‘Make a song about mass unemployment and fallout shelters, with the recurring phrase ‘keeping the sidewalk warm, that makes sense’, in eighties style, with a touch of reggae.’ Hear the machine rattle and after a minute the result blasts from the speakers.
Keeping the sidewalk warm makes sense
said those who waited for a ray of hope,
while factories were silent, silent in the family,
and the future hid itself in a gradient
Admittedly, it is not Nobel Prize-winning poetry, but neither are the lyrics of Bløf. The accompanying music is, within the genre, more impressive, with touches of Small Orchestra and touches of Doe Maar. It’s all possible with AI programs such as Suno and Udio. Texts with ChatGPT, images with Midjourney or videos with Runway: no area is safe from the grasping hands of generative AI. Not even music.
It all starts with admiration, just like at ChatGPT. Anyone who uses the recently launched Udio for the first time will be amazed by the possibilities and the often impressive creations. In any case, it is wonderful for someone who cannot make music to finally make beautiful pictures or nice music according to their own wishes. Thanks to AI. A dreamy Dutch song based on a translated poem by Baudelaire, a post-punk song in the style of the eighties band Bauhaus or a classical chamber music piece: Udio has no problem with it.
Then soon comes the big ‘but’. Or rather: a number of big buts. The most bizarre objection this week came from Kane guitarist Dennis van Leeuwen. In the A.D he speaks of ‘unfair competition’ by the ‘terrible’ music apps. ‘Suppose you replace a mediocre football player with a robot that is a hundred times better than the rest. Doesn’t that ruin the whole game?’
Apparently, in this analogy, Kane is the mediocre football player, Udio the super robot. As a music lover I would say: bring on music that is a hundred times better. However, things are not that far yet. And the question is whether it will ever come to that. As long as AI music has existed (for a long time), this has been the big unanswered question: is a machine capable of being truly creative? Can AI produce anything beyond a mathematical average of the material it was trained with? And also: can it really affect us?
Of course there is unfair competition, but for the time being it is mainly the makers of generic commercial tunes that will have to fear. Perhaps the greatest danger is that humans carelessly outsource more and more tasks and skills to efficient machines. If struggle is an essential part of the creative process, what does the arrival of all these AI tools mean? As people who make art, aren’t we losing something very important?
Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter (as early as 1982!) did not even see that as a problem: ‘There is no need to fear that the mechanization of creativity will mark the end of art. On the contrary: it is a day to look forward to, because on that day our eyes open to whole new worlds of beauty.’
