I Asked an AI Generator to Rewrite My Song
Yesterday I read a disturbing line in an article by music psychologist Sophia Omarji:
…studies have shown that when unaware of the composer’s identity, we can emotionally connect with AI-generated music in the same way as human-composed music.
Hear that, folks? AI has reached a quality so humanlike that it can elicit emotional responses! The article also cites that AI-generated art is often indistinguishable from human art.
This made me wonder, Could I be replaced by a machine? Not just my music, but my identity as a musician? Surely not! Surely AI music would sound trite and generic, lacking the nuanced context of human experience. I decided to try out Udio, an AI music generator, just to make sure I was right.
In not-the-most-scientifically-rigorous experiment, I wrote up a prompt based on one of my songs and fed it to the AI:
A little girl is on a sailboat with her father. They are dead in the water when a wind begins to blow, and she can see cat feet on the water coming toward them. They anxiously wait for the wind to arrive.
Admittedly, I purposefully chose my most experimental piece with two metaphors: “dead in the water” and “cat feet (an effect when wind moves across still water)” to trip it up. I was going to prove that while it might be able to make a bop or two, it would be incapable of abstract thinking, a product of human consciousness that can’t be distilled down to 1’s and 0's.
The results were disturbing.
After a minute of processing, I pressed “play” on the new song. Ethereal, atmospheric chords set a mood, and a captivating female voice began reciting a lyrics over effects. It certainly wasn’t perfect and would need a lot of work to get there. Some of the lyrics were a bit trite, and the overall sound was generic. However, I was blown away by several things that signalled this technologies coming potential:
- Though I never assigned the song a genre, it mirrored the haunting ambience of my original.
- It understood the metaphors I gave it and even expanded upon them.
- When I asked it to create a second section, it drifted into this fairy-tale-like melody. Though the lyrics could use some work, I found the transition evocative and haunting. I thought, “Man! That’s a good idea!” and resisted writing it down.
Hearing my own story recreated and played back to me in an emotive, interesting way felt at once terrifying and exciting. It was like staring into the face of an imposter “me”….or perhaps…something that could make “me” better?
At that moment, I realized that yes, if my art was simply a commodity, there were many ways I could be replaced — if I didn’t sell my soul to it.
