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.
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.
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.
And how many times did the creators (not the marketing people) say that no CGI was used?
I know it happened in several cases, and I try not to watch those movies.
But others, where they are upfront about it, I think it is fair play.
The key is ethics. Always has been.
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.