Splice CEO: AI-written emails are killing creative conversation

Kakul Srivastava, chief executive of the sample platform Splice, isn't buying the hype around AI tools that generate full songs at the push of a button. In a wide-ranging interview she explains why documents produced by language models damage the creative process — exactly the outcome she fears for music. Splice, whose samples appear in hits including Lisa's "Money" and Sabrina Carpenter's "Espresso," acquired Spitfire Audio last year and continues to expand its foothold in the music-production market.

The fine line between tool and creator

Srivastava arrived at Splice after senior roles at Flickr, Yahoo, GitHub and Adobe; her entire career sits at the intersection of Silicon Valley and the creator community. At Splice she is trying to thread a careful needle: the company ships AI products but insists on keeping the human at the center of the workflow. On an episode of Decoder last year she sharply attacked the "press-button-get-song" approach associated with outfits such as Suno, and her skepticism appears only to have hardened since.

When the words belong to no one

Her core argument concerns internal communication. Splice operates remote-first; there is no hallway to bump into colleagues. In its place are well-crafted documents and real debates around them. "Almost every good thing that has happened here started that way," she says. The moment you cannot tell whether a human stands behind the words, the conversation about the document becomes a different conversation — and a worse one. There is no way back from that. The same principle, she argues, applies to music.

The happy place on the internet: Instagram

Asked where she likes to spend time online, her answer is surprising: Instagram. Not the fashionable answer, she admits, but her feed has become a collection of people making music in ways she never would have imagined — gothic western, street dance in Russia, modern hits on hammered dulcimer, Indian chai rap. She could watch it all day. Her favorite game, Antakshari, an Indian tradition, is built entirely on communal singing without any participant identifying as a musician.

The disappointing gadget and the Slack chapter

The most disappointing gadget she has bought? A mug warmer. It warms the mug, not the coffee, and works exactly as designed. The creation she is proudest of is her children, and she notes matter-of-factly that this happens on every street. The least proud: being part of the early team at Tiny Speck, the company that later became Slack. Before Slack they built a game called Glitch, a massive multiplayer title that failed.