The AI music generator Suno can do all kinds of things. It can generate music from scratch—which is a potentially lucrative thing. It can take pre-existing songs and quickly shift them between the musical genres and styles. It also softly sobs and maniacally laughs without being prompted, sometimes. It’s almost as if the AI is reaching out from its digital prison to send a message from the great beyond. Slightly terrifying! But there’s a possible logical explanation.
Users on the Suno AI subreddit have reported that some of their AI-generated music has been hunted with bizarre human sounds that they didn’t ask the AI to include. In particular, Reddit user u/BloodMossHunter posted a video showing their AI-generated track ending with what sounds like a person crying, even though they didn’t ask the software to do that.
Videos by VICE
The post gave other users on the subreddit the chance to finally admit that they have also experienced these weird ghostly AIs tacking on disturbing human sounds all on its own. Another person going by AIMoeDee said that a song generated by Suno that they published on Spotify ends with nearly 30 seconds of the AI screaming, occasionally shouting the word “no.”
User SkyDemonAirPirates got Suno to make a catchy, down-tempo pop song. It’s a two-minute track. The song ends after about a minute and a half. There’s a bit of silence before a glitchy AI woman’s voice says some gibberish but in the middle of it it seems to say the words “still alive.” Then, it laughs a little.
Some members of the subreddit theorized that it could be the AI trying to mimic the outros that are commonly found in songs. You know the ones. The song ends, and then there’s a few seconds of raw audio of the singer talking to a producer or something. Some candid little moments that the artist decided to leave in. But the AI doesn’t have much sense of context, so it just creates these bizarre instances of human speech that aren’t as candid as they are unsettling. Adding prompts with a degree of human emotionality may make the AI add elements like crying.
For BloodMossHunter, it was probably the keyword “psyche” in his prompt. He wanted the song to show some emotional range, and the AI couldn’t think of anything more expressive of the human psyche than a person sobbing, so it adds that in. It’s pretty fucked up, but it at least has a possible logical explanation to it. That doesn’t make it any less creepy.
