{"id":235480,"date":"2026-01-13T09:56:14","date_gmt":"2026-01-13T09:56:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/235480\/"},"modified":"2026-01-13T09:56:14","modified_gmt":"2026-01-13T09:56:14","slug":"suno-and-ai-music-could-be-the-sound-of-the-future-are-we-ready","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/235480\/","title":{"rendered":"Suno and AI music could be the sound of the future. Are we ready?"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to the French music streaming service Deezer<\/a>, there are about 50,000 fully AI-generated songs uploaded to its platform every day. Many of these songs won\u2019t reach a wide audience, but over the past year, a few have gained millions of listens<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Which raises the question: If our future is going to be filled with this kind of AI music, what does that future sound like?<\/p>\n

Deni B\u00e9chard is the senior science writer at Scientific American<\/a>. For the better part of a month, B\u00e9chard has only allowed himself to listen to his own AI-generated music using the AI music app Suno<\/a>. He says the experiment is an attempt to think more critically about how we might engage with this kind of music in the future.<\/p>\n

B\u00e9chard spoke with Today, Explained<\/a> host Noel King spoke about what he\u2019s learned so far and how his AI creations stack up to human-made music. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s much more in the full podcast \u2014 including snippets of B\u00e9chard\u2019s songs \u2014 so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts<\/a>, Pandora<\/a>, and Spotify<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Alright, so you\u2019re using Suno, you said, to create the songs. <\/p>\n

I come up with a prompt and I\u2019ll plug it in, and each prompt makes two songs, and I\u2019ll try to be as creative as possible. I\u2019ll usually plug it in two or three times and vary it, add different kinds of instruments or different kinds of vocals, and just plug a bunch of those in. One that made me laugh was a song called \u201cOrgan Trafficking.\u201d I had asked for a contemporary rap song with female vocals, and I had asked for playful, ironic lyrics, and it comes up with this song, where organ trafficking is kind of the central metaphor. I was pretty surprised.<\/p>\n

I think one of the things I\u2019ve realised is that a lot of the music I listen to that is mainstream is, I would consider, heavily processed music \u2014 music that\u2019s designed to have a large market. And it doesn\u2019t feel very personal to me anyway, so I realized that in that particular context, [the music I made with AI] didn\u2019t feel very different a lot of the time.<\/p>\n

Do you think if someone had handed you a playlist of 10 songs, five are AI, five are not, do you think you\u2019d be able to tell the difference?<\/p>\n

Wow. And what does that tell you?<\/p>\n

I mean, it tells me that the AI is getting very good.<\/p>\n

One thing I noticed during this process was that a lot of the AI music that is popular, that people are listening to on Spotify that has millions of listeners [are] songs that are very soulful, very gritty.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like Xania Monet<\/a> or Solomon Ray<\/a> or Cain Walker\u2019s \u201cDon\u2019t Tread on Me<\/a>\u201d \u2014 and Cain Walker\u2019s not a person. It\u2019s an AI avatar, right? Or Breaking Rust<\/a>\u2019s \u201cLivin\u2019 on Borrowed Time<\/a>.\u201d Those songs all feel just really authentic. This person really suffered through these things and felt these things. That\u2019s how they come across.<\/p>\n

I think that AI tends to work best when it just leans into that authenticity because it kind of helps overcome the cognitive dissonance that we\u2019re thinking, This isn\u2019t really a deeply felt song, and it moves away from mainstream human-generated music \u2014 human-made music \u2014 which is often very heavily designed to be a summer hit or to go viral in some way. And it often doesn\u2019t have that level of authenticity, that feel of authenticity. I think when AI replicates that, we\u2019re more aware of it being superficial or artificial, because there\u2019s already an element of artificiality there.<\/p>\n

Do you think when your experiment is done, you\u2019re going to keep making AI music?<\/p>\n

Oh my god, you love the power. <\/p>\n

I think, you know, what has surprised me with it is, I\u2019ll be walking somewhere, and I\u2019ll think, \u201cWhat if I were to ask it to combine these styles or put a banjo with a hip hop track and add this kind of vocals? What would I get?\u201d I get curious now.<\/p>\n

I would say now I\u2019m at the point where I don\u2019t worry about the connection to the human. I did in the beginning. In the beginning, I was really like, \u201cWho\u2019s this person?\u201d When you\u2019re reading a book and you\u2019re halfway through the book and you think, \u201cWhat human mind did this book come out of?\u201d And you turn the book over and you look and see who the author was, and you Google them and you\u2019re like, \u201cHow in the world did they think of this?\u201d<\/p>\n

I just had that impulse so often in the beginning to want to know who felt this, who thought this. I just would have cognitive dissonance. I\u2019d be going, \u201cThis is a machine. This machine did not fall in love. This machine did not suffer these experiences. This machine did not wake up at two in the morning and write this song just needing to express itself.\u201d It was actually really bothering me. It kind of would block me from being able to enjoy the song.<\/p>\n

And I thought, \u201cWell, if somebody created an AI avatar and gave it a personality and they were a fictional character that existed in the Metaverse, and that AI avatar was a songmaker and it was singing this song, would that make it easier?\u201d And weirdly, it would. It would make it a little easier. And so I kind of was just imagining these AI avatars, and I\u2019m like, \u201cOkay, I\u2019m imagining a fictional character singing this song.\u201d And that lasted maybe four or five days, and then I just got used to listening to the music, and I stopped thinking about it.<\/p>\n

Does doing this experiment and seeing how you\u2019re reacting to this music change how you think about AI at all?<\/p>\n

I think my conclusion from this is that in 10 or 15 or 20 years, there are going to be a lot of teenagers who look at the discussions we\u2019re having right now and go, \u201cWhat are these people talking about? This is totally normal. Why would anybody feel so conflicted about this?\u201d<\/p>\n

I think we\u2019re going to adapt to it pretty quickly. That is my gut feeling. There are a lot of big questions around the creators and protecting artists and what it means to be an artist. There are a lot of questions that are going to come out of this, and I really hope that artists are as protected as possible and remunerated properly. But I think this is going to fit into our lives a lot more smoothly than I think we\u2019re realizing at the moment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"According to the French music streaming service Deezer, there are about 50,000 fully AI-generated songs uploaded to its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":235481,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,1503,44254,85,1720,46,409,965,125,13265],"class_list":["post-235480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-culture","tag-explained-podcast","tag-il","tag-innovation","tag-israel","tag-music","tag-podcasts","tag-technology","tag-today"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235480\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}