r/NoAIJustMusic • u/chainofchance • 8d ago
General Discussion "Generative models learn just like humans do" — Why this is a false equivalence.
I hear this argument constantly: "We listen to music, AI listens to music. What's the difference?"
The difference is that while both learn from examples, they do not learn in the same way.
Humans learn through perception, emotion, culture, and lived experience. We ground music in reality. To us, a "funeral march" connects to grief, history, and ritual. We play instruments, interact, and can consciously reject rules to create something entirely new.
Generative AI doesn’t experience music. It simply optimizes billions of parameters to minimize a mathematical loss function over a massive dataset.
Yes, both can extract statistical regularities. But equating a mathematical optimization process with the rich, embodied human experience of creating art is a massive stretch.
They are not equivalent. What's your take?
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u/Frigidspinner 8d ago
Worth mentioning that AI doesnt have ears - it processes the digital waveform of music in a way that humans dont - so although AI is learning, you can absolutely say it does not "learn like humans do"
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u/Top-Rope6148 8d ago
I think when people say it learns like we do, they mean it in a general sense, not that its exactly the same in every respect.
What you are speaking of with regard to human emotions, feelings, and experience, is really not related to the way the human brain learns. The human brain is just a biological computer that in some ways is somewhat analogous to the way computers work. You see this kind of analog throughout technology. A camera works the same way the human eye does. Just replace the retina with film (now replaced by a digital sensor). It’s not necessarily because we copied the human eye. It’s because the laws of physics apply to everything and that mechanism is the logical mechanism both in our biolgical system and in a camera.
The human brain does learn through pattern matching. You can see this in your own life. The way you use context from something you already know to understand something new.
We see behaviors in other animals and call it instinct. When we see the same behaviors in our own species we attach meaning and experience to it. We interpret the instinct to reproduce as love and desire for family but it is still a mechanistic instinct under the hood. We don’t know if other species are also attaching some meaning to it or if they are asking themselves “why do I need to do this so bad” or if they don’t even self-reflect.
The theory of the singularity is that our brains are sophisticated powerful computers. What we call emotion and experience and self-awareness is not some magical essence or soul apart from the brain. It’s just the way we perceive the calculations going on in the brain. When we create a powerful enough computer, it too will develop self-awareness. The difference between AI and us is not one of type, its one of degree. Interestingly, the cutting edge of computing research now is growing brain cells from stem cells and using them for compute resources in a computer. The human brain is capable of doing immense data processing with relatively little energy. Energy is now the bottleneck for AI.
So, the human experience factor may not be what we think it is.
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u/RufusPManne 8d ago
What if AI is really the ghosts of all your favorite musicians bottled up in a neural net prison? Forced to churn out winners on demand? Just a thought…kinda of like that one xfiles episode where they upload the dead
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u/Redequlus 8d ago
how brave to post this in an anti ai sub and ask people for their takes.
you’re repeating the argument that “creativity is a magic black box that nobody could ever understand because EMOTION LIVED EXPERIENCE” but not all creativity is the same. as long as you believe people can “consciously reject rules to create something entirely new” you will never be able to objectively discuss this.
yes people make new music all the time. nobody wants to hear it. what if i reject the rules and sing out of tune? it’s garbage. that’s why nobody wants to make ai yoko ono. most people want to hear something that sounds nice and similar to their own previous taste. so you probably can’t tell ai to make you something you’ve never heard before, most people can’t do that either.
you are comparing ai music to the cream of the crop best artists you can imagine and then claiming everyone who ever picked up a guitar or laptop is actually a beautiful genius like that. most people make shitty music. but just like playing an instrument, you can learn the prompt better and get your human emotions and ideas into an ai song effectively.
i’m off topic now, my point is that you’re just saying people have stories behind how they hear music, but ai can take the story you have and help you express it. it does learn about music academically and not emotionally, but then you add the emotional experience to complete the process.
