John P. Strohm

🚨 SAM ALTMAN: “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model … But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.”

iHeartRadio has banned its radio stations from playing AI-generated music or using AI-generated personalities, as part of its “Guaranteed Human” program.

People keep saying “AI training on books is theft,” but that only works if you fundamentally misunderstand what training actually is. Here’s the simplest, most human analogy. When a child learns to read, they absorb patterns from thousands of sentences. They learn grammar, rhythm, storytelling, vocabulary, structure. Their brain builds an internal model of how language works. Later, that child writes something new. What they write is influenced by everything they’ve read, but it is not a copy of any book. It’s a transformed, abstracted understanding. No one would ever claim the child is “stealing” from every author they learned from. No one expects them to pay royalties to the books they used to learn how to write. No one thinks learning itself is a crime. Learning doesn’t duplicate the original. It synthesizes patterns into something new. AI does the exact same thing. It learns statistical patterns of language. Just like we do. If pattern learning were theft, then every human writer would be guilty. Every journalist, scientist, poet, novelist, teacher, and student. Humanity itself would be a copyright violation. The output matters, not the learning. If an AI copied a book verbatim and sold it, that would be theft. But training? That’s just learning, the same process every human mind goes through. If we criminalize learning, we don’t just break AI. We break everything.

I grew up singing. I sang everywhere I went, I wrote songs in my diary, I told teachers that I wanted to be a singer & songwriter when I grew up. But wanting to be a musician in 2006 required resources that a low-income family didn't have. My parents couldn't afford to get me any instruments. They couldn't pay for music lessons. They couldn't get me into studios. A dream I had became just a memory, until now. I am beyond proud and honored to get to work at a company that is enabling music creation for everyone. For the 13 year old kid in their bedroom who dreams of being a musician, you can be one. For all of the professional artists, you can do more of what you love. I really wish Suno existed 20 years ago when I was a kid in elementary school, showing strangers songs I wrote with no way to produce them. But I'm really, really happy that it exists today, for all of the other kids who might need it. We are still just getting started :)

A live performance of East Nashville Song About A Train on the Morsecode Podcast. We talked about my NYC days, Letterman, The Dolls, my good brother the late great Todd Snider, and got heavily into my solo career, songwriting process, and approach to recording music.

Resist the urge to use AI to “help” you with anything creative. Don’t surrender your creativity to an algorithm. Don’t try to rationalize stealing someone’s work, which is all that AI does. Creativity is like a muscle. If you use AI, those muscles will atrophy and die. Don’t.

AI creators are a gift to mankind. For the first time in history, anyone from any background can express themselves visually, instantly, and share their ideas with the world. You no longer need an art degree, years of training, or access to expensive tools. AI has opened the gates of creation. It has given people the power to explore worlds, to shape aesthetics, to build images that once lived only in imagination. What once belonged to a few now belongs to everyone. And that, to me, is one of the most beautiful revolutions of our time.