My feeling about it is “Who cares?”
AI is here and ppl are gonna use it. Like any previous technology, it’s gonna eliminate the low hanging fruit… if any of the musicians and artists around have been phoning it in, they’re gonna be outta the game.
We’ve been living with a real signal-to-noise problem and the more low-effort stuff gets eliminated, the better for those of us who actually work at this.
It’s a tough world out there. We all need to decide for ourselves whether music is a hobby or a profession. If it’s a hobby, you got nothing to worry about. If it’s a profession for you, then you better start acting like it.
'If any of the musicians and artists around have been phoning it in, they're gonna be outta the game.'
AI is the definition of a way to 'phone it in' creatively, using it to give you the ultimate head start when 'creating' something, so the intent behind that statement is curious. It's the ultimate low-effort way to 'create' something.
Do you mean that AI will suddenly make musicians who already couldn't write or play go away completely, thus implying that music created with (or with the assistance of) AI will suddenly out the 'fakes'?
I work daily with professional voice talent, many of whom we have all heard on commercials and other settings nationwide/worldwide, and the discussions I've had with them about AI are frightening, so much so that many of them are now including tags in their email and marketing materials as '100% Genuine Human Voice' or something like that. As an experiment, one of them fed a certain AI generator with enough source material of their own work that, in the end, it was able to spit out recordings which were almost indistinguishable from their regular work. Someone could, in theory, steal their 'voice' and create their own work with their 'likeness' and never pay them a cent. The consequences for musicians could be equally devastating.
If an artist suddenly has a huge creative output that seems uncharacteristic, I guess one could assume that AI is contributing to their newfound spurt of inspiration or skill in their recorded work, making us question their authenticity?
I think as long as an artist is focused on authenticity first and foremost and doesn't use AI to help 'create' anything in the first place, that will be the more ultimate arbiter of what's real vs. what's jive. I think we should care deeply - especially when some people are using AI to 'create' and get paid for something that didn't come from their head or heart to begin with, while others are truly creating organically.
My concern with AI has less to do with art than it does with we as a society giving up too much control to 'AI' for the sake of convenience. At a certain point, there's no going back. Life is imitating art at this point, as there are plenty of examples where movies and other artistic commentary have warned about AI becoming too 'smart' and integrated in society. The thing I'm worried about getting eliminated isn't 'low hanging fruit' in an artistic sense. I'm worried about us losing ourselves as humans.
"We have only bits and pieces of information but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early twenty-first century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI." - The Matrix
