No, AI Is Not “Just Like AutoTune”

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As the music industry wrestles with just what to do about generative AI programs like Suno that can quite literally compose an entire song including lyrics, instrumentation, production, and everything else in a matter of seconds solely based off of a textual prompt, there has been one dangerous falsehood parroted out by AI’s proponents and apologists: It’s no different than AutoTune—the software that allows a sharp or flat note to be brought in tune in either a recorded or live performance.

Most any time AI comes up, this common defense is found. West Coast rapper Tyga has been catching flack recently from some in the hip-hop community over his new album released under the pseudonym $starface on July 31st that leans heavy on ’80s-style synth sounds and guitar solos. The suspicion was that much of the album was generated with AI and Suno specifically. In a feature for hip-hop magazine Vibe, Tyga flat out admitted it.

“I’ve never spoken on this with anybody because I always felt like it’s similar to a magician explaining how he does his tricks. Like why are people over-explaining how they make sh– that’s good?” he said when directly asked if he used AI. “It’s supposed to give you an experience and a feeling. But we definitely used AI as a [tool]. And I know people are going to be mad about me saying this, but it’s where technology is going. It’s no different than when Auto-Tune came out. Some people were opposed to it, but real artists took it and used it.”

Sure, maybe it’s no different in how people were mad when AutoTune first came out. But to compare the technological leap of AutoTune to AI is an apples to bowling balls comparison. AutoTune when originally developed was never meant to be a blanket fix-all for performers who couldn’t sing whatsoever. Its purpose was to tune a sour note or two in an otherwise stellar studio performance so the singer wouldn’t have to waste time singing the part again, and perhaps not as well as the first take, aside from the sour notes.

Then Cher used AutoTune for the vocal effect in the chorus of her song “Believe” released in 1998, and all of a sudden artists were using the program to purposely give vocals a more robotic sound. If anything, that was a more artistic use as compared to the one of using it to tune off-pitch vocals. Then you had T-Pain, who built his entire career off of AutoTuned vocal tracks, and performers using the program not just to tune one or two notes in the studio, but entire performances, and in live settings.

But it was never a situation where the public and the industry completely accepted AutoTune use. Jay-Z famously release the anti-AutoTune song “D.O.A. (Death of AutoTune)” in 2009. And even today, artists get accused all the time of using AutoTune to cover up for vocal flaws or a general lack of singing talent.

Yet even at its most sinister, deceiving use—which is a singer performing live with full pitch correction to make up for the fact they can’t sing in tune at all—there is no way you can compare it to the kind of capabilities and ramifications of AI. With AutoTune, you still need a human singing to create the performance. With Suno, you don’t need anything, except the unauthorized use of copyrighted material from existing recorded music that Suno pulls from to generate its tracks, or the parts of tracks. This is the reason every major label is suing the company at the moment.

But what Tyga is right about is that many are using the technology, and unabashedly. And it’s most definitely not just confined to the hip-hop space. Traditional country artist Joe Nichols recently explained how country songwriters are using Suno to create demo recordings of songs they write to pitch them to artists. It’s become commonplace to see these kinds of practices as harmless, as long as the AI demos don’t make it out into the wild, and it’s simply used as a song development tool.

But again, those demos built through Suno are relying on the work of artists that never gave the company permission to use them. Those artists are also not being compensated, and those artists are having their entire livelihoods put at risk by the technology. It is the most slippery of all slopes when people start apologizing for AI use, or equating it to marginal technology leaps like being able to tune vocals.

Rapper Tyga goes on in the interview to clarify that all the writing and the vocals on his new album are his. It was just the music that was generated by AI. “There’s nothing wrong with using technology as a tool,” he says. This is true … until that technology completely replaces the humans that are trying to use that tool by making them obsolete. Then you have an existential crisis in the music industry, and in humanity. This is the technological dystopia you trundle toward when you try to act like AI is just as trivial as the use of AutoTune.

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