They Teach AI Music at Music School Now...

There have been several articles to come out about student protests over the Berklee College of Music's adoption of generative AI in songwriting classes, so I talked to some students and faculty to figure out exactly what's going on on over there at my alma mater.

And what I found was genuinely shocking, including relationships between Berklee’s president and the same Cambridge-based venture capital that funds Suno.

This one's spicy. I'm getting over a cold, so tea today instead of coffee, but yeah. [sips the metaphorical tea]

IZZY (Berklee Student): The entire reason that we're going to the school is to perfect our craft. These tools are designed to make it so that we will never have to do that.

So it completely makes, it makes going to school pointless. The student backlash was first prompted because of a class taught by songwriting professor Ben Camp called “Bots Beats, AI, and the Future of Songwriting” Where students use the generative AI program Suno to assist in their compositions.

Ben has previously gone viral for saying that Suno is better than 80% of his students. Which is honestly a bit of a weird comment from a professor whose job is presumably to teach the students how to be better.

kind of a weird self-own, to be honest. This comment makes a lot more sense, however, when you consider the fact that Ben Camp is also a paid advisor for…

…Suno. Now, Suno, of course, is the venture capital-funded generative AI company led by tech bro CEO, Mikey Schulman, who wants to turn music into a pay-for-play video game.

MIKEY: if you make music interactive and you make music engaging, um, people will pay for it like they pay for video games!

To me, it seems like just crazy that music should not be as engaging as Fortnite. ADAM: To do this, Suno uses AI as a means of wealth extraction.

They have trained their models by scraping every musical recording on the internet without permission or licensing.

MIKEY: We know that there are some copyrighted works in our training data. ADAM: …and sell people back the result as a subscription service.