The Washington Post March needed an update. I tried using AI to replace it.

That probably wasn’t welcome news to several record companies that sued Suno in late June, arguing that the company’s tool could only generate tunes because it chewed up an untold number of their copyrighted songs to learn that like. (Suno, for its part, has called its technology “transformational.”) Still, the app remains live and free to download—for now, anyway.

And since the app dropped a few days ago, what started as a silly experiment to generate catchy journalism-themed tunes has turned into a minor obsession of mine. As it turns out, creating songs on a whim using AI is truly a blast, but it also began to reshape my relationship with music in ways I wasn’t comfortable with.

Here’s what Suno can do and why I felt a little uneasy after living with it.

Getting started with Suno is simple: Just create an account, decide if you want to pay extra to create more songs every day, then start plugging in 200-character requests.

Creating these tracks can take anywhere from seconds to minutes, depending on whether you’ve paid for a higher level of service, and your requests will always generate two tracks to review.

Your musical tastes are probably different from mine, but I already knew what I wanted my first attempt at a new Washington Post thread to sound like. Bright, luscious guitars were a must, as were lively, adventurous bass lines and journalistic lyrics.

But when I asked Suno to create just that, he produced a pair of generic pop-funk tracks that used the words “bright and weird” as lyrics instead of instructions.

[Listen for yourself: Washington Funk 1, and Washington Funk 2.]

Maybe this genre wasn’t right. I then gave Suno the following command to see if it would copy a specific artist: “Early 2000s Paramore-style pop-punk, high energy, female vocals, lyrics for The Washington Post.”

None of the resulting songs immediately struck me as Paramore pastiches, but that may be because Suno completely ignored my request for female vocals. However, the songs felt like something I would have heard in high school and featured a surprisingly earwormy chorus:

To tell the tales we need to know

From the city to the world and back

In its pages there is no turning back”

[Listen for yourself: Postamore 1, and Postamore 2]

I wanted to keep those textures (plus a few tweaks) for my final attempt, so I opened Suno’s Custom mode and pasted them back in for another go. (Interestingly, if you want Suno to build a song around an entire set of lyrics, its website reminds you to only use AI-generated lyrics; the app doesn’t bother to mention this.)

Now, for the rest of the instructions. Going further felt like the right move, so I asked for the music style to include the following elements: “j-pop, math rock, female singer, anime theme, instrumental intro, guitar solo.”

And for the first time, Suno’s results felt like they fully embodied what I gave them on demand—except when both songs ended abruptly, went quiet for a while, and fired up the fake guitars again for one last look.

[Listen for yourself: Washington! Post!! OP1, and Washington! Post!! OP2]

Okay, okay, none of these will ever replace The Washington Post March — but if any of them had a chance, it’s Postamore 2.

After I finished my AI journalism track, I found myself messing around with Suno, making silly little songs with nonsensical lyrics and trying to recreate the back-to-back song styles I liked.

But it wasn’t long before I felt I was using — and sharing the results — a little too much. My wife was having a rough day, so I sent her a beautiful AI song, including our dumb pet names, to cheer her up. I prepared some really terrible rap lyrics and sent a friend four Suno songs built around them in a row.

Then it hit me – I could easily see myself continuing to release songs and send them to people as cavalierly as I drop emojis.

Music is a force for good, for pleasure and healing and activation and reflection. Was this entire slapdash music scene somehow serving to devalue the music in my life?

Max Vehuni, one half of the indie-pop duo Slender Bodies, pulled me off that ledge.

“Music is a way for people to express themselves.” he said. “If it’s another way for you to communicate with your wife, I think that’s very nice.”

Vehuni is obviously no apologist for AI music — he’s experimented with Suno and services like it for personal projects, and says he sees tremendous potential for AI as a tool to improve an artist’s writing and production.

He’s also quick to admit that, while Suno has been sued for allegedly using copyrighted music as training data, that process isn’t entirely different from what humans do.

“Artists are drawing a line, saying, ‘Well, I’m okay with artists being influenced by me, people being influenced by me. But when a computer is affected by me, that’s not right,’ he said. “Is it something we have to agree or disagree with? I do not know.”

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other things to worry about. The rest of my lingering discomfort, for example, stems from a worry that I’d be ruining the artists I love by generating music that sounds like theirs but isn’t.

Fortunately, Vehuni said that slenderbodies makes most of their money from touring and that the band is lucky to have a fan base that will support them through the “post-AI musical apocalypse”.

Choosing to directly support the artists you care about, in other words, is more important than ever.

However, he worries about the possibility that record companies could submit their copyrighted song catalogs to AI companies in exchange for access to models that can create synthetic music for which they would not have to pay royalties. . Or that streaming services will create and promote their own synthetic artists and pocket the revenue. (He’s not alone in asking this.)

It’s too early to know how any of this will shake out. Either way, Big Tech, the music industry, and the rest of us have no choice but to continue to fight AI music creeping into our lives.

“We took it out of the box and I don’t think we’ll ever get it back,” Vehuni said.