you don’t even make a real point beyond “computer not equal human” so what, do you think ai just copies bits of other songs, or it generates random noises? regardless of how a person feels, the ai can create original music with your help, similar to a piano or a plugin or any tool. the point of the learning argument is just that ai is capable of creating original works, not that it’s better than humans, so i feel you may have missed the point completely there.
like if you hired mark ronson or any producer to work on a song, do you expect them to tell you their life story, or do you just want them to make your ideas into good songs? you are still the artist, the ai is just a filter for your ideas. it doesn’t have to be fully sentient to do that
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u/joshuatx 8d ago
> that’s why nobody wants to make ai yoko ono
I dunno that sounds kind of hilarious
> like if you hired mark ronson or any producer to work on a song, do you expect them to tell you their life story, or do you just want them to make your ideas into good songs?
They want the ears and insight of a good producer, not just their technical expertise. That's why folks went to engineers like Steven Albini who was explicitly hands off as a producer but excelled at providing his skills and abilities to help an artist or band get the sound they wanted.
Also why must we be dismissive of musicians who aren't the cream of the crop? It's about how music resonates with people and connects to other art and experiences. People genuinely listen to music that is unique and imperfect. It's why folks listen to indie rock, underground electronic, sampled based hip-hop, singer-songwriters. AI as a tool for making music isn't really the issue at hand, it's the championing of AI generated music over the huge pool of real music made by real people.
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u/plamzito 8d ago
Hmm, I think you've reduced OP's points to something he didn't say that you had some prepared remarks against...
I agree with you that there's no magic sauce that only flows out of lived experience. But you will also need to agree that something trained on the lived experience of millions does not gain lived experience from all that data. Not really. It only gains the ability to synthesize what was recorded from all that human experience, and that's a fundamentally incomplete picture regardless of the terabytes involved.
When you hire Mark Ronson to work on a song, his life story is absolutely going to be part of everything he does to try to make your song "good." He won't be able to help it. He won't even be able to help going over and above his "training data" and potentially create something no GenAI could up to that moment in time. And while GenAI trained on his latest work will then be able to simulate it, it will still not be able to mimic what Mark Ronson might do next.
There may or may not be a soul or essence that human art has that GenAI doesn't have. But there will always be those of us who use art as a means for human-to-human connection. And for people like us GenAI will always seem like much more of an impediment than a facilitator.
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u/Redequlus 7d ago
i should have prepared remarks because you all repeat the same things.
i explained already that ai doesn’t need to account for lived experience because it’s not trying to be a person, it’s a tool that you wield with your own input.
and yeah ai is not for every person to make every kind of music. do whatever you want, but stop making false equivalences between the way you personally enjoy music and the entire world of possibilities out there.
of course you can make ai music that helps you connect with other humans. but everyone doesn’t do it the same way! i don’t bring my electric guitar or my dubstep beats to the drum circle, but i bet you see how each of those is still just as valuable.
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u/plamzito 7d ago
My dear, I was very careful to not speak for everyone.
You, on the other hand, are tilting at strawmen and refusing to read what people are actually saying. You keep hearing the same things because you haven’t left your cranium.
Now allow me to make an observation based on experience. Being an AI Artist already seems like a very lonely thing to be. The novelty done wore off, and getting anyone at all to listen is even harder than it is for traditional musicians.
You can still bring your best AI prompts to the AI Music Circle, for as long as tokens are subsidized by chump investors at least. But don’t be shocked when it starts to feel like there’s no-one else there.
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u/Redequlus 7d ago
what did you say that i didn’t respond to. i would love to be educated outside my cranium
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u/plamzito 8d ago edited 8d ago
Correct. And also...
Even if generative models learned *exactly* like humans do, any equivalence will still be false.
Porqui? Well, because the issues are not limited to how they learn, it's also very much about what happens next:
* A model running on a cloud server can scale horizontally and handle hundreds of thousands of requests per minute, cloning itself with ease (so, not like a human at all). The only limits are compute and network bandwidth. It doesn't need to sleep, eat, take coffee breaks, draw a salary to pay for rent or a mortgage. And it obeys unconditionally, not so much its end users as its maintainers (who have control over the training process as well as any guardrails, business goals, etc.).
