“I can get the best voice from AI. I don’t need anybody to sing the song anymore”: Diplo urges musicians critical of AI to “adapt or just give up and become an Uber driver”

Why Diplo’s Weirdest Ideas Became the Biggest Songs in the World (Full Interview) - YouTube

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Diplo has urged musicians and producers to incorporate generative AI into their creative process, telling creatives in a viral post on X that they “need to adapt or just give up and become an Uber driver”.

The controversial comments were shared alongside a clip of Diplo’s recent interview with podcaster Daniel Wall, in which the pair discuss the artist’s views on generative AI and how the tools have become central to his own music-making.

Speaking on Wall’s Behind The Wall podcast, Diplo says he believes critics of AI are fighting a losing battle, and that musicians should engage with the technology or risk being left behind as it becomes more widely adopted.

“You’re not going to win,” Diplo tells Wall’s listeners. “There’s no fighting AI. You have to just work your best to be the best at it right now. You’re wasting your time. You’re wasting a year being like ‘ahh’ because everybody else is going to just use it and not give a fuck what you think.”

The producer and Wall go on to compare the debate surrounding AI-based music creation to the criticism levelled at producers relying on Splice loops in the studio.

“People were mad about that, then you have songs like [Sabrina Carpenter’s] Espresso that are like two Splice loops,” Diplo says. “It’s proven every time that technology wins. People’s pushback and people’s attitudes, it always ages out pretty badly.”

“The customer and accessibility is what’s always going to be triumphant,” Diplo continues. “You’re never going to be like, ‘I’m going to choose the artistry and the hard work’. You can talk that all you want, and some people will love that, but 99% of people are going to wanna love the best product made the quickest, made the cheapest – that’s what the American economy is.

“We wanna say we want healthy foods, but no, we want cheap, we want to have things quick. That’s what music is also.”

Diplo also claimed that he doesn’t need to work with human vocalists anymore because he can generate a superior vocal using AI tools like Suno or Udio. “I don’t even need a voice anymore,” Diplo tells Wall. “I can get the best voice from AI. I don’t need anybody to sing the song anymore.”

“I’ve had some voices that I’ve made with AI, and I’m like, ‘damn, I couldn’t even get this take out of the best singer’. I wouldn’t have said that to you three months ago, but the way it’s changed in the last three months, the advances on the music side are just like ‘fuck’.”

AI-powered music creation platform Suno has developed significantly over the past year and currently has more than 2 million paid subscribers.

After introducing Suno Studio in 2025, a browser-based production environment for its AI models that the company describes as a “generative audio workstation”, the company launched the Voices feature in March, which allows users to create custom models of their own vocals to generate and use in their tracks.

While the company claims to be on a mission to “democratize music creation”, Suno is currently embroiled in a legal battle with several major record labels, who have alleged that the company illegally used copyrighted music to train its AI models.

Having struck a settlement deal with Warner Music Group in late 2025, Suno is currently in talks with UMG and Sony Music with the hope of achieving a similar outcome. A spokesperson told the Financial Times earlier this month that the company wants to “work cooperatively” with the music industry to “unlock new sources of revenue for artists".

Meanwhile, Suno faces heated criticism from across the music community. In February, a group of artist representatives launched the Say No to Suno campaign, publishing an open letter that describes Suno as a “brazen smash and grab platform” that risks diluting the royalties of legitimate artists and enabling streaming fraud on “an industrial scale”.

“They are not putting technology in the service of artists; they are putting artists in the service of their technology,” the letter reads. “Every time artists’ creations are used by the platform, those creations have just unwittingly been contributed to the creation of endless derivatives of artists’ own work, not to mention AI slop, with limited or no remuneration back to the human creators.

“Suno built its business on our backs, scraping the world’s cultural output without permission, then competing against the very works exploited.”