Clattermouuuth’s Music of The Week: Music and AI

By Andrew Kohler

Welcome back to Clattermouuuth’s Music of the Week, curating Rockaway’s music taste one week at a time.

With the dramatic rise of generative AI, it’s important to keep it as far away from music as possible, keeping music as human as possible. As humans, we make art to express ourselves creatively and skillfully. When we use generative AI, we’re losing the opportunity to develop skills, AND we aren’t even expressing ourselves — AI is.

AI has become the latest controversial topic in the music industry, and it needs to be reckoned with. “Music” generated in minutes is reaching millions of streams on Spotify. Many popular musicians have been using generative AI in their own music and album covers. Famous producer and songwriter Timbaland has become the strategic advisor for SUNO, an AI music generation platform, and cofounder of Stage Zero, an organization focused on pioneering “A-POP,” a new genre of music generated by AI. Recently, I Shazamed a song at a restaurant only to find it was by an artist who was releasing an album a day (AI).

I don’t understand why people have such a desire for AI to generate music for us. It isn’t creatively fulfilling, and the outcome is underwhelming. What’s the point of making impressive art if we don’t need skill or talent to do so? Generative AI completely undermines the time and effort an artist puts into their craft. I’ve seen visual art and questioned if it’s made by a human or an AI. Imagine if you are an artist who spent years on a piece just for someone to call it AI-generated. If musicians and AI become interchangeable, being a musician or doing anything creative in general is going to quickly become so unappealing for the next generation of youth.

It’s extremely difficult to solve this problem; banning generative AI is near impossible at this point. AI-generated music is here to stay, and I think the most realistic solution is to be aware that it’s out there and we should really try our best to avoid it. Furthermore, we need to continue celebrating and promoting REAL music created by REAL people. The less AI music is listened to, the less AI music there will be.