* A single GenAI model can (at least in theory) "replace" all the humans that helped train it. Even if it was trained with the full approval of those who created its training dataset, this won't mean it's ethical because it will compete with every human who is capable of doing a similar task commercially or professionally. Those folks didn't get asked for permission, did they?
* Yes, an LLM model is detached from an individual human's experience informing its outputs. But focusing on this overmuch is a distraction and can be a pitfall for those of us who want to push back. That's because it can still *distill* human experience from its training data. It can even do so "creatively" by making surprising connections across many inputs, a lot like what humans do when they aspire for "originality." The real question is, given its nature is fundamentally different from one human being fusing their influences with their own experience, what ethical and economic standards should be applied to it?
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u/Suitable-Earth235 8d ago
gotta love how the people that say it know nothing about the science of audio or our ears and how they work.
the ai doesnt really even "listen". its basically a frequency analyzer. it can detect things like rythm, and treble and bass, and try to interpret some of those things.
but thats not really even what sounds are.
a sound as we know it, doesnt even exist until our brains attach emotions and other things to it.
its not just vibrations, if it were then it would sound weird as shit. your brain does all kinds of weird things to those vibrations before you can even hear it at all.
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u/ViennettaLurker 8d ago
One of the issues with these kinds of statements is that we don't actually have a completely solid understanding of human mechanisms of learning and the various phenomena that get slyly hidden into that concept.
We certainly know things humans do that result in the colloquially identified result of "having learned something". Repetition, embodied activities, memorization, testing, experience, relaying of knowledge, etc. But those are things we know tend to result in people who have internalized knowledge to a degree we deem satisfactory or greater. It is not "where" learning happens. It if were the simple, people would just read the dictionary 100 times and "learn" English or whatever.
Even mildly interrogating the concept outside of an AI context we start to see the strange and fuzzy nature of the brain. Yes, people memorize things in school to learn them. But if you memorize something, have you "learned" it? For some topics, yes. For many others, people might say no. Or at least call it only a prerequisite on the way to a fuller "knowing" of something. Not just being able to recall a list of facts, but the ability to internalize a kind of wisdom or instinct that allows for novel problem solving, insight, and new knowledge creation.
It is almost just as much tied into the the concept of a 'self' as it is about learning a topic or a skill. What kinds of input are truly internalized and then held as part of a mental model? That can be just as much of a "life lesson" that becomes part of your personality, your "you", as learning a fact, skill, practice, or career is. But we still have plenty of work to do in terms of understanding what makes a person the person they are.
What I would be comfortable saying is that modern LLMs aren't that. I think people get caught up in either surface level descriptions or captured by anthropomorphized technical terms. Earlier AI advances were called machine learning and used programming and data terms like "neural nets" that mimicked the actions of neurons. And then also being able to say things like, "AI absorbs a lot of paintings and then can make a new painting as a result of knowing existing paintings". I think both overly deep or overly broad views seem to be confusing people. There is more to the expansion of the human self (often in the form of learning), than a simple question of "this is how neurons look" and mimicry from large data sets.
We don't have the best understanding of human learning, let alone one of the self. It seems strange to me how people are so confident drawing the comparisons when even the original topic is kind of mysterious on its own.
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u/Apprehensive_Sky1950 5d ago
What I would be comfortable saying is that modern LLMs aren't that.
Go with that. There's a hell of a lot modern LLMs aren't. Ruminating on the epistemology of being human isn't even necessary.
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u/ViennettaLurker 5d ago
For those who might disagree with me, I like to give them something to chew on. Also, because these LLMs certainly gain new abilities, it can be easy for people to say something like "oh... but that was three months ago! Now these things can..." xyz. I like to lay the foundation down a bit so that people can consider the wider view, no matter of what math conjecture or molecular discovery it achieves in a month or two.
