Suno is free. Does the company see its users as employees who train it?

[Reid Rosefelt]

Meta just announced a new program that I find chilling. Everybody who works there has to let each keystroke and mouse click be documented by Meta's AI. There is no opting out. So everybody at Meta is being forced to train the tech that will cause a large portion of them to lose their jobs.

I have often wondered how Suno and the like can afford to offer a free service. The cost for them is in the millions or billions. Every single time somebody makes a song, they are paying for it. I have no idea what. It could be a penny, it could be a dollar. That never made sense to me.

The only business that makes sense in ALL AI companies is enterprise. If AI music is to work as a business (which remains to be seen), billions will come from making songs for Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and the like. Clear as much non-star music as possible out of streaming and take all the money. Under no circumstance take any songs from unknown musicians.

Is it possible that very user is an employee of Suno? Each time they make a song, are they helping train the algorithm. Handing over their humanity? Making Suno just a little better at destroying the dreams of all aspiring songwriters?

That's the only explanation I can come up with. Why pay people, taking a loss each time, to put their songs up there? They are paying for the data.

What do you think? Too harsh? The new Meta policy really made me think.

 

[Nekujak]

Meta just announced a new program that I find chilling. Everybody who works there has to let each keystroke and mouse click be documented by Meta's AI. There is no opting out. So everybody at Meta is being forced to train the tech that will cause a large portion of them to lose their jobs.

If I were an employee of Meta, what I'd be more concerned about is the invasion of privacy, knowing that the company has access to everything I'm doing on my computer.

The last tech company I worked for used Slack for all intra-office communication, and the company had full access to everyone's chats. It made you feel like Big Brother was watching over everything you do and say. You eventually get used to it and don't consciously think about it, but it's always in the back of your mind.

Meta is upping the ante by adding AI monitoring and analysis to the equation, which could end up being more oppressive.

In terms of using their employees to train their tech... that's actually not uncommon. Many tech companies "eat their own dog food" as they put it, effectively having employees use the company's products to report bugs and make feature suggestions. I think that kind of feedback would be more useful to a company than training AI from keystrokes. But maybe I'm wrong.

I have often wondered how Suno and the like can afford to offer a free service. The cost for them is in the millions or billions. Every single time somebody makes a song, they are paying for it. I have no idea what. It could be a penny, it could be a dollar. That never made sense to me.

The only business that makes sense in ALL AI companies is enterprise. If AI music is to work as a business (which remains to be seen), billions will come from making songs for Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and the like. Clear as much non-star music as possible out of streaming and take all the money. Under no circumstance take any songs from unknown musicians.

With burgeoning tech companies, earning a profit is usually not the primary goal. Showing growth and user adoption is far more important, because that's what excites investors and drives up stock prices. Investors is where these companies get most of their money.

If Suno were only earning money from subscriptions, they'd have been bankrupt long ago. The money that fuels the business comes from investor dollars.

As far as streaming services go, it's difficult to say just how much revenue can be squeezed from that stone. In the case of Spotify, they generate their own AI tracks to displace human-created tracks, as a way of saving money by not having to pay out royalties. It's not clear to me where Suno fits into that picture and how much they actually earn from it.

Is it possible that very user is an employee of Suno? Each time they make a song, are they helping train the algorithm. Handing over their humanity? Making Suno just a little better at destroying the dreams of all aspiring songwriters?

That's the only explanation I can come up with. Why pay people, taking a loss each time, to put their songs up there? They are paying for the data.

It's certainly true that all AI engines learn something from each user interaction. That's why ChatGPT, Claude, etc. offer a thumbs up/down icon after every response. Every interaction helps to refine an AI engine, just as we humans learn something from our interactions with others. I don't think there's anything particularly nefarious about it with respect to AI companies, it's simply the nature of the tech.

Is Suno bad for us songwriters? For songwriters who are trying to earn money from their songs, absolutely. For everyone else, perhaps not so much. If I'm just making songs for my own creative pleasure, it really doesn't matter to me what Suno is doing. But if I'm trying to sell my music, and have to compete with millions of AI-generated tracks that took only a few seconds to create by someone who knows nothing about music... then yeah, Suno is the embodiment of Satan.