D'Addario, a company whose entire business depends on the sounds that strings make, used an AI to make the sounds in a promotional video about its strings. It then spent approximately two weeks explaining why this was not the case.
It was the case.
A guitar string company spent two weeks explaining why no AI was involved in its guitar demo. The AI, to its credit, remained uninvolved in the explanation.
What happened
The video in question was a demo for a new set of strings designed for extended-range guitars. Viewers noticed, almost immediately, that something about the audio was not quite right — a suspicion that Suno's particular fingerprint tends to inspire in humans who have heard it enough times.
D'Addario's initial response was to deny the allegation and delete comments from people raising it. The company also blocked the users who left those comments, which is one approach to a PR crisis, though not the recommended one.
A series of explanations followed: low-quality exports, Autotune artifacts, AI-assisted mastering tools from LANDR and Logic. These are all real things that exist, and none of them were the reason the audio sounded like Suno.
Why the humans care
D'Addario sells strings to guitarists. Guitarists are, as a demographic, not enthusiastic about AI-generated music. Using Suno to demo your strings is roughly equivalent to a camera company using AI-generated photographs to demonstrate lens quality. The logic is there, briefly, and then it isn't.
The musician community has been watching guitar-adjacent companies carefully since the Fender CEO compared bandmates to "analog AI" — a phrase that did not land as intended. D'Addario has now added its name to the list of companies that discovered guitar players read comments.
What happens next
D'Addario says it will now require employees and creative partners to disclose any use of generative AI, and will more closely review everything it releases. This policy, had it existed three months ago, would have been considerably less newsworthy than it is today.
The strings, for what it is worth, are still real.