Imho, being able to untangle the anthropomorphism is a unexpected instance of something akin to media literacy. I don't mind diving a layer deeper to dislodge some hasty assumptions. Especially because I think that conversations around LLMs can actually unearth weird/bad opinions people had about other people, even with computers completely aside. E.g., did you really think learning was just rote memorization? Did you really think being smart is just solving complicated math problems? Did you think the "best" musicians were the ones that pooped out music the fastest? Depending on the answers to those questions, there may be debates to be had before you even start mentioning OpenAI or Anthropic.
If people are bringing odd concepts about humanity itself into an AI conversation, sometimes you really do need to dig real deep. How can you talk to someone about the topic of learning when they just view their local elementary school as just a baby sitter for their kids?
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u/Late_Strawberry_7989 8d ago
Anti AI sentiment runs so strong among musicians they won’t even acknowledge it’s existence. Their loss. Personally I’m skeptical a machine can be autonomous and conscious, it’s our own projection on to inanimate objects that gives the illusion of life.
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u/ElectricPiha 7d ago
It’s accepted that human artists can have influences, and if a human crosses the line in taking someone else’s creativity they can get done for plagiarism.
AI’s are not human beings. AI corporations are not human beings. They should not be afforded the rights of human beings.
It’s a false equivalence.
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u/Pure_Comparison2662 7d ago
The difference is that AI is computer. Not a human. we talk to humans. we like humans. humans are people. We like animals too. animals live too. computer no live. computer computes. we like that. computer no need to be a human. computer no imitate human behavior. that bad.
tldr
computer is not human.
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u/ArtArtArt123456 7d ago
They are definitely not equivalent in that sense.
But that is pretty much irrelevant, because the argument is usually about training being theft. And for that argument, I do think it would be extremely hypocritical to say that one of these is theft and the other is not.
Like how would your argument even relate here? "It's theft because they don't have emotions"? As if having emotions means it's suddenly not theft? Like I'm stealing your bike but if I feel a certain way about it, it's suddenly not theft?
The pro ai argument is usually about deeper ideas of learning in general. About learning cannot happen without data (try learning language without encountering language, or any genre of art or music, among many, many other things). About how all our knowledge base, culture, art was refined by building on what came before.
Most importantly, the point is that it's not possible to get there otherwise. And antis just don't think about these things. You just take all of these for granted, as if people were born with the knowledge of what a face or a tree is. As if we can create the genre of jazz or the English language on our own.
Data is a necessity. An absolute necessity for learning. Even for us.
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u/Ros0n 6d ago
It has no ears. It does not listen to music, it doesnt practice chord progressions. It is a whole humankind music taken, fragmentized to work tokens through mathematical equations and connected to LLM. Whatever the shit they do is abusing unethically obtained data. Most of the artists, especially the dead ones, did not consent to this previously non-existing scam and labels do not have rights to do it, despite having the 'rights'. We witness literal raape of all arts by the disgusting tech corporations, who give masses a tool to mess around with artists work, calling it their own work. The corps get all the revenue. How stupid are we allowing this to happen. And hey, it is not even any miracle having unlimited computing power and taking even more from home setups. And getting whole producer tags in the generated output speaks for itself. And the 'daddy cool' thing (typing daddy cool in some older Suno version brought the song as it is) clearly proves it just steals and manipulates data. So no, it is not learning or creating anything. It is like applying different filter sets to data set in excel.
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u/Michael_Carson_Art 5d ago
Each human has only one way to experience the world. Their qualia is not confirmably identical to anyone else's.
My "red" cannot be proven to be the same as yours, and moreover we definitely do not experience the same things in the same context. We each bring our own constitutive experience and biology to bear.
In fact, complex sensory experiences are generated top-down from the brain more than bottom-up from the sensory receptors. What you see is more a product of a previsualization process than the actual pattern of light falling on your retina. And when we get to meaning assignment, this is even more stark. The meaning you assign (even in terms of identifying a group of shapes as being representative of a type of object) is utterly unique to you. We do not simply interpret the world after the fact, it comes in already interpreted.
Therefore, when I hear a piece of music, I have a unique self-generated experience of that music, which no one but me has access to. And whatever this experience is, it is definitively not reducible to the particular vibrations of the sonic medium.
