Is Timbaland an AI music pioneer or plagiarist?

His influence can bring a new medium mainstream

Tim “Timbaland” Mosley is a prolific Suno user, generating over 50,000 tracks

Suno is an AI music generator using copyrighted songs in its training data, leading to lawsuits from all major record labels—chief among them Universal Music Group.

But at the same time, Universal has a deal with renowned producer Tim “Timbaland” Mosley, who works in the legendary Def Jam hip-hop division. Not only is Timbaland an avid user of Suno, he’s one of their creative consultants, under the moniker Baby Timbo.

He is a prolific Suno user, to say the least, having generated over 50,000 tracks:

God presented this tool to me. I probably made a thousand beats in three months, and a lot of them—not all—are bangers, and from every genre you can possibly think of… I just did four K-pop songs this morning!

Suno’s beta feature “Cover Songs” trains on existing tracks that are personally provided by users. Timbaland combines them with elements of other songs to generate new music trained on a melange of rhythms, melodies and lyrics from various sources. The results are songs based on the user’s repertoire, but augmented with copyrighted music used without the explicit consent of its original creators.

Last year, Nicki Minaj, Stevie Wonder, Katy Perry and Billie Eilish joined 200 others signing an open letter that condemned AI generators training on their music without consent. And last month, over 1,000 musicians endorsed the “silent” album Is This What We Want? in protest of the U.K.’s laws that would claim fair use in training data.

Spoiler alert: the album isn’t true silence—it’s more room noise, footsteps, and shuffling about, inflecting the presence of an artist and studio, but the absence of music. I wouldn’t play it at my next house party, but I am playing it now as I write this, and I will say Is This What We Want? is a fascinating document that speaks volumes about the creative instinct to respond to and engage with a new technology.

But despite the surrounding voicey uproars, Timbaland is undeterred. He sees AI music as learning off a vast compendium of available human knowledge combined with human creativity, in the creation of something new. He is conspicuously secretive about the prompts he feeds Suno, pointing towards a “secret sauce” in the process.

Copyrighting human-engineered prompts is another battle in the AI authorship saga that could provide artists with another path to creative production and ownership. While most musicians lament the possibility of AI eliminating their jobs, Timbaland emphasizes the creative potential of humans thoughtfully collaborating with AI:

It’s going to elevate your job, it ain’t going to just operate on its own.
It might give you something that you ain’t never thought of, and it becomes the biggest record of your life. Are you gonna criticize it then?
I never want to remove humans from what they do. I just want to inspire them to do more.

My grain of thought

Timbaland has elevated—and in many cases revived—the careers of numerous popular musicians, including Missy Elliott, Jay-Z, Nelly Furtado, Justin Timberlake, Madonna, Beyoncé, and Björk, to name a few. He became known for bootie-shaking hits that not only got the party started but also sent profits soaring.

His signature production style, a fusion of futuristic beats and genre-bending experimentation drawn from Middle Eastern, South Asian and Latin American influences—has also been criticized for cultural appropriation, exploitation and uncredited sampling, and he’s even been unsuccessfully sued for stealing beats. The result is an artist largely unfazed by backlash. He’s been there and done that.

Hip-hop always involved sampling other people’s art. Over time, it became understood: you acknowledge the source, you pay for the lift. If artificial intelligence is going to be entrenched as the next instrument in the booth, perhaps the same logic should apply. What matters now is whether the industry treats training data as a sample worth crediting and compensating—or if we’re left with more proverbial silent albums, no longer able to be stripped for parts.