My friend called me a few days ago and told me Suno is adding a watermark to everything created on its platform. If you have never heard of Suno, it is a website where you can make a finished song without a studio, a band, or a single instrument. Even if you are a novice to music, you give it your idea, and it will create a full song! If you are a seasoned musician, it will take everything you direct it to do and create what feels like magic. You can give it lyrics, musical direction, the style, the mood, the tempo, the kind of voice you want, and a few minutes later you have a professionally produced composition that incorporates all of your experience and expertise combined with the machine’s training. Millions of people use it. For someone like me, who has written songs for decades without a band standing by, I initially viewed it as a door that would lead to the world finally hearing my songs in the way I always imagined them. But, like most things in life, there is a catch and a price to pay. And the price just went up again. The AI police have come for the music. Suno announced it this month, in the middle of its legal battles with the major labels: invisible audio watermarking and fingerprinting, rolling out in the coming weeks, built so platforms can detect and flag anything the machine touched. You won’t hear it. The machines will. The mark can say a machine was involved, but it does not point to what the human contributed. It is the same blindness I wrote about when the AI detectors started calling writers who use AI guilty until proven human. When one of my songs gets flagged and labeled, the listener learns that AI touched it. They will never learn about the lyrics I wrote, the chord progressions I chose, the pocket I demanded, or the nuances that make a song connect to listeners, nuances I earned over decades in music studios as an artist and a songwriter. The machine’s fingerprints get detected. The human’s fingerprints get erased. People see the glamour of the music business, but few have the slightest clue of the sacrifices and grueling hard work it takes to hone this craft, and I will not stand by while the shortsighted people building these detectors and watermarks erase what takes musicians years to achieve. People are building answers to the AI police, and I respect the effort. The Authors Guild offers a Human Authored certification for books. It draws its line in one place. A human must write the words. It lets you use AI to research and to brainstorm. What it will not allow is a machine helping to write the words. There is even a service called Verify My Writing that gives you a human seal by running your work through AI detection software and then giving it a score. Here is how well that works. Ron Charles, the book critic formerly with The Washington Post, took a phone interview he had done, fed it to ChatGPT, and told it to write a five-hundred-word story in his voice. Every word of it came from the machine. He submitted it to that service and paid ten dollars. Ninety seconds later he was holding an authenticity certificate that read one hundred percent human based. Those certifications vouch that a human wrote the words with no machine helping to shape them. They have no category for work a human created while a machine helped render it. That purity badge has never been my story, and if you’re honest, it is probably not yours either. There was a machine in my room. I invited it in, I directed it, I overruled it, and I made every final call. What I need is a mark that tells the truth about that. Proof of authorship: what I originated, what I created and what the machine rendered based on my direction. You can’t understand what this watermark erases without knowing what I put into it so let me share my backstory. I have been writing songs for thirty years. I was in an R&B group, Vybe, signed to Island Records. I was in another group signed to Giant Records. People who know my work have compared me to songwriters whose names I won’t repeat here, because those women earned their legends and I have not achieved mine, yet. What I never had, in thirty years, was the team. The singer. I can sing but not every song I write calls for my voice and tones. The keyboard player. The drummer. The producer. I had moments with one or the other, but there were always too many cooks in the kitchen, and there were only moments when my full voice was realized. For a while I had a writing partner who was a master of melodies, and when that friendship fell apart, I stopped writing for months, because my confidence walked out the door with her. I eventually picked up the pen again but was still missing the team I needed for my work to fully take shape. Then Suno came along, and I’m just going to say it the way I felt it: it was like I asked the Lord for something and he hand-delivered it. The keyboard player, the producer, the drummer, and a world-class singer who could take my lyrics and melody ideas and bring them to life exactly the way I heard them in my head. All the hundreds of songs I never finished were finally going to be finished and heard. I don’t read music, but decades in studios teach your ears things schools can’t. I gave it my lyrics. My chord progressions and beats per minute. My instructions for how the singer’s vocal runs should move in and out of the pocket. In one week, I wrote six songs. I played them for industry veterans, people who have heard everything, and they told me every single one was a great song. Six for six, across genres, including a country song I wrote decades ago and never had the right connections in the country music genre to do anything with. Then I read Suno’s Terms and Conditions, and the proverbial record scratched off of the turntable. On paper, as a paid subscriber, I own what I make. But I give Suno a worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable license to my creations and my prompts, meaning they can use my work, and license it to others, without ever paying me a dime or crediting me for my contribution to the work. The US Copyright Office will not register an AI-generated composition. My lyrics I can register and protect, because I wrote them. The produced sound that I directed and that makes it feel like my finished song I cannot own. Ownership I cannot enforce, plus a license given back to Suno, is ownership in name only. In plain English: it means squat. These were my melodies. My progressions. My hard-earned years of instructions. And I’ll be damned if I was going to give that away. I slammed on the brakes, heartbroken, and I have not contributed the entire body of my experience on that platform since. I did find another use case, which is background music for my marketing materials, and that part is very cool, because I know exactly the sound I want and now, I can create it myself. Suno also raised the stakes for singers by adding another feature that lets you sing on it with your own voice. I read those Terms and Conditions too and went on Instagram with the terms on screen and warned every serious singer who was contemplating using it not to put their voice in Suno. So far that comment has gotten well over 400 likes, plus responses from grateful singers who feel like they dodged a huge bullet by opting not to put their voice on Suno’s platform. When a watermark arrives, it marks the machine’s part and stays silent on the human contribution. Everything I just described, the experience, the hard work, the sacrifices, the six songs, the ears, disappears behind one label that says AI was here. I already built the answer to the AI police for my writing. It’s called The CYNERSA Record™, and it sits at the end of everything I publish, stating what I originated, what I rewrote, what I overruled, and what the AI did, with the full itemized record behind it. It has been running live on Substack for a few weeks. The format is free for anyone to use with attribution (just say where you got it from), and the whole explanation … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit debrataylorwrites.substack.com