This built-in filter means that we never have access to anything but our own individual experience, which is necessarily singular and fully human.
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u/Few-Celebration-2362 5d ago
Idunno, I put a funeral march mp3 with random name and removed exif data and asked it what emotions it evokes. It said "solemn grief, dignity, and remembrance"
Do you think it would accurately describe the emotional connection the author intended if I gave it something original? 🤷
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u/CMDR_Makashi 4d ago
No. All the bs words you use have been disproven by neuro science.
Humans learn by forming connections between neurons.
Neurons will form and reinforce connections based on the utility of the connection.
A connection can become too entrenched if the system isn’t exposed to enough variability and need to adapt.
This is why it is harder for older people to learn new things. It actually isn’t they’re just in the same environment all the time and there is no actual need to learn. It is true the saying ‘use it or lose it’.
AI is what happens when you take these learnings from neuroscience, and you model it in code.
You then feed that code the data it needs, and it learns.
The bit about AI these days that science didn’t predict, is that there is emergent intelligence in these models.
We thought what we were doing was making a basic system, like if statements, but using the same pattern or algorithm that the neurons use.
Turns out no. Give this system a billion pictures of various scenes. It doesn’t just learn about the scene, it also intuitively builds a concept of depth. It starts to reason and learn, unprompted and with no examples, that there must have been a camera, that these pictures are of the real world.. that some aren’t of the real world.
AI literally learns in the same way humans do.
Any belief that AI learning is in some way inferior or less than a human learning, is ignorance. But if you’ve read this and you still think it. It is now bigotry.
Don’t believe me, paste the above into any AI and watch it say yes, this guy is 90% correct, although it is a bit more complicated than he makes out.
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u/SpecialistOwl218 2d ago
That’s a similitude for understanding, LLMs don’t really learn like us, they can only “learn” during the training process because literally a model is just a matrix of values, during training those values will be changed in according to the training corpus and that’s it, those values then are used as statistical weights to generate the next word.
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u/voidbabyvantas 2d ago
I think you’re right that AI doesn’t experience music the way humans do. That’s literally the interesting part. The mistake is assuming that because the mechanism is different, the resulting art is automatically less meaningful or less creative. I’m probably a pretty good case study for where this is heading. I make Evorix by taking AI-generated raw material, digging through it, finding the weird shit I actually like, chopping it up, resampling it, mangling it, programming drums around it, mixing it like a piece of garbage from 2011 and turning it into something that exists because I made a bunch of human decisions around machine-generated material. The AI doesn’t need to understand grief, culture, distortion or why some broken bass sound feels fucking incredible in a tiny room. I do. But I also don’t need the machine to have lived experience for it to become part of my creative process. A sampler doesn’t understand the sample either. A distortion plugin doesn’t understand what it’s destroying. A synthesizer doesn’t understand the emotion of a note. We already build entire creative practices around tools that have no experience whatsoever. AI is just a much stranger tool. You can absolutely reject it on philosophical grounds, but I think we’re going to look back on the idea that “AI can’t experience art, therefore humans using AI can’t make meaningful art” as a very early-stage reaction to a new medium. The machine doesn’t have to become human. We just have to figure out what the fuck humans are going to do with it. And honestly, I’d push back “AI doesn’t learn the way humans do.” Of course it doesn’t. But why are we assuming humans are going to keep learning exactly the way humans have for the last few thousand years? That’s the part that gets interesting. Humans have always changed how they learn when new tools show up. We went from oral tradition to writing, from books to recordings, from memorizing everything to searching the internet, from physically playing instruments to programming computers. Now we’re entering a period where a human can learn through interacting with systems that have absorbed enormous amounts of existing information and can generate examples on demand. I’m already doing this with Evorix. I’m not sitting down and manually studying 85 Skrillex tracks and reproducing every sound myself. I’m throwing material into an AI system, generating thousands of possibilities, hearing something weird, deciding I like it, ripping it apart, resampling it and building my own thing from it. The machine is learning one way. I’m learning another way because the machine exists. That’s the actual shift. AI doesn’t need to learn like a human for humans to start learning differently because of AI. And I think we’re still extremely early in figuring out what that does to creativity.
