AI Gave Taylor Swift a Tough Competition but Lost Shamelessly at The End

AI can generate music with uncanny qualities of a song indistinguishable even by the most trained ears

Artificial intelligence is already a reality now, moving ahead from being an invention or potential tool. It is almost personified demonstrating its capability to be emotional. It is making art (DallE-2), music, and writing stories. The music-making Artificial intelligence so far has been only a tool to help musicians write good music. With the recent developments, AI is learning its tricks fast and is prepping itself to be a replacement for the musician himself. At the click of a button, AI can generate music having uncanny qualities of a song indistinguishable even by the most trained ears putting the stakeholders at unprecedented risk of losing their identity if not the business. Only recently, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in a response to the US government's Office of Trade Representatives, expressed their fears and listed several tools and services that are being put to use for various services from separating vocals to creating music resembling the style and tone of any famous artist. As of now, there is no legal imperative; however, the question of whether AI-generated art can spell doom over the genre of human-generated music looms large.

Grooving to Technology

Initially, it was taken in a positive stride, for its great democratizing influence and innovative potential, making the art of music a commoner's pride. When synthesizers invaded the market, instead of avoiding them, musicians invented new styles like techno, hip-hop, post-punk, and new-wave music. Now that technology has accelerated, they do not find time to digest and absorb their overwhelming presence so as to make sense of them. In fact, there are too many intermediate stages, along which musicians have lost track or failed to identify when AI transitioned from assisting in music making to creating music of its own and experts believe it is a natural process like in any other field. Ever since the calculating machine was invented in the 1800s, technology has been a loyal partner of musicians. However, it is only in recent times that it has been promoted to a self-conscious entity with Taryn Southern writing top numbers like "Break Free" with passionate vocals and pulsating beats using artificial intelligence

How AI Music Generators Work?

The first AI music-making algorithm, when first conceived by Sony's Flow Machines AI, had no predefined output in mind. It fed around 13,000 songs into the database from every genre and style for the algorithm to analyze the harmony and melody of each song.  A human composer named Benoit Carre when asked to input a style and lyrics, he went for 'The Beatles' to get the very popular 'Daddy's Car'. Over time the algorithms improved from taking style as input to generating their own music. Dance Diffusion, the latest kid on the block, although released years after OpenAI's Jukebox, generates better output with musical structures like choruses and meaningful lyrics, lacking in the previous models. The latest model was developed by Harmonai, a company that has collaborated with Stability AI, the creator of the Stable Diffusion model, and borrowed its technology too. It is trained on the lines of the Stable Diffusion model, to generate new data, in this case, songs. When fed with existing data, it improvises by destroying and recovering the data as and when needed to create new work

Faceless Music- How much of it can you take?

When Taylor Swift or Beyonce is on the stage, the audience doesn't sway just to the song they sing, but to a person completely immersed in the act of art making – which apparently is not possible with AI-generated music or, say a robot. It is the curiosity of an artist – a sign of life and vibrancy that makes for an essential part of the performance – that hooks the viewer. As of now, AI-generated music lacks in all these departments, sometimes even disappointing with sloppy songwriting and poor musicals, which again requires a human to curate for it to sound great or even normal. Till it can acquire human-like intelligence, the AI Vs Taylor Swift kind tiff should be looked upon as a manifestation of nay-sayers' anxiety. At best AI can only be considered a sub-genre of music rather than a competitor to Cardi-B or Selena Gomez, although it will be mired in the controversies surrounding copyright claims.