Show Notes
AI Is Killing Music! This Is How We Save It.
Hardly anything is real anymore! And that includes most people. They walk around staring at their phones with earbuds in, ignoring the reality all around them and instead choosing to live in their screen’s virtual reality. Regardless of what their senses tell them, if their screen says it’s real, then it’s real. If their screen says it’s true, then it’s true.
On top of all the propaganda made by humans, the internet is also overflowing with AI misinformation and deepfake videos of people who are not themselves saying things they never said. And now, music streaming services are full of AI-generated songs by artists who didn’t write them, because the artists don’t even exist. Yet every day more and more humans choose virtual over real, screens over trees, and AI over elders.
If you’re like me, and you’re also horrified by this brave new AI world, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with grief for the loss of our old world where humanity mattered. But focusing on the past and everything we’ve lost makes us feel bad. And focusing on the future and how robots are gonna steal our humanity (and our jobs!), makes us feel worse. So what do we do? We continue to bring awareness to this problem, while simultaneously creating solutions in the form of a parallel system. So let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work right here in the present. How? We make music real again.
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That’s no easy task, though, because all new music cannot and should not be trusted. It’s similar to how the singing on recordings could no longer be trusted after the release of auto-tune in 1997. If you hear a recording from before ‘97 and the singer sounds good, then you know they’re actually a good singer. Unless it’s a Milli Vanilli lip-syncing type thing, but still, there were good singers on those recordings, it just wasn’t Milli Vanilli.
And obviously not every singer used auto-tune on their recordings after ‘97. However, I personally know studio engineers who secretly tuned vocals overnight, so when the singer arrived back in the studio the next morning, they wouldn’t even know their vocals had been tuned. They’d just be thinking: Wow, I nailed that! So if the singers don’t always know they’ve been tuned, how can we?
Now in the 2020s, we’re dealing with the songwriting version of this. If you hear a good song from before the ‘20s, then you know it was written by good (human) songwriters. Even if it was written by ghost writers, they’re good (human) songwriters. But now we can no longer trust the songwriting behind recordings.
And that goes for new albums by old-school Gen X bands, too. They could just as easily have gotten AI to write the songs, and then learned how to play them afterwards. Or perhaps the songwriter in the band was under immense pressure to write new songs that would become modern classics, so at home in secrecy they got AI to write the songs and the lyrics. The rest of the band wouldn’t even know they were AI-generated songs, so how can we possibly know?
By now you might be thinking: Why does it matter? If the song is good and I enjoy it, what’s wrong with it being AI-generated? Everything is wrong with that, because every time we choose AI over humans, we take another step into transhumanism. This is about a lot more than music! Even small choices make a difference, like choosing a check-out in the grocery store with a human clerk instead of self-checkout, and looking them in the eyes, smiling, and saying: Hello friend, how are you? Human connection is the only way to maintain our humanity.
Music is one of the most powerful ways for humans to connect. Every time we listen to an AI-generated song, instead of connecting with humans, we’re being connected to the machine. And yes, doing the research to ensure we’re listening to real music requires time and effort, but it’s worth it, just like it’s worth researching what we eat in order to ensure that it