“I listened to it, and I was like, oh, my God, this is my anthem. I’m