A Skeptic’s Surprise: 1010Benja’s ‘Semiramis’ Dream’ Wins Over an AI Doubter

Even for writers who track AI art closely, generative music platforms often produce “offensively boring” results—Sunos output is frequently dismissed as generic slop. So when critic Jay Peters of The Verge found himself genuinely enjoying 1010Benja’s new track “Semiramis’ Dream,” it sparked a reassessment.

The song opens the musician’s latest EP, Time Has Nothing To Do With What You Choose, and immediately stands apart. A jungle beat and Benja’s unmistakably human vocal performance anchor the track, while the telltale artefacts of AI-generated music are largely camouflaged inside hyperpop-inspired chops and heavy processing. The most obviously synthetic element—a choir of backing vocalists—blends so naturally into the landscape that many listeners might not realise it was produced by Suno at all.

1010Benja, a Kansas City artist who earned Pitchfork’s Best New Music tag for his 2024 album Ten Total and has experienced periods of homelessness, was not looking to deceive anyone. He has been open about feeding human-made elements into Suno: a beat from collaborator Patrick Holder, his own recorded vocals, and then output from the AI, which he repeatedly edited in Ableton and fed back into the platform. He estimates that cycle was repeated a few hundred times for this single track.

Far from a one-click shortcut, the process was a resource-intensive grind. Benja acknowledges the ethical tensions—the environmental cost of AI models and the power of “greedy corporations”—but frames his use as a pragmatic response to lacking the means to hire a real children’s choir or realise his full vision. “The good guy doesn’t win this one,” he says.

How a Human-Intensive Workflow Made Suno a Genuine Creative Tool

Why ‘Semiramis’ Dream’ Works Where Most Suno Output Fails

The critical difference is the labour and human judgment injected at every step. Benja did not delegate composition to an algorithm; he wrote the lyrics, sang the lead vocal and worked with a collaborator on the instrumental foundation. Suno was used as a texture engine—a way to generate layers that were then heavily edited, recombined and obscured by the very production techniques common in modern pop. This iterative, human-driven feedback loop turned Suno from a simple generator into a true creative tool.

The Real Cost of ‘AI as a Cheat Code’ Is Still High

Despite the result, the process exposes the limitations of current generative AI for serious music-making. Achieving a convincing result took Benja hundreds of rounds of generation and manual editing—hardly a time-saving shortcut. Environmentally, the compute load of that many inference cycles is significant, and the artist himself offers no defence of the ecological damage. For a struggling musician unable to pay rent, the trade-off may feel forced, but it is exactly the kind of calculation that fuels the wider backlash against AI art.

What the Track Proves—and What It Doesn’t

“Semiramis’ Dream” proves that in skilled hands, Suno can produce something artistically compelling, not automatically generic. Yet it does not prove that AI can replace human creativity or that the same result was impossible without AI. As Peters points out, there is little on the track that could not have been achieved by layering performances and clever vocal processing; the AI essentially filled a narrow economic gap—a children’s choir that the artist couldn’t afford. The real achievement belongs to the human behind the controls, not the model itself.

What Musicians Can Take from the Experiment

For artists weighing whether to try generative AI, the lesson of “Semiramis’ Dream” is that the tool is only as good as the human craft wrapped around it. Expecting a polished, original track from a single prompt is a fantasy. Instead, treat AI generation as raw material to be cut, layered and reprocessed—and be transparent about that use. Acknowledge the environmental cost openly, and recognise that the tool’s value is not as a shortcut but as a low-cost stand-in for elements you genuinely cannot source otherwise. Above all, accept that the human vision remains the irreplaceable ingredient.