Just last summer, experts on the intersection of AI and music told Rolling Stone that it would be years before a tool emerged that could conjure up fully produced songs from a simple text description, given the endless complexities of the finished product. But Suno, a two-year-old start-up based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has already pulled it off, vocals included — and their latest model, v3, which is available to the general public as of today, is capable of some truly startling results.
In Rolling Stone‘s feature on Suno, part of our latest Future of Music package, we included an unsettling acoustic blues song called “Soul of the Machine,” fully generated by Suno, which uses ChatGPT to write lyrics unless you submit some yourself. The song — generated from the prompt “Mississippi Delta blues song about a sad AI” — went viral, with more than 36,000 plays in four days, and sparked debate over cultural appropriation, Suno’s training data (the precise contents of which they won’t reveal), the technology’s effects on human artists, and more.
In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, we unveil more of the songs we made with Suno’s v3 model, and host Brian Hiatt speaks with the company’s co-founder, Mikey Shulman. Also in the podcast, we share even more from Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid, who was among the first to hear “Soul of the Machine” when we sent it to him before publication. He notes that his reactions are “a combination of wonder, shock, horror,” and adds that “the use of an African-American idiom, deeply tied to historical human trauma, and enslavement, merely to demonstrate how close to ‘human’ the AI can become is disturbing.” (To hear the full episode, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.)
He also says he was stunned on a technical level that all of it was generated by AI — “not just the acoustic rural ‘blues’ guitar and the mournful ‘bluesman’s’ vocals, but also the room, ambience, of the simulated recording. No mics. No board. No high-ceiling converted small church transformed into a mobile recording space by a young, committed, Alan Lomax-type character, passionate to preserve vanishing sharecropper songs for posterity. It is not inconceivable that the Alan Lomax archive (and a lot more besides) was raided to train Suno’s AI.” (Suno has declined to reveal details of its training data, though one of its main investors, Antonio Rodriguez, told Rolling Stone that he is prepared for a potential lawsuit from labels and publishers.)
“The long-running dystopian ideal of separating difficult, messy, undesirable and despised humanity from its creative output is at hand,” Reid continues. “The horror of what ‘Soul in the Machine’ portends lays in the fact that what has been presented at this stage will not remain static. Its specificity and depth will advance, at frightening speed. What is certain is this: Humans driven by extraordinary circumstances to make beautiful, haunting, funny, strange, powerful, popular, cathartic, healing, and obscure [songs] — those who have suffered and struggled to advance their craft — will have to contend with the wholesale automation of the very dear-bought art they have fought to achieve.”
Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone‘s weekly podcast, Rolling Stone Music Now, hosted by Brian Hiatt, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts). Check out six years’ worth of episodes in the archive, including in-depth interviews with Mariah Carey, Bruce Springsteen, Questlove, Halsey, Neil Young, Snoop Dogg, Brandi Carlile, Phoebe Bridgers, Rick Ross, Alicia Keys, the National, Ice Cube, Taylor Hawkins, Willow, Keith Richards, Robert Plant, Dua Lipa, Killer Mike, Julian Casablancas, Sheryl Crow, Johnny Marr, Scott Weiland, Liam Gallagher, Alice Cooper, Fleetwood Mac, Elvis Costello, John Legend, Donald Fagen, Charlie Puth, Phil Collins, Justin Townes Earle, Stephen Malkmus, Sebastian Bach, Tom Petty, Eddie Van Halen, Kelly Clarkson, Pete Townshend, Bob Seger, the Zombies, and Gary Clark Jr. And look for dozens of episodes featuring genre-spanning discussions, debates, and explainers with Rolling Stone’s critics and reporters.
Jack White Responds After Uproar Over Taylor Swift Songwriting Comment
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Jack White posted a statement on Instagram Monday evening after numerous publications took his comments in an interview with The Guardian out of context. When discussing poetry and songwriting, White mentioned fellow musician Taylor Swift‘s style of songwriting, and explored his own approach to storytelling when creating music. Unfortunately, online outlets framed his words as a critique of the Tortured Poets star, especially when it came to headlines that quickly circulated on the internet.
“Putting this up for a day and then taking down to just put this to bed,” wrote White in the since-deleted post. “I didn’t say that I think Taylor Swift’s music was ‘boring’ or whatever click bait the net is trying to scrape together. What I was trying to say in an interview I did about poetry and lyric writing, was that I don’t find it interesting at all for ME to write about MYSELF in my own lyric writing and poetry because I think that it could be repetitive for ME to always write about and It could be uninteresting for people who listen to my music to delve into, and that imaginary characters are more attractive to me as a writer.”
White went on to acknowledge the “tremendous success” of Swift and other songwriters who have their own process, while stating that just “because I say I have a way of doing things doesn’t mean that I think that EVERYONE should do it the same way.” He added, “They should do what works for them, And they do, and it is obviously appealing to many people, and I’m glad to hear that.”
When asked by The Guardian in the article published Sunday, if any of any of his songs were entirely autobiographical, White replied, “Not too much. Now it’s become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired break-ups, which I don’t find interesting at all. I think it’s a little bit boring for me to write about myself.”
White further explained, “Even if I’ve had a really interesting day, I feel like I’ve already lived that, I don’t need to go through it every time I sing this song. If it’s something really painful, I’m not going to put this important, painful thing that I went through out there for some idiot on the internet to stomp all over. So I put a percentage of that into what I do and then morph it into somebody else’s character. I can’t really learn about myself until I put it into somebody else’s shoes.”
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In his Monday statement, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee said that at times he has been “made less and less interested in doing interviews” amid the “age of this massive demand for click bait and content.” Any “scrape of anything interesting” can be used as drama and “spit out as bait,” he continued, leading White to “not want to answer questions with any sort of romance or passion or reflection as I’m too busy having to worry about accidentally triggering nonsense like this from so called ‘journalists’ and ‘editors.'”
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He ended his response to the wave of backlash following his interview by saying, “This has always been a problem as it encourages artists to give ‘safe’ answers to any question and stifles artistic vision and imagination and pushes all of us to not share anything interesting, which was one of the points I made about keeping private things private in that same interview. But yeah, content.”
ADVERTISEMENTWhite recently released Jack White: Collected Lyrics & Selected Writing Volume 1, a collection of lyrics from the artist’s solo recordings including No Name, The Raconteurs, and more, plus selected poems and writings by White, and essays by poet Adrian Matejka.