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An AI-Generated Country Song Is Topping A Billboard Chart, And That Should Infuriate Us All
(www.whiskeyriff.com)
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
What’s original about most popular songs. They’re usually lyrically simple with a catchy beat and chorus. Something AI would easily be good at and it could churn out mediocre music easily, and a catchy popular tune wouldn’t be too difficult with interation. Country is no exception.
I don't wanna defend pop music too much but "catchy" is one of those aspects of music that's easy to immediately recognize but extremely hard to pull off. In order to be catchy a melody needs to be both wholly familiar feeling but also juuuuuust different enough to surprise our ears.
I'm not saying a generative AI couldn't ever pull it off if you drained enough lakes to do it, but while it's very good at producing the "familiar" it's very very bad at producing anything "surprising".
Plus you can spam thousands of songs easily, one is bound to be catchy and successful, an outlier on the bell curve.
I'm curious what they will do for live concerts, hire a perfomer or AI all the way with some generated video?