random thoughts on ai and music
Western classical musicology and journalism has always tended to prize serious, somber-sounding music over anything else. Pop music journalism kind of does too. Same with movies, same with politicians.
But serious, somber-sounding music is the easiest to imitate. Whether by a person acting like a robot, or by a robot acting like a person.
What can’t be faked is spontaneous human interaction. Reading the room, feeling the moment, being funny. Anyone who plays or attends shows in tiny venues knows there are basic human phenomena that no AI could ever replace.
Deerhoof’s strategy to avoid having our recorded music plagiarized by AI is to make it inconsistent in style, hard to copy, every song different, and full of exactly what AI can't do: improvisation, surges in feeling, a sense of humor, and human (or animal) interaction. We try to make it obvious that it wasn’t made with AI.
We also don't use AI to create our music, listen to music made by AI, or use algorithmic streaming platforms to listen to music. We take our music off of platforms that allow scraping and try to focus our career elsewhere, playing live for example. We try to boost other artists doing the same thing.
The Deezer poll where listeners couldn’t tell the difference between human music and AI music doesn’t tell us that much, when so much corporate-funded human music sounds like mechanical background music anyway. The poll result is an indictment of the corporate musical style, not low-quality listeners. It certainly doesn’t prove that AI has “gotten good” or that listeners want more of it.
“AI” is the Citizens United of tech. It’s just corporations posing as humans and trying to steal real humans’ legal rights.
The movement to change copyright laws so that musicians are compensated fairly for their work being plagiarized by corporate computers is nice, but it also legitimizes the practice. It legitimizes the building of data centers in poor areas. Personally I’d rather the whole practice die out for lack of listener interest.
Culture isn’t just a museum. It’s something alive by definition. Immigrants aren’t what’s erasing “Western culture.” Corporations and AI are what’s erasing Western culture, and all other cultures.
Think how rich U.S. culture has been in its brief history. Now imagine a culture that has survived for thousands of years, being erased with the flick of a button. Cultures like Iraq or Palestine. The corporations and politicians attempting such erasure haven’t succeeded yet, but their total indifference to the idea tells you about their understanding of what culture means to them.
The unholy synthesis of AI, warfare, policing, and corporate profiteering that now strikes the U.S. population as some kind of controversy was no controversy for the ruling class that’s spent the last several presidential administrations methodically bringing it into being.
Staying in the good graces of arms dealers and tech CEOs who now sell AI as a weapon has long since eclipsed winning elections as a top priority of both corporate parties and their politicians.
The rest of us have no reason to stay in the good graces of arms dealers and tech CEOs who now sell AI as a weapon. You’re never going to convince billionaires to become ethical. Politicians whose careers are propped up by billionaires, same thing. More effective than pleading for mercy would be to not use their products, and not vote them into office. We need to boycott, strike, refuse. And we need a viable third party in the U.S.