AI Will Kill Music — But the Real Question Is: Do We Care?
Why AI is not a tool
There are 182 Beatles songs. Imagine you can have 3,000. Or 10,000. Or even more. What until recently was nothing but a (silly) dream is now just a click away. AI has taken the world by storm, and the first it did was to shake the foundations of art (of all things).
Artificial Intelligence like Suno or Udio are capable of creating deceptively real audio (should we call it songs?) with only a prompt. The songs produced by the artificial intelligence come with full instrumentation, groovy rhythms, lifelike vocals and meaningful lyrics.
And this is only the beginning. It is hard to imagine what is already happening in the laboratories of the tech companies. And what will be taken for granted in only a few years’ time.
For some, this is a horror scenario, for others an exciting and promising development (Remember the Beatles songs?). And why not?
You could well say that there have always been new developments that we initially viewed skeptically and then integrated into our lives as a matter of course. And we have always made great progress with them.
The printing press was demonized at first; today we hold the book up as perhaps the greatest cultural achievement ever. When electricity…
