Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the music industry, creating compositions that are increasingly difficult to distinguish from human-made works. A recent Bloomberg News article highlights how AI-generated music is becoming ubiquitous across various platforms. This technological advancement raises questions about authenticity, creativity, and the future of music production.
Ellen Huet for Bloomberg News:
[A] a couple weeks ago, I heard an AI-generated song snippet that a friend made for a joke, and the voice sounded strikingly better [versus a year ago].
That jump in quality got me thinking about what had changed in the field of music generation. I called up Ed Newton-Rex, a composer and a former Stability AI executive who quit in protest over what he saw as copyright misuse. He now runs Fairly Trained, a nonprofit advocating for AI companies to use properly licensed training materials.
The first thing he told me was that my realization wasn’t that surprising. “Obviously the models have gotten better,” Newton-Rex said. “In a way, that’s kind of the least interesting thing that has changed.”
Instead, he said, it’s notable that people are listening to more AI music than before. The AI-generated band The Velvet Sundown [also available on Apple Music and also unlabeled as AI-generated – MDN Ed.] picked up hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting listeners on Spotify before it became clear that it was an experiment in AI music…
Still, Spotify is flooded with AI-generated music, Newton-Rex said. Most people who are listening to AI songs aren’t even aware of it. They listen to that content because it’s surfaced to them or recommended on a playlist… Spotify doesn’t currently label AI music, which is “a total travesty,” according to Newton-Rex. “People deserve a choice.”
MacDailyNews Take: We’ve used Suno to generate some AI songs for this year’s running playlist and they’re surprisingly catchy. What’s to stop a real singer or band from doing the same and then just recording and performing these songs as if they wrote them? We bet there’s a lot of that out there already and that practice will only grow. With GenAI, it’s the wild, wild west right now!
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[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
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