Three songs generated by artificial intelligence topped music charts this week, reaching the highest spots on Spotify and Billboard charts.
Walk My Walk and Livin’ on Borrowed Time by the outfit Breaking Rust topped Spotify’s “Viral 50” songs in the US, which documents the “most viral tracks right now” on a daily basis, according to the streaming service. A Dutch song, We Say No, No, No to an Asylum Center, an anti-migrant anthem by JW “Broken Veteran” that protests against the creation of new asylum centers, took the top position in Spotify’s global version of the viral chart around the same time. Breaking Rust also appeared in the top five on the global chart.
These three songs are part of a flood of AI-generated music that has come to saturate streaming platforms. A study published on Wednesday by the streaming app Deezer estimates that 50,000 AI-generated songs are uploaded to the platform every day – 34% of all the music submitted.
Yes, masses like simple shit. Fast food, superhero movies and simple tunes with easy to understand lyrics.
If AI generated slop raises to the top of the charts, it tells a lot about the perceived quality of the human-made slop there.
You can’t convince me that’s not manufactured
Americans love slop music, whether by AI or a committee of writers behind a sexy singer.
It literally is. Human beings aren’t listening to this music. The huge numbers are coming from bots.
The AI slop bros are making the Dead Internet theory real, to artificially inflate their value.
The future fucking sucks.
Unless you enjoy music regardless of whether it’s AI generated, in which case the future’s going to have way more options.
AI slop isn’t music.
Human slop isn’t, either. The issue is that AI slop seems to top human slop now.
The absolute worst human art is better than the best machine art, because art is exclusively human.
because art is exclusively human.
Which is a rather weak redeeming quality. I hate AI generated slop, but that does not excuse the existence of human generated slop. My argument is not “see how good AI is”, but “see how much human creativity has fallen”.
Oh, the evergreen “but what about human slop” argument of AI boosters.
I’m anything but an “AI booster”. Still, human slop does exist.
If 97% of listeners can’t tell the difference then I’m not sure the point of quibbling the definition.
So you’re happy that you are being sold a lie?
When you watch a movie with computer-generated special effects, are you happy watching a lie?
The movie doesn’t pretend that the main character has really jumped from a cliff onto a ship.
It isn’t lying.
There are plenty of movies where the CGI is creating elements that could well be real, like people or buildings. There was a movie recently where rather than go through the legal hassle of having live horses on set they just CGIed every last shot that contained a horse, even if they were just standing around in the background. You’ve no doubt watched plenty of CGI imagery that you had no idea was CGI. It looked good, that was all.
Found the AI “artist”.
It is a question of authorship. What I don’t approve of is zero effort AI slop. But the use of CGI in movies is OK because it serves the vision of the director. The usage of samples in music is OK if the use is transformative. Autotuning is pushing it but can be OK if use is limited or transformative. Even AI tools can be OK if authorship remains human. But an end-to-end pipeline of endless soulless AI generated slop is not OK. So it is very a question of degrees. AI generated/authored works should be labelled as such. Also the label should contain the degree to which AI was used. Not simply an either/or tag.
I could really love where in the article this study is.
I’m a musician, so, it’s all fucking garbage. But people don’t care how their music is made just like they don’t care what’s in hot dogs, so enjoy your soul less shit music.
“Synthetic music”, no you mean AI slop but want to keep inflating the bubble the Guardian
I like to not get music advice from charts. I don’t think I’ve heard AI music. I’m going to not look for it.
Spotify won’t tell you that it is even if you do happen to stumble upon it.
Serious question: Let’s say you hear a song on Spotify, and you like it, add it to your favorites, etc., then later find out it was AI. Do you stop enjoying it? If so, why?
I’ve unfollowed and purged real artists for less
I’d stop listening to it in simple protest. I want to hear music made by people. I have no interest in ai crap. If we keep allowing ai then the real artists will cease to exist. The young people won’t pursue a career in music. Why would they?
F ai
The young people won’t pursue a career in music. Why would they?
MIDI didn’t stop people from playing instruments. Digital art didn’t stop people from painting. AI can’t put on live performances.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like AI taking peoples’ artistic jobs any more than anyone else, but I do think this is a bit of an extreme take.
Hatsune Miku has been putting on live performances for decades. There’s no reason at all why an AI-generated musical act couldn’t too.
It makes indie scene significantly harder to get into. For every mildly successful indie artist, there’s thousands of those who failed to break into the scene, now they have to compete with not only their competitor that is more famous than them, they have to compete with 0 effort music from 0 effort producer. It kinda like how game dev is getting harder and harder to get into, as the competition is getting tougher and people expectation is getting higher, even though they don’t have to compete with AI slop that plays and looks like a Ubisoft game yet.
Of course, people who persevere or talented will eventually pops up from the sea of slop, as vocaloid doesn’t kill japanese indie scene. But then vocaloid is entirely different thing than what the current AI issue is.
