads (which I have no use for anyway) but as a purely creative tool it falls short a great percentage of the time because of the redundant nature of the results.

I seem to recall a while back (before all this "AI" garbage hit the fan) that artists were criticized when their work got redundant or rote. Critics would label artists as washed up or burned out because of this. Now, no one seems to give two shits about content or creativity - it seems more about the sheer number of bird farts one can produce using the most UN-creative processes they can find and calling that "art".

 

Last edited: Mar 19, 2026 at 10:34 PM

Not only this, but you could most likely never create eclectic and unique sounds. The most incredible and unique sounds come from either hyperintentional sampling and processing, or happy accidents through messing around with dials and automation. AI stem generation will never give you this, or the satisfaction and knowledge you would get through the journey and not just the destination. If anyone just wants the destination and not the journey, maybe this isnt the profession for you. Definitely dont quit your day job, because AI generation is not taking you to the top, or ever NEAR the upper eschalon of music production

 

My kid doesn't have any quarrel with the AI technology. He will be growing in it as we grew into other techs we take for granted that sparked very similar conversations and debates that we weren't part of them cause we were little.

These techbro companies stealing and profiting from public resources are not different that many other areas were private capital takes advantage of colective resources (knowlodeage, studies, advancements, water, soil, etc) for the shareholders, and the shareholders can be your granma and her pension fund. They are one symptom of the disease, not the disease itself.

TBH if a model can make better music than you, well... Did you thought that this can be the ultimate push for musicians to make better stuff? To get out of the comfort zone and try things that models cannot do? That now there will be a growing audience that carves for things that are truly geniune and out of the box?

For the time I've been experimenting I've a list of things that models will suck for a very, very, looooooong time for anyone interested.

FLAMENCO. A total disaster. The compás alone would break them. Try getting a model to nail the relationship between a cantaor's melisma and a guitarist's falseta with palmas that breathe with both. Flamenco people are very safe.

JAZZ IMPROV. Total joke, the lack of intention on the models means random notes disconected and souless.

CLASSICAL CHAMBER MUSIC, or anything related to avant garde chamber music.

IDM, ironically you can use models to help you make IDM by experimenting a lot but models can't do it by themselves. IDM has a lot of art direction. Models give you either quantized predictability or random noise. That sweet spot where your brain detects there's an order underneath the madness is a thing that I doubt model will be ever be able to do.

I think that everything that requires real-time human interaction and cultural memory will be out of the model´s menu for a long time. Make of that what you will.

 

Get it better...cmon, try making anything other than a vst synth demo track by wanting to do it better, good luck.

When the "channel" is open whatever you have on your hand is what you use, and you gotta pay the best ears to move it further where every single % counts. That is why if a person is not planning to pay the best ears to work on a track and still want's to call it a "music".. is laughable.

it is just noise, sounds and everyone is wasting their time.

You can buy a ball, buy a better ball, better looking ball, bounce it, throw it, juggle it and you did not played any sport with any of the moves you just made, and it is the same with music and the plugins.

And also talking about this crap changes nothing, it is the attention what works things out in a collective mind and it moves things with the energy of the majority, money shows how people work it out in their minds and how quickly they decide.

i get yes, music many genres are not replicable and stuff but whatever, and yes i feel anxious that a person can be that shallow minded but have intelligence to start the Suno and run it give interviews, angry kid run the stuff that grinds all the music we made thru the history into a dust and wants to steal its soul

 

re: the OP.

There are no lines, at least not anymore. (be Zen like that spoon bending kid talking to Neo in The Matrix).

Anyone can draw a line of their choosing, and other's will justify their own views regardless.

There was a time I may have occupied the moral high ground, but that seems like a lifetime ago.

Everything that was, has changed. All that remains is a state of perpetual change that feels like chaos out of order.

It is what it is.

 

Last edited: Mar 20, 2026 at 5:36 AM

OP, are you looking for a justification for your lack of interest/passion for music?