The rise of AI brings a number of uncertainties for musicians in the world.
AI doesn’t only pose a threat to job stability as seen in other careers, but it’s also directly harming the artists who put time and effort into crafting music. Artists often pour their heart and soul into a single piece, something AI cannot do.
Yet with a single prompt inserted into an AI chatbot, it’s possible to create a full song, melody, lyrics, and all.
Does that not defeat the point of what music is supposed to be?
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“When you’re feeding AI millions of songs into a database, and then it’s summarizing all that information into one new song, [and] that’s where you start losing the credibility of ‘no one really created this,” junior commercial music major Zander Shaw said, referring to the idea that a human did not actually create a piece of music, but because when it’s being passed off as human work, you begin to lose the credibility that music and the industry has. “This is just everything that’s been created put into one new idea. You’re losing the human aspect of it, which is kind of what music is all about.”
Music is supposed to be creative.
It’s supposed to draw emotion because emotion was woven into the notes of the song.
Music, in its intended purpose, is meant to draw emotion and bring people together. It’s entertainment and a piece of culture. Take the human aspect away, and where does that leave us?
What kind of connections can be formed from soulless art?
“I think that AI in music is a cancer on the basic ideas of creativity,” Cyrus Ditch, a sophomore vocal performance major, said. “I think that the only ethical use of AI [in music] is to crunch numbers. I think even in the forms of tedious work that you would find in something like commercial music, at the end of the day, there is a… human element that must go into that for it to be human music. To completely remove that and say, ‘I don’t need to do that,’ is to delete the idea of creating, which is to take the time to make something.”
Using AI as the tool it was created to be, especially when using it commercially, is much more reasonable than using it to poach off the artists who genuinely care about their work and the quality of it.
On the commercial side of music, it would make sense why certain individuals would utilize artificial intelligence.
They’re not using it to generate a song or create something new. Instead, they’re using it to crunch numbers, summarize, and organize information that is already there.
“I think that using AI as a form of organization and as a form of data collection is kind of where I can see it being more of a gray area,” Shaw said. “I do a lot of live show planning, and sometimes we will use artificial intelligence to summarize numbers for us and to give us a [clearer] view of things, like we have these 80 shows we just did. [I might ask AI something like:] ‘Can you summarize the overall net worth that we collected?’ Or, ‘How many people, on average, bought a shirt compared to how many people went to the show altogether?’ I think that that’s generally okay because that’s just running financial numbers. That’s not something that [is] inherently creating information.”
There’s so much that goes into commercial music and what it entails.
As a performance major myself, I don’t know much about what happens in commercial music, so I can’t speak much about it. However, I can understand why AI would be reasonable to use to organize and summarize information.
That is where the line should be drawn in terms of how AI should be used in music and the music industry.
The industry as a whole needs to discuss what the guidelines should be in order to limit that gray area. That not only protects the individual artists but also the credibility of music and the industry as a whole.
Protecting and preserving the arts is something that should be taken seriously. It’s a part of the human experience. It’s history, and it’s humanity.
Any threat to that needs to be dealt with before it’s too late.