The industry does not necessarily care if someone’s music is digital or acoustic, but it WILL care if they have to pay you for it.
And that’s the point. Ai means basically no one is getting paid. But the industry is making money.
F ai
And also, the point is to delete the artist. Artists are problematic; they are anti-establishment, opinionated, queer, vocal. Your billionaire overlords want to silence that, by replacing you with a machine.
I would. I have a difficult time separating art from the artist and couldn’t currently bring myself to willingly listen to AI music. Mostly because it’s a soulless conglomeration of what “good music is supposed to sound like” rather than art created by an actual human who has something to say. But to be fair, I feel the same about any pop or country hit that is churned out for the sole aim of getting a hit.
The horrific actions of Ian Dankins made me unable to listen to Lostprophets songs, so if I don’t immediately spot the “underwater” quality of genAI songs…
Note that I submitted a San Francisco Chronicle article about this yesterday. One thing that came up during the discussion is that while there may be a lot of people streaming the song on Spotify, at least according to one source, the Billboard chart that was topped was a small-volume one, so it may not be as significant as it sounds.
Volume aside, I find Billboard charts equivalent to JD Power awards as they’ve always been rigged via payola schemes and the fact that nearly the entire nation’s radio stations are owned by a single company iHeartRadio/Clear Channel. The music industry is picking winners and losers not the listening public.
This may be different with streaming but that platform makes it really easy to rig the system with bots.
Turns out a lot of people like how it sounds.
If it sounds better to the masses that human slop, so be it.
Also, I think the less interesting question is where it is today and more where it’s going to be in, say, five years, if you figure that development continues.
And might be possible to explore more long-tail stuff if production costs drop, or even do stuff customized to a single listener. I mean, we can’t economically have humans do that.
Oh yeah? Tell me more about the long tail. Do you have a pitch deck you can show me?
God, I fucking hate this shit.
Do you have a pitch deck you can show me?
What?
The “long tail” refers to niche areas with only a few people who want something in a market. It’s talking about the graph of a distribution of potential consumers for something.
Like, there’s normally a lot of people interested in a few things. You can sell a blockbuster to them. But then there’s this long tail of people interested in small, niche areas. If you can bring more of them together or reduce production costs, it starts to be viable to make things for them as well. The Internet is often described as bringing people with those niche interests together, so that people on that long tail become numerous enough to make something for. Bringing down production costs has the same sort of effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail
In business, the term long tail is applied to rank-size distributions or rank-frequency distributions (primarily of popularity), which often form power laws and are thus long-tailed distributions in the statistical sense. This is used to describe the retailing strategy of selling many unique items with relatively small quantities sold of each (the “long tail”)—usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities (the “head”).
The long tail was popularized by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com, Apple and Yahoo! as examples of businesses applying this strategy.[7][9] Anderson elaborated the concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.
Anderson cites research published in 2003 by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, who first used a log-linear curve on an XY graph to describe the relationship between Amazon.com sales and sales ranking. They showed that the primary value of the internet to consumers comes from releasing new sources of value by providing access to products in the long tail.[10]
Before a long tail works, only the most popular products are generally offered. When the cost of inventory storage and distribution fall, a wide range of products become available. This can, in turn, have the effect of reducing demand for the most popular products.
Some of the most successful Internet businesses have used the long tail as part of their business strategy. Examples include eBay (auctions), Yahoo! and Google (web search), Amazon (retail), and iTunes Store (music and podcasts), amongst the major companies, along with smaller Internet companies like Audible (audio books) and LoveFilm (video rental). These purely digital retailers also have almost no marginal cost, which is benefiting the online services, unlike physical retailers that have fixed limits on their products. The internet can still sell physical goods, but at an unlimited selection and with reviews and recommendations.[31] The internet has opened up larger territories to sell and provide its products without being confined to just the “local Markets” such as physical retailers like Target or even Walmart. With the digital and hybrid retailers there is no longer a perimeter on market demands.[32]
You have to have at least a certain number of potential sales before it becomes worthwhile for a human to address a niche. If the cost falls, then new niches become viable to sell to. So now you can make, say, R&B aimed specifically at teenage female Inuits or something.
Boy am I a slut for patronizing MBAs. You learn all that at Deloitte, paper boy?
Can someone make some AI music to counter the alt right AI music?
Yeah I was thinking why not make some punk rap antifa song similar to Bob Vylan.
I can offer a curl terminal log output in death metal, from my favourites, if it helps.
Love it lmao, I lost it at “TLSv1.3 IN TLSv1 3 OUT”
I’m sure you could, if you want.
They’re either using one of those or a similar service.
I don’t think that it’s gonna be all that rewarding, though.
I mean, do you really want to be trying to get in a yelling match with someone else over politics, each trying to drown the other out?
If you’re looking for AI-generated anti-AI music, we’ve got that (mildly NSFW).
You can be the change you want to see.
