- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Three songs generated by artificial intelligence topped music charts this week, reaching the highest spots on Spotify and Billboard charts.
Walk My Walk and Livin’ on Borrowed Time by the outfit Breaking Rust topped Spotify’s “Viral 50” songs in the US, which documents the “most viral tracks right now” on a daily basis, according to the streaming service. A Dutch song, We Say No, No, No to an Asylum Center, an anti-migrant anthem by JW “Broken Veteran” that protests against the creation of new asylum centers, took the top position in Spotify’s global version of the viral chart around the same time. Breaking Rust also appeared in the top five on the global chart.
These three songs are part of a flood of AI-generated music that has come to saturate streaming platforms. A study published on Wednesday by the streaming app Deezer estimates that 50,000 AI-generated songs are uploaded to the platform every day – 34% of all the music submitted.
“Slop” feels like a weird description when it’s something widely loved and appreciated. Like, either you mean it in the snobby “most people don’t understand real art” sense, or what’s not slop?
Compare to when it’s used to describe, like, one of those SEO clickbait sites, which are full of hallucinated answers to whatever you were looking for. Nobody likes that, but it’s hard to shut down.
Most people don’t understand art, as most people also don’t understand chess. It’s important to accept that art is not something you can understand just because you like it or not, that’s not the same thing; in the same way that’s important to accept that a move made by a grandmaster chess player cannot be judged by someone who doesn’t understand chess at a deep enough level. Science follows a similar conundrum, people don’t understand even the most fundamental level of a certain field beyond their high-school knowledge and they still believe themselves capable of judging what science is.
We, as humans, and as a society, must learn to accept our own shortcomings and take pride in not having an opinion about something that we do not understand enough. It’s fine to listen and like some tunes, but that does not give you the qualifications and knowledge to judge the quality of music and art. For that, you’d have to go deeper, and then you would also become a “snob”.
So are you an art fan who thinks 4’33" is a work of genius? Or one of the ones who thinks it’s garbage? I’m almost tempted to go for visual art where these controversies are more common; musicians are actually pretty chill about it most of the time. (And I’ll avoid the derogatory term if we’re discussing whether it’s good, as opposed to just if someone in particular is doing it)
Scientists come to consensus, and update that consensus in sync as new discoveries are made. Art fans do not. There’s also anthropology showing the existence of non-Western systems of music completely different from and alien to our own, divergences between systems within Western music history, and a long history of new kinds of music associated with minorities being deemed “wrong”. Meanwhile, other people have known beauty is subjective continuously since Plato.
All that adds up to gatekeeping art being done for essentially the same reasons people gatekeep anything.