The Suno Slop Engine: Why AI Music is a Race to the Average
AI-generated image · Bay Street Wire
While generative AI is marketed as a creative revolution, the technology remains a high-efficiency tool for producing sonic mediocrity.
OPINION: The marketing surrounding generative AI music suggests a creative revolution, but the reality is far more pedestrian. For most, tools like Suno are not instruments of innovation; they are high-efficiency engines for producing what can only be described as sonic slop.
As Terrence O'Brien of The Verge notes, the general output of Suno is often "offensively boring." This is the inherent trap of generative AI: it does not create; it averages. It synthesizes existing patterns to deliver a product that is mathematically designed to be unobtrusive, resulting in the digital equivalent of elevator music.
Even when an artist attempts to elevate the medium, the limitations of the technology remain glaring. Consider the case of 1010Benja and his track "Semiramis Dream" from the EP *Time Has Nothing To Do With What You Choose…*. While O'Brien suggests the track is infectious, the process behind it reveals the AI's role as a crutch rather than a catalyst. 1010Benja admits to using Suno because his creative visions are "far beyond [his] means," citing financial instability and an inability to pay rent. He uses the AI to simulate elements he cannot afford, such as a children’s choir.
However, the result is hardly a breakthrough. O'Brien observes that the AI-generated choir on the EP is not "particularly convincing" and argues that the same sonic effect could have been achieved through layered performances and intelligent vocal processing without the need for a generative engine.
1010Benja's workflow is a testament to the labor required to make AI music not sound like AI music. According to an interview with Hearing Things, 1010Benja worked with collaborator Patrick Holder on the beat, recorded his own vocals, and then entered a recursive loop: feeding elements into Suno, exporting them to Ableton for editing, and feeding them back into Suno. 1010Benja estimates he repeated this process a few hundred times for a single song.
When an artist must spend hundreds of iterations scrubbing the "AI-ness" out of a track to make it palatable, the tool is no longer facilitating creativity—it is creating a chore. The fact that the song is marked as AI-generated on Deezer is a badge of transparency, but it doesn't erase the underlying mediocrity of the tech.
1010Benja himself acknowledges the darker side of this efficiency. He admits to the environmental damage caused by these tools and notes the role of "greedy corporations," concluding with a nihilistic outlook: "The good guy doesn’t win this one."
Ultimately, the "breakthroughs" are illusions. If a song's quality depends on a human artist spending hundreds of hours editing AI outputs in Ableton to hide the machine's fingerprints, the AI isn't the artist. It is simply a shortcut to a bland, synthetic middle ground.