Hi Richard and All music lovers,
I last posted on this THORNY AI topic here ‘My thoughts on AI and music’ since then I have avoided making further statements about it whilst I considered further its impact and where AI and music is likely to take us.
Today a post was made by Clint @CT where he used AI to generate a song that emulates the feelings Leonard Cohen song ‘Hallelujah’. Before I go further I would like to emphasise this is not criticism of Clint, and hope he understands that my comments are observational, but what he did in producing ‘The Road to Ruin’ made me consider more deeply the impact of AI and its use in the Music world as a whole.
What struck me most about ‘The Road to Ruin’ was how to the casual listener it could be very appealing and make them want to hear more of the artist. Yes at times it does sound a bit overproduced and contrived but then so does a lot of music we hear on popular music outlets, radio or streaming services. The frightening aspect of this is what it implies the music industry could and is probably already doing with AI technology!
It does not take much imagination to realise that a big corporate music company can analyse its historical music catalogue and of others identifying the Artists and songs that have produced the most revenue and use AI to invent a new Artists and music. This has actually been done by them in the past, one of the most notable being ‘The Monkees’ a band invented by a music corporation in answer to ‘The Beatles’ in the 60’s, originally the members of ‘The Monkees’ could not play instruments, and they certainly did not write the songs, it was done by song writers and session musicians, and ‘The Monkees’ mimed when seen on film. It was a facadé pretending to be something it wasn’t, it caused a huge upset, fans feeling duped when they found out, real musicians angry at the manipulation and the realisation that they might have little control over their own destiny in the future if corporations did not like what they produced because it was not commercial or popular. I use this just as an example and I expect there have been many more over the years, boy and girl bands put together over the last 3 decades by record producers come to mind. To finish off about ‘The Monkees’, I was a big fan as a kid and they actually produced some very good songs whether written by themselves or not, and to their credit they did go on to learn and play instruments and perform live themselves.
The point I am trying to make is that now that the AI Genie is out of the bottle the music corporates are never going to not use it. The bad and frightening aspect for me is as AI music production and quality improves, and this will be at an exponential rate, it will soon become impossible to identify songs produced by it and performed by computer generated artists, if we are not already there. If it is used as I anticipate then artistic and human input will lost, and creation of music with soul and emotion may become a thing of the past.
My view is this - Music is an expression of the human condition, evoking feelings of joy, sadness, empathy, love, hate, fear and many more emotion, remove the human from its creation and it is no longer music in the true sense. Music produced by AI will just be a product.
i apologise for my ramblings but I think the question we need to ask ourselves is this.
Do we as a group of musicians and real music lovers want to support AI music on this forum or not? Personally AI and its use in music does not sit well with me.
Thanks for reading.