You are driving down the freeway, windows down, wind blowing through your hair. A song comes on that you have never heard before, by an artist whose name is brand new to you. When the drive is over, you search this new artist up on social media, because the song was amazing, and you would love to learn more about them. Upon search, you find an account with hardly any followers and limited photos of the actual artist. After a little bit of digging, you find the real identity of this mysterious artist–they do not exist. It was all AI-generated.
This has been reality time and time again as AI encroaches on the music industry. Music fans are finding that these new artists that pop up on their streaming services are actually the works of technology developers, not aspiring performers. The crazy, and slightly terrifying, aspect of this is that we often cannot tell that the song was completely generated by AI at first. Usually, it is not until we do a deep dive into the ‘artist’ that we realize that there is little to no human action involved in the music.
Have songs by Xania Monet, The Velvet Sundown, or Sienna Rose popped up on your radio or streaming services? The answer is most likely yes, as these three ‘musicians’ have been everywhere recently. While all performing different genres, they all have one thing in common–they are completely AI-generated. Despite being fully AI, these ‘artists’ are taking over the charts and platforms, with Xania Monet charting on Billboard, The Velvet Sundown accumulating over one million Spotify listeners, and Sienna Rose charting on TikTok. Most of these listeners contributing to their success have no idea that their new favorite song was made by a group of older developers, not the “new, hit rising artist” they believed it to be. Music is and always will be art, but AI in the industry promotes a sense of imitation and replacement.
Music has always been an area where humans are able to convey their emotions, thoughts, and opinions with the world. Lyrics and songs are personal to each artist and allow connection through media. AI cannot hold emotion or feeling, making their lyrics baseless and imitating basic human thought. The aspect of individualization in music will slowly be lost if AI-generated artists and songs continue to rise. Without the human connection, an area of music we hold true to our hearts cannot exist.
There are always ways to combat this and ensure that our playlists are as AI-free as possible. When we hear a new artist, we unfortunately need to be researching them and making sure they actually exist as a human being. Many streaming services allow users to hide certain content, so removing any songs or artists we find to be AI-generated allows for less of it to be promoted to us. One of the ingredients of wonderful music is emotion, not artificial intelligence.
