Sweet treats in a child’s lunch box. Good idea? Bad idea? Is it possible to be neutral about such a thing? A woman’s Instagram account, @ashleighjamz, went viral at the start of the new school year for posting text messages the creator claimed were from the “mom’s group chat” at her daughter’s school. The messages revolved around a request from “Michelle” for the other mothers not to pack Oreos in their children’s lunch boxes. Over a series of 40+ videos, the “moms” castigate one another over their parenting choices and plot against “Michelle.” The posts have been viewed millions of times, reposted, stitched, commented on by everyone from parents to dietitians to the official Oreos account (“Oreo-gate was NOT on my 2026 bingo card”). So far, so clickbait.
It didn’t seem to matter if the messages were entirely fictional – it’s fair to say their authenticity is, at best, uncertain. Doesn’t really matter as long as they go viral, right? The storm became known as #oreogate, and media outlets from Good Morning America to Business Insider reported on it. Generally the reporting focused on parents’ opinions around allowing kids to have treats in their lunch boxes, coupled with a strong helping of disdain for the fictional women involved in the chat, a disdain that effortlessly spilled on to real women.
Posting ludicrous texts or group chats to social media is nothing new. What struck me about it was that @ashleighjamz’s posts were set to music using the generative AI platform Suno, and presented in video form. She explicitly acknowledges this, describing herself as “a mom turning her hectic life into songs using @sunomusic” and “Suno Partner”. The music is funny and absorbing enough. The text is delivered in the high-camp mode of a Broadway musical comedy, full of drama and flair. In contrast, the images in the videos are fairly boring, featuring screenshots of the texts overlaid on an extreme close-up of Ashleigh’s emotionless face.
Watching it unfold, I thought of the French film theorist Michel Chion, who developed the concept of “added value” to describe how sound functions in cinema. In his 1993 book, Audio Vision: Sound on Screen, Chion outlines how when we watch a clip soundtracked with sad music (for example), it’s the music that induces the emotion, making us feel the images are inherently sad, rather than the images themselves. In the case of #oreogate, it’s clear that the music is doing the heavy lifting; without the ability to rapidly turn the texts into comedic music using Suno, I doubt the posts would have gone viral.
There are plenty of generative AI platforms for music – including Eleven Labs, Udio and Riffusion – but Suno is considered the most powerful globally. The company is valued at $5.4 billion. In a recent pitch deck, Suno claimed that users were creating more than seven million songs per day on the platform. To put this in perspective: the platform outputs the equivalent of Spotify’s entire catalogue once a fortnight.
The first of the #oreogate videos has had more than 12.7 million plays on Instagram at time of writing. It appears to be the most viral piece of verified AI content since 2024’s “BBL Drizzy”, a Drake diss track featuring a Udio-generated sample, released by producer Metro Boomin at the height of the Kendrick Lamar-Drake feud.
Tracking the success of Suno-generated material is difficult.
It’s impossible to tell who is using the platform, because users who pay for subscriptions automatically gain commercial rights, can download their tracks and post them outside of Suno.com with no obligation to disclose that Suno was used in the process.
There are plenty of musical slop merchants releasing an album every week by fictional artists such as Masters of Prophecy (36.2 million subscribers on YouTube). But it is impossible to know how many real musicians have signed up for the higher-tier subscriptions and quietly integrated Suno into their practice. The company is very much aware of this. Earlier this year Mikey Shulman, the company’s chief executive, described to The Guardian how Suno was “the Ozempic of the music industry – everybody is on it and nobody wants to talk about it”.
However, @ashleighjamz didn’t just use Suno to create the music for her videos: she was paid to generate the videos. This detail is lost in much of the reporting, but as a musician I find it critical. Mikey Shulman describes Suno’s mission as facilitating a future “where music is a bigger, more valuable, and more meaningful part of people’s lives than it even is today”. But Suno’s latest viral success is not with a musician, it’s with a paid influencer using their tech to make short-form video – the dominant medium of our time – more compelling. The Oreogate influencer is not looking to sell albums or concert tickets: she’s selling T-shirts and mugs with quotes from #oreogate printed on them.
Is this what music is for now? Is this the inevitable use the logic of generative AI impels us to put music to: music not just as a way to “add value” to short-form video, but as the grease that keeps the wheels of content creation turning?
Jennifer Walshe is professor of composition at Oxford University
