Streaming services, notable musicians and fans are confronting the growing presence of AI-generated music and drawing lines in the sand. On Tuesday, Spotify announced it had removed some 50m songs considered AI slop from its recommendations to users over the past year. Spotify requires “AI persona” badges on artist profiles that don’t represent a real human being, but it does not require individual songs generated by AI to be labeled.
Other streaming services have taken more stringent stances. Though it’s cracking down on slop tracks, Spotify is far from AI-shy. The company allows users to create playlists with generative AI and has promised a tool for making AI-generated remixes and cover songs.
Unable to ignore the tide, even early AI boosters like the singer and producer Grimes, former paramour of Elon Musk and mother to three of his 14 children, have declared their limits on allowable amounts of AI. She and other musicians say they are open to AI-generated music but wary. Fans, by contrast, have little tolerance for it.
They are voting with millions of streams against artifice in music. Songs and albums harkening back to analog instrumentation are dominating the charts, no futurism wanted. Both A$AP Rocky, rapper and partner to Rihanna, and Grimes have taken the same position: accepting AI-generated music but not making it.
But who am I to say what’s standard and what’s not? I’m just doing me out here, and I’m doing my music practically – the right way.” Kelly Clarkson similarly outlined her own boundary while expressing enthusiasm for AI. Grimes, one of my own favorite musicians, has begun promoting her first new album in six years, Psy Opera, which she described to the Paris Review as capturing the “emotion of being thrust into the future”.
Stereogum described the album as “AI-inspired but not AI-generated”, citing Grimes’s own insistence that her team of 70 be credited rather than reduced to machines. Grimes offered a free license of her own voice to AI enthusiasts to make what they would three years ago. That she declined to generate her own music indicates that, even to a futurist like her, AI-generated music is lacking, similar to Rocky’s stance.
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