In the past, music used to be the soul of the universe. It was what made people dance and smile and it brought them together no matter their differences, but as I watch my phone project a video of an AI music artist becoming number one on the billboards for most played artist, I now realize what Don McLean meant when he sang “the day the music died”.
As artificial intelligence advanced from a creative tool into content creators, developers began building digital personas and producing fake music for them to take credit for. This shift gave rise to a new generation of AI artists.
Xania Monet is an AI generated artist, who in recently led herself and other AI-generated personas onto music billboard charts and over 1 millions streams in the U.S so far.
Her creator, Telisha “Nikki” Jones, has defended this impersonal music by telling the world that “AI is the new era that we’re in, and I look at it as a tool, as an instrument,” and uses AI as an “extension” of her real self.
This “tool” could actually just be seen as an easy way out of things that people think they cannot do. If Jones could not sing, she should take singing lessons or attempt to collaborate with other artists. If she does not want to sing, then she should style her “music” as poetry, but there is no reason to create something fake and write it off as “the era we are in”.
Freddie Mercury, historically was known for embracing studio technology music, specifically in hit songs like “Bohemian Rhapsody”, but during his time, the technology was more based on synthesizers and digital recording, not advanced AI.
In the 80s Mercury expressed his rising concern for technology in the music industry by saying that “we are in the golden age of music. There will be a time when technology becomes so advanced that we’ll rely on it to make music rather than raw talent… and music will lose its soul.”
Even back then, these artists knew that something similar to AI would be here and would be taking over our jobs and replacing our passions with imitations of our creativity. We were warned for decades about the new coming technology but without the dangers being completely in peoples faces, they are not seeing it.
We as a society have lost the ability to step up and actually work for the things that people want to accomplish and are on the verge of losing our own right to humanity if we continue to allow the sloth and corruption to overrule the abundance of creativity that lives within mankind.
