The development of AI for public consumption came on fast and strong a couple of years ago. I think 2023 was the year it really broke open and ChatGPT became a household name. Since then, it’s been the Wild West and a lot like the the late 1990s and the early days of the Internet itself. Back then, we were learning about technology like email and its effects on our society, while at the same time, we were getting bombarded with spam through unfiltered services like Hotmail and Yahoo. This incredible technology was instantly a platform for both good, like keeping in touch with family and friends, and bad, like attempts at deceiving people into giving up important information. Now with AI, we’re in a very similar space. We have these tools for sifting through tons of information at speeds we could have never imagined, while at the same time, the same tools are being used to spread false and dangerous information. Every new technology will seemingly be used for good and evil simultaneously.
And now, a couple of years later, one of the thousands of uses of AI technology is the actual creation of music from scratch. AI tools can create completed works in seconds based exclusively on text prompts. There’s no need for a human-generated chord progression, or human-generated lyrics, or anything, frankly, besides a sentence or two description of what you want, and it will create a fully fleshed out and produced song.
Recently, a controversy spun up about a completely AI-generated band called the Velvet Sundown that went viral on Spotify. Some industry leaders believed perhaps it was a marketing ploy by a real band to generate attention. Others believed it was (and continues to be) an experiment to see if the public would accept AI-generated music by actually listening to it. The whole situation has prompted analysis videos, like this one from Rick Beato.
Rick uses the service Suno to create music from scratch in just a few minutes and challenges whether or not he should be considered a “creator” of that music. His position, as a lifelong musician, is of course that he isn’t really creating music, and that this kind of music shouldn’t be allowed to be copyrighted. If a prompter can’t hold a copyright for the music, then the financial incentive to flood the streaming services with AI-generated music could be removed.
I’m still figuring out my position when it comes to all aspects of AI, particularly its use when it comes to music. I will be sorting out my position in these blog posts (that are 100% human-created, by the way!) As toes are being dipped into various AI technologies all along the process of creating music, I can say definitively that I will never intentionally consume music that was 100% AI-generated for pleasure or as a substitute for human-created music. It just doesn’t seem to make sense to waste what precious little time I have left on this planet listening to a robot mash together previous works that humans created and try and predict what a human may have done when prompted with a few sentences. There are plenty of humans out there who are still making tons of music, and I’d rather make sure I’m enjoying their work first.