Within Reason #155 AI Music is Not Music - Adam Neely
7 snips
May 13, 2026 
Adam Neely, American bassist and YouTuber known for music-education and commentary, debates AI’s impact on musical craft and culture. He argues AI can de-skill creators, questions whether AI-generated sound counts as music, and weighs accessibility for disabled makers against loss of human interaction. Conversations cover Suno, sampling vs generation, personalized music’s social effects, and why live jazz and spontaneity remain vital.
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Honesty Matters More Than Calling Tools Cheating
- Neely rejects a blanket 'cheating' label for tools but stresses honesty about what was done in production.
- He cites autotune and quantizing as examples where market pressure hides human contribution and misrepresents craft.
Suno Explained And Why Neely Finds It Problematic
- Neely describes Suno as a ChatGPT-for-music trained on nearly all online audio and capable of generating songs from text prompts.
- He admits it works decently as demos but judges the outputs musically weak and the training unethical.
Mass Training On Recordings Feels Unethical And Nonhuman
- Neely argues training AI on all recordings without consent is unethical and not analogous to human learning.
- He calls the model's pattern extraction 'brute force' and fundamentally different from embodied musical learning.