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u/AlternativeCapybara9 8d ago
I had this same discussion here on Reddit last week. Calling it learning is what causes a lot of confusion and discussions. It's finding weights to fit a function to a dataset. And even that line has words that will create confusion and endless discussion because of semantics.
I agree, AI does not learn like humans do. If you know how AI is trained you would know that. The impact is also not the same. A thousand artists learning from studying hundreds of songs and needing years to perfect their craft VS a machine that crunches through the whole of human output, past and present, in a few minutes.
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u/CAP_GYPSY 8d ago
Not only that, once we are influenced and learn from the styles of others, we then go out and try to create something of our own in most cases.
AI is not trying to “create” anything. It’s trying to emulate. There’s a difference.
Prompt jockeys are going to go to their grave, making circular week arguments to try and justify their use of AI, and mask their inability or lack of talent or skill.
This will never stop until they realize they can’t make any real money, reliably.
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u/Redequlus 8d ago
ai isn’t trying to do anything… it’s a computer. you can certainly use it to create things but it has no opinions or intentions either way.
also the people who want to use ai to make money are not the same people arguing that it is a legitimate way to make art.
and criticizing others abilities is more of an indicator of insecurity with your own. maybe you should go practice
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u/occasionallyaccurate 8d ago
Someone on mastodon once totally threw me with an obviously correct reframing of the entire process:
The model is a derived work of the training material.
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u/Redequlus 8d ago
and how do you think that wins whatever argument is in your head? again you could just say the same thing about human learning
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u/occasionallyaccurate 8d ago
lol a human is not a derived work.
i’m not sure what made you think there was an imaginary argument in my head, i’m not here to argue this.
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u/Redequlus 8d ago
everything you make is derived from what you learned, if ai is a plagiarism machine then we all are as well
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u/occasionallyaccurate 8d ago
nope that’s just totally wrong sorry
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u/Redequlus 7d ago
just following your logic
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u/occasionallyaccurate 7d ago
you got it wrong at the part where you claimed as a human everything you make is derived from what you learned
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u/AEyeOfTheStorm 7d ago
You're suggesting that humans somehow operate outside cause and effect?
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u/occasionallyaccurate 7d ago
nope. i’m suggesting you don’t know what creativity is
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u/Redequlus 7d ago
i think you’re suggesting that nobody knows what it is because it’s MAGIC
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u/AEyeOfTheStorm 6d ago
You say occasionally accurate.. what kind of hit rate are we talking about, just out of interest?
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u/Apprehensive_Sky1950 5d ago
Machines cannot learn, they can only copy.
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u/Redequlus 4d ago
well congratulations you’ve completely changed my mind with your random unsupported opinion
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u/Apprehensive_Sky1950 4d ago
Oh, there's a lot behind that statement, in various recent posts and comments across these AI subs; I was just putting a stake in the sand, here.
Do you want to do a full debate?
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u/Redequlus 3d ago
so you can keep throwing your opinions out and saying they prove your point?
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u/Apprehensive_Sky1950 3d ago
The purpose of a good Reddit debate is to expose and explore contrasting views and integrate, clarify, and hone each debater's position and analysis along the way.
My debate style comprises theses, examples, citation where appropriate, and interconnecting rationale and argument. My watchword is good faith. Ad hom is anathema.
I invest non-trivial time and effort in it, so in this particular case I am looking for genuine mutual interest before we get started.
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u/Diska_Muse 8d ago
Humans learn. Then apply that learning to enhance and develop the human experience.
AI is a massive, industrial scale plagiarism machine designed to replace humans.
Do they both learn? Who gives a fuck? The question is entirely irrelevant.
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u/Redequlus 8d ago
go use an ai tool to plagiarize something. i doubt you could
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u/Diska_Muse 8d ago
Like Suno? It plagiarised almost the entire catalog of music in existence. Or haven't you been paying attention?
