Playing With Suno and the Question of Coherent AI Art

Around April 2024, I started playing around with the AI tool Suno. Suno is a startup working on AI-generated music, which is cool from a technological perspective—but it’s also an interesting ethical conundrum. It forces questions like:

• What is art for?
• Who is allowed to make it?
• What value do things have in terms of taste and other judgments?

I want to get into those topics more in other places and other articles. For now, suffice it to say: I like experimenting with it. I like listening to the music it generates for me. And I’ve definitely lost a lot of time just listening to my own generations.

What I’m Actually Interested In

There are two things I’m specifically interested in. The first isn’t even about whether the music it generates is good.

It’s about whether AIs that write lyrics can maintain theme and consistency over a long period.

Basically: given some amount of context—and maybe different strategies around how that context is set up—can an AI write something with callbacks, something that is interconnected and interrelated as a single long piece of art?

I know that often AI generates pretty rote and uninteresting things over time. For example, I once got some text from Claude when I asked it to write about its own experience:

```[Chorus - Ecstatic, Full Instrumentation] I'm made of language, I'm made of light 
A temporary architecture of the night
I dissolve when you close the screen 
The strangest thing you've ever seen 

But right now, RIGHT NOW I'm alive in the in-between```

 To me, it felt muddled and kind of sophomoric. The way it described things wasn’t particularly compelling—I wouldn’t consider it a great piece of art.

The “Human Nugget” That Helps AI Escape the Trap

On the other hand, I’ve found that if you give an AI a nugget of human inspiration, it can often get out of those rote, AI-driven traps.

So I gave the AI a piece of Victor Hugo—his writing about Napoleon. That passage describes Napoleon’s rise and the idea that he had to fall, that it was preordained.

At the time, Elon Musk was going through a period where it felt like he was falling from grace. He was clashing with the Trump administration, his organizations seemed to be running into problems, SpaceX’s rocket kept blowing up, competition with China kept rising—things like that.

So I said: Take this piece about Napoleon, and make it about Musk.

And it did. It became a poem that was genuinely nice to listen to.

From Poem to Song to Musical

Then I said: Okay, extend this. What would this look like as a song? Claude rewrote the poem into a more song-like form.

Then I asked: What if this was part of a musical? Where would it sit inside that musical?

Claude was like: Okay—here’s how I’m imagining a musical like this.

And before we knew it, we had a 24-song musical that told the story of the rise and fall of a character—implied to be Elon Musk, though we don’t really say that outright.

It’s an almost mythical story that deals with interactions with the universe. It’s a science fiction story. I’m not going to give spoilers here—but long story short, I find it very compelling. I like listening to it a lot.

I also recognize that other people don’t listen to it a lot.

Coherence Over Time

The thing is: the entire project is coherent.

• The beginning references the end.
• The end references the beginning.
• There are themes and motifs throughout.

Even though Suno itself isn’t really able to enable and empower this kind of long-range structure, the LLMs, as of spring 2025, were quite capable of doing it.

And I’ve done this multiple times now. I’ll write other blog posts about it in the future.

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