A rising tide of artificial intelligence (AI) bands is ushering in a new era where work will be scarcer for musicians.
Whether it’s Velvet Sundown’s 1970s-style rock or country music projects “Aventhis” and “The Devil Inside,” bands whose members are pure AI creations are seeing more than a million plays on streaming giant Spotify.
No major streaming service clearly labels tracks that come entirely from AI, except France’s Deezer. Meanwhile, the producers of these songs tend to be unreachable.
Photo: AFP
“I feel like we’re at a place where nobody is really talking about it, but we are feeling it,” said music producer, composer and performer Leo Sidran. “There is going to be a lot of music released that we can’t really tell who made it or how it was made.”
The Oscar-winning artist sees the rise of AI music as perhaps a sign of how “generic and formulaic” genres have become.
AI highlights the chasm between music people listen to “passively” while doing other things and “active” listening in which fans care about what artists convey, said producer and composer Yung Spielburg on the Imagine AI Live podcast.
Spielburg believes musicians will win out over AI with “active” listeners but will be under pressure when it comes to tunes people play in the background while cooking dinner or performing mundane tasks.
If listeners can’t discern which tunes are AI-made, publishers and labels will likely opt for synthetic bands that don’t earn royalties, Spielburg predicted.
“AI is already in the music business and it’s not going away because it is cheap and convenient,” said Mathieu Gendreau, associate professor at Rowan University in New Jersey, who is also a music industry executive. “That will make it even more difficult for musicians to make a living.”
Music streaming platforms already fill playlists with mood music attributed to artists about whom no information can be found, according to University of Rochester School of Music professor Dennis DeSantis.
Meanwhile, AI-generated soundtracks have become tempting, cost-saving options in movies, television shows, ads, shops, elevators and other venues, DeSantis added.
AI TAKES ALL
Composer Sidran says he and his music industry peers have seen a sharp slowdown in work coming their way since late last year.
“I suspect that AI is a big part of the reason,” said Sidran, host of “The Third Story” podcast. “I get the feeling that a lot of the clients that would come to me for original music, or even music from a library of our work, are using AI to solve those problems.”
Technology has repeatedly helped shape the music industry, from electric guitars and synthesizers to multi-track recording and voice modulators.
Unlike such technologies that gave artists new tools and techniques, AI could lead to the “eradication of the chance of sustainability for the vast majority of artists,” warned George Howard, a professor at the prestigious Berklee College of Music.
“AI is a far different challenge than any other historical technological innovation,” Howard said. “And one that will likely be zero-sum.”
Howard hopes courts will side with artists in the numerous legal battles with generative AI giants whose models imitate their styles or works.
Gendreau sees AI music as being here to stay and teaches students to be entrepreneurs as well as artists in order to survive in the business.
Sidran advises musicians to highlight what makes them unique, avoiding the expected in their works because “AI will have done it.”
And, at least for now, musicians should capitalize on live shows where AI bands have yet to take the stage.
Dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s (艾未未) famous return to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been overshadowed by the astonishing news of the latest arrests of senior military figures for “corruption,” but it is an interesting piece of news in its own right, though more for what Ai does not understand than for what he does. Ai simply lacks the reflective understanding that the loneliness and isolation he imagines are “European” are simply the joys of life as an expat. That goes both ways: “I love Taiwan!” say many still wet-behind-the-ears expats here, not realizing what they love is being an
Google unveiled an artificial intelligence tool Wednesday that its scientists said would help unravel the mysteries of the human genome — and could one day lead to new treatments for diseases. The deep learning model AlphaGenome was hailed by outside researchers as a “breakthrough” that would let scientists study and even simulate the roots of difficult-to-treat genetic diseases. While the first complete map of the human genome in 2003 “gave us the book of life, reading it remained a challenge,” Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of research at Google DeepMind, told journalists. “We have the text,” he said, which is a sequence of
Every now and then, even hardcore hikers like to sleep in, leave the heavy gear at home and just enjoy a relaxed half-day stroll in the mountains: no cold, no steep uphills, no pressure to walk a certain distance in a day. In the winter, the mild climate and lower elevations of the forests in Taiwan’s far south offer a number of easy escapes like this. A prime example is the river above Mudan Reservoir (牡丹水庫): with shallow water, gentle current, abundant wildlife and a complete lack of tourists, this walk is accessible to nearly everyone but still feels quite remote.
It’s a bold filmmaking choice to have a countdown clock on the screen for most of your movie. In the best-case scenario for a movie like Mercy, in which a Los Angeles detective has to prove his innocence to an artificial intelligence judge within said time limit, it heightens the tension. Who hasn’t gotten sweaty palms in, say, a Mission: Impossible movie when the bomb is ticking down and Tom Cruise still hasn’t cleared the building? Why not just extend it for the duration? Perhaps in a better movie it might have worked. Sadly in Mercy, it’s an ever-present reminder of just
RSS