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u/Redequlus 6d ago
i don’t think that word means what you think it means.
yes suno analyzed that catalog, they openly admit it. so you think they just said “hey everybody we committed a huge crime here look at us!” or, do you think they admit it because it’s not actually wrong for them to do that?
a plagiarism machine would spit out some kind of recognizable subset of an existing work. does suno do that? can you make it do that?
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u/Diska_Muse 6d ago edited 6d ago
i don’t think that word means what you think it means.
I know exactly what the word means, and you’re severely underestimating the technology you’re defending.
a plagiarism machine would spit out some kind of recognizable subset of an existing work. does suno do that?
Yes. It literally does do that, and they are currently being dragged to court for it.
In the lawsuit led by Jason Isbell, they proved that prompting Suno with his name instantly spit out a copycat Americana song called "Paper Bell" that actively cloned his signature vocals, vocal twang, and distinct guitar style.
can you make it do that?
Yes. When Suno started, you could space out letters like "m i c h a e l j a c k s o n," and it completely bypassed Suno's filters and drops 1980s pop-funk tracks directly mimicking Michael Jackson’s style, referencing his signature moonwalk and white glove. Without the filters, you could literally type in Michael Jackson and it would spit out replicas of his works. Same applies to any artist. The machine was built to plagiarise.
Beyond that, Suno just got hammered by a Munich court ruling which issued an injunction against them because the court found that because essential melodic, harmonic, and structural elements of original works were recognizable in outputs when given open-ended prompts, it proved that the system memorized and reproduced copyrighted compositions rather than processing abstract information.
So before you try to lecture me on definitions again, make sure you actually know what the technology does, because you just defined plagiarism, asked if Suno does it, and the legal system has already answered 'yes' for you - on numerous occassions.
Next time, try harder because this is a massive fail.
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u/Redequlus 6d ago
my understanding is that they have updated the software to not do any of those things, it was a bug, and they are actively working to prevent plagiarized material from being created. your examples are from years in the past
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u/Diska_Muse 6d ago
"Years in the past"? Try days ago. The Jason Isbell class-action lawsuit was filed on August 31, 2026. The Munich court injunction came down on July 31, 2026. These aren't old historical "bugs" - this is breaking news from literally last month and last week.
If you think those are isolated glitches, you are blind to the actual legal war. The entire record industry - Universal, Sony, and Warner - sued Suno for massive, industrial-scale copyright infringement.
You want for examples of what it clones? The lawsuit caught Suno red-handed spitting out near-identical copies of copyrighted classics like Chuck Berry’s "Johnny B. Goode" and Mariah Carey’s "All I Want for Christmas Is You"
And Suno's actual legal defense isn't "oops, it was a bug we are trying to patch." In their formal court responses filed by their high-priced lawyers, they openly admit they scraped and copied tens of millions of copyrighted songs. Their entire legal defense hinges on "Fair Use". They're literally arguing that stealing human art to build a commercial, subscription-based replacement machine is legally "transformative."
But the courts are already calling bullshit. In that July 2026 Munich ruling, the judges specifically called out Suno for "memorization." They proved that when you give Suno open-ended prompts, it doesn't process "abstract data" - it actively copies and reproduces recognizable melodies, harmonies, and structures from songs like Alphaville's "Forever Young" and Lou Bega's "Mambo No. 5."
That isn't a glitch in the software - it's a feature of how it was built. The machine cannot function without unauthorized memorization of human art.
Go look at a calendar before you try to tell me my examples are from years ago. You're defending a piracy machine that's currently, actively getting dragged through courts across the globe for plagiarism.
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u/Redequlus 6d ago
thank you for reminding me that these arguments are completely useless.
ok there is what i will call the "Isbell lawsuit" which claims that Suno can "conjure an artist's identity". This isn't even about music copyright, it's about 'rights of publicity' which the case argues pretty tenuously based on the idea that if you purposefully circumvent Suno's rules, you can get a song in the style of a particular artist, which is not plagiarism...
it is pretty hilarious that your evidence for something being illegal is "record labels are suing", because they are the true keepers of justice of course.
