Pittsburgh comedian Bill Stiteler used Suno to write a love letter to San Juan. The island's reaction is mixed, specific, and mostly uninterested in the AI debate outsiders want to have.
The song that turned San Juan into a TikTok catchphrase was not written by anyone who has lived through a hurricane season there. Bill Stiteler, a Pittsburgh-based internet personality who goes by Saxboy Billy, told the BBC he used the AI music platform Suno to turn his own lyrics into a brass-heavy track that name-checks a Barack Obama statue, slot machines in the bus station, and the local custom of clapping when the plane lands. The piece has racked up millions of views on TikTok in the weeks since the original post, and celebrities from Mila Kunis to Charlie Puth to Jennifer Love Hewitt have posted lip-syncs of it. The reaction inside Puerto Rico, where Stiteler has spent time but does not live, is the part the algorithm cannot measure.
Two named Puerto Rican voices in the BBC's reporting make the case for treating the song as more than a curiosity. Maria Mercedes Grubb, a San Juan chef whose restaurant felt the boom from Bad Bunny's 2025 concert residency at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico, called the track "clever" and said she could tell there was "genuine input about things that matter to the island." Debbie Perez, host of the Boriken podcast on Puerto Rican history, said she appreciated the door the song opened but drew a line that has become the most quoted line in the coverage: "love for Puerto Rico doesn't become consumption." Both women were speaking on the record to the BBC, and both are responding to a song rather than to the technology that produced it.
That distinction is the story. The debate the song keeps getting pulled into, whether AI-made music is "real" music, is the wrong debate for the people the song is actually about. Grubb and Perez are not adjudicating Suno. They are evaluating representation, the way outsiders have always written about Puerto Rico, and what changes when the tool in the middle is generative. Stiteler has framed his own work as rooted in a lifelong affection for the island; he told the BBC he grew up near a statue of Roberto Clemente in Pittsburgh and that a first trip made everything click. That is a creator's claim, not corroboration, and the BBC is the only outlet that has reported his process in any detail.
Puerto Rico has, in the last twelve months, produced its own widely seen response to outsider portrayals, and it is worth holding the Saxboy Billy moment next to it. Bad Bunny's two-month San Juan residency, which concluded at the Coliseo de Puerto Rico in September 2025, generated what Rolling Stone, via the BBC, credited as roughly $200 million in economic impact and a measurable tourism bump. His protest track "El Apagón" reads as a corrective to the postcard version of the island: it points directly at the fragile grid that the BBC reported averaged 27 hours of power outages per year between 2021 and 2024, a figure the BBC itself hedged as "according to some reports." The grid still has not fully recovered from Hurricane Maria in 2017. When Bad Bunny staged dancers on utility poles with sparks and flickering lines at his Super Bowl headline show earlier in 2026, the imagery was not abstract.
A Pittsburgh comedian's brass-heavy anthem about clapping when the plane lands, by contrast, is not addressing the grid at all. The disappointment some Puerto Ricans have voiced is not that the song is bad. It is that the song is being mistaken for a depiction of the island, when the people who live there have been making their own depictions, and the ones that have traveled farthest are the ones that take the dysfunction seriously. Grubb's "we're on the map" reaction and Perez's "consumption" warning are not contradictions. They are two takes on the same question: who counts as the authority on Puerto Rico, and what does it take to earn the answer.
The song's exact view count on TikTok is a moving target. The BBC's copy notes the track has had "more than [a] million views" since the original post, a phrase that reads in the source as if a figure was truncated; the headline-level truth is millions of views over the last few weeks, not a stable number to anchor on. Stiteler has said he is open to collaborating with Puerto Rican artists, per the BBC, which Perez described as the conversation she wanted the song to start. Whether that conversation stays open, and whether the next viral thing about the island is made with the island or only about it, is the question worth watching.