AI CEO Makes Dumb Claim That Musicians Hate Making Music

There’s an old quote, attributed to several different writers, including Dorothy Parker and Robert Louis Stevenson, which says “I hate to write, but I love to have written” meaning that the process of writing is grueling but the final product is much more satisfying. Similarly there’s a quote that Kurt Vonnegut attributed to Renata Adler that said something to the effect of “A writer is a person who hates writing.” There’s a certain truth to that, undoubtedly, but at the end of the day, I’d still rather be writing than have someone do all my writing for me. But to ask Suno AI co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman, you’d think most musicians would rather be doing anything rather than creating music.

In a recent appearance on The Twenty Minute VC podcast (that was reported on by our friends at Metal Injection), Shulman gave the ridiculous viewpoint that most musicians hate making music:

“We didn’t want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators ten-percent faster, or makes it ten-percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music, you have to build something for a billion people. That is, first and foremost, giving everyone the joys of creating music. And this is a huge departure of making music. It’s not really enjoyable to make music now.

“It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”

While it may be frustrating to make music at times, to say that people don’t enjoy making music is laughable. Being a musician is one of those few careers that people dream about. How can you say that nobody enjoys it? And that’s before you get into all the ethical issues around AI. When it comes to really dumb takes about AI, and there have been plenty, this might go down as one of the dumbest.