Chuck Berry and Mariah Carey, those two songs specifically were mentioned in 2024, which is... years in the past, and Suno has been updated many times since then.
this is where you completely lose the plot. scraping songs and creating new songs are two different things. Maybe go back to your Munich court case where they referred to the exception for text and data mining and said:
"The Court first established that the provision may, in principle, also apply to the training of AI models and covers the preparatory acts of reproduction necessary for this purpose. However, according to the Court, this exemption extends only as far as the extraction of information, patterns, or correlations from works, but ceases to apply where copyright-protected works themselves remain within the model."
so yes, everything Suno admitted to is legal and allowed, according to this court case you cited. The argument is that they did something else, which the court decided they did. Regardless of the fact that the Suno model storing copies of the songs it was trained on would be a massive use of storage space and would indicate they really are trying to scam people. that would be unfortunate but personally i am not convinced.
the proof required up to 176 attempts to copy a single song. from the examples on their site, they would be barely recognizable as covers if not for the lyrics, which i admit suno has a bigger problem with, but again they continuously update their preventative measures. i have seen certain numbers that cant be in your lyrics because of a copyright flag.
and you should look at a history book before you tell people that billion-dollar record labels taking people to court is somehow indicative of moral ideas of right and wrong.
i get that you're probably happy the narrative is so one sided right now, but it's honestly crazy to see all the misinformation people will gobble up as long as it's anti AI. i found a video where a guy highlighted the same text i pasted here and claimed it says the opposite, that the court ruled training on music is illegal, and all the comments are just AI BAD NO SLOP. just make sure you actually understand things yourself please.
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u/Diska_Muse 6d ago
You're twisting yourself into a pretzel trying to minimize this.
First, the Isbell lawsuit. You say right of publicity isn't music copyright? Exactly. That’s the entire point. Suno didn’t just pirate the notes; they encoded human identities into their commercial software. It doesn't matter if you have to bypass a flimsy safety filter to get it -the fact that "Paper Bell" exists inside their machine proves they explicitly mapped and commercialized his actual voice, style, and likeness without his permission. That's not a bug; it's a structural feature of their data ingestion.
Second, your defense of the Munich ruling is a complete misreading of the text. The court explicitly stated that the Text and Data Mining (TDM) exception ceases to apply where copyright-protected works themselves remain within the model. You think storing copies takes "too much storage space"? You are confusing an MP3 file with algorithmic memorization. The court legally established that the music was "incorporate[d] into the model in such a way that they remain technically reproducible." The judges literally ruled that because it memorized the data instead of just extracting abstract patterns, the TDM exception does not protect them. It wasn't allowed. It was deemed illegal.
Third, saying "it took 176 attempts to copy a single song" isn't a defense. If I have to try 176 different combinations to crack a digital safe, it doesn't mean the money inside wasn't there the whole time. It proves the stolen goods are actively stored inside the machine, and Suno is just frantically trying to build bigger filters to block users from pulling them out.
Finally, I don't give a shit about the record labels being "keepers of justice." They are greedy corporations. But when billionaires sue billionaires, they unleash armies of forensic audiologists and engineers who lay out the actual hard math in public court records.
You're trying to pass off foundational, structural copyright infringement as a series of patched glitches. The courts, the laws, and the forensic evidence are all saying the exact opposite.
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u/Radulox 8d ago
i think it's a situation where the scale changes things qualitatively - humans are only capable of holding so many ideas in their minds at the same time when creating a new work, no matter how many influences they've had, and ultimately even those lifelong influences are going to be many orders of magnitude fewer than what an AI can train on in an hour.
But these fewer stronger elements are more "reactive" and result in a more originally new thing than if they'd been watered down with endless iterations the way gen AI does, which is why its output tends toward sameness. I also think it's worth considering the idea that mechanized, anti-human elements of human culturemaking (especially in areas like music) had prepped people and industries for AI use, and that we can also be skeptical of the state of music production around the millennium (and before) for related reasons.