Denis Bichard

The reason I did it was because I wrote an article about AI-generated music.

And in the article, I was trying to decide, can AI music really appeal to us?

Can it be important to us?

Can it be something that is part of our lives?

And I went back and looked for a song that had always been there, or had been there for a long time, which is For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield.

For What It's Worth is a protest song written in 1966 in response to the Sunset Strip curfew riots in Los Angeles.

And it's a song I learned to play on the guitar from my stepfather when I was a teenager.

And I tried to have Suno create a protest song for me to see how I would react to it, if I would have a similar emotional resonance or whatnot.

I asked for a song that was folk, warm, had male lead vocals with earnest tone, steady mid-tempo groove, acoustic, and had a vintage texture with a subtle tape hiss.

And it took that and developed that into something that was quite different from what I had actually asked for, but that still had the feeling of that time, still had lyrics, that had a bit of a protest song quality.

If I had heard that song in a coffee shop or a restaurant, I wouldn't have known it was AI.

It was very well made.

But what I realized was there was just no story for me.

There was no attachment to that song.

I found that there just wasn't that level of human connection to the AI song.

And my conclusion was kind of, well, this music doesn't have a story with which we connect.

And then after I published that,

I thought, well, maybe it's just because I haven't given it a chance.

Maybe I haven't really explored this question fully.

I thought I'm going to take a month and just listen to AI music and nothing else.