Food for thought: I’ve been reading a lot about Ai in music, who hasn’t? I even had a go myself last year using lyrics i’d written at University. Now that the Ai generated country track ‘Walk My Walk’ has topped US Billboard charts! I personally wasnt expecting it, I thought Ai music was aimed moreso at flooding the streaming chart for algorythmic plays to scrape off an unwitting income. ‘Walk the Walk’ by the “artist” Breaking Rust has already reached three million streams on Spotify in less than a month. Three million plays on Spotify are worth approximately $9,000 to $15,000, based on an estimated payout of $0.003 to $0.005 per stream. It’s not huge business but it adds up.
As someone who works in the creative field as has been at the front line of the image side of Ai for a couple of years and I am well aware that for Ai to be able to create images it needs a resource, and that resource is us, if we dont create, what does it feed on?
I read that approximately 120,000 songs are uploaded each day of which 50,000 are Ai and no im not citing sources this is rough data. There are up to 200 million songs out there so far. As time moves on I am sure this Ai number will rise as more platforms appear and the software gets better. Fortunatly there are still many bands out there producing great music, but there are far more bands out there creating formulaic music based on taste and trend that are free to upload as well.
I remember seeing the ‘HG Wells’ film ‘The Time Machine’ from 1960 as a kid and the part when the hero walks into the archives and finds that the human race known as Eloi has stopped recording history. Then there were the Morlocks, I remember them as the the creatures underground who derived from humans.
A quick search and: ‘The Morlocks are a humanoid species which is descended from humans, particularly low-class underground machine operators. They are subterranean, and prefer dark, as their eyes are sensitive to light. The Morlocks are more technologically advanced than the Eloi, maintaining more remnants of human technology. In most timelines, the Morlocks eat their Eloi cousins.’ (timemachine.fandom.com)
- I’m certainly not suggesting Ai coders will start cannibalising humans like the Morlocks do to the Eloi in HG Wells’s vision of the future.
- I’m not suggetsing that humans will stop making music like the Eloi stopped recording anything.
- I’m not suggesting IT professionals or Ai coders are a different race sat in the dark, sensitive to light and technologically more advanced 🙂
But if the Ai they create allows music to flood our platform at the rate it is, then surely Ai will have no option but to start cannibalising itself? Ai will draw on Ai for musical inspiration? The human creations wont stop but they will be in the minority? That’s a scary thought, and no we do not have a Time Machine to fix this.
(cover image creating in Ai (ironicaly) on ImageFX using the prompt ‘a vinyl record with a morlock on the centre artwork’)
