Splice CEO Says AI-Written Emails Are Quietly Killing Real Conversation

Kakul Srivastava runs Splice, the sample platform that countless producers use for one-shots and melodic loops. Material pulled from the service has ended up in major hits, including Lisa's "Money" and Sabrina Carpenter's "Espresso." Now she is weighing in on a different corner of tech: the rise of AI-written email.

Her argument, as framed in a recent Verge interview, is that machine-generated messages are hollowing out conversation. When both sender and recipient lean on AI to write and summarize, the exchange risks becoming two systems talking past each other, with the people involved reduced to bystanders.

Srivastava has a distinctive vantage point on the question. Before Splice, she held executive roles at Flickr, Yahoo, GitHub and Adobe, and she has spent much of her career at the point where Silicon Valley meets working creatives. That background shapes how she thinks about tools: software should help people make things and connect with each other, not stand in for them.

At Splice, that philosophy has played out in practice. Under her leadership the company has broadened its footprint, including by acquiring Spitfire Audio, the well-known maker of sample libraries and virtual instruments. It has also moved into newer territory around AI in music, an area where producers are wary about authorship, credit and compensation.

The tension she describes is familiar across creative industries. AI can speed up drudge work, but it can also flatten voice. In music, a sample is valuable because a real person made it and a producer chose to flip it in a way no one else would. Srivastava's concern about email appears to follow the same logic: the choices, quirks and effort behind a message are part of what makes it communication in the first place.

For a platform that sits between musicians and the tools they use, the stance is notable. Splice is not rejecting AI outright, but its chief executive is drawing a line between automation that supports human expression and automation that replaces it. How that line gets drawn will matter as more creative software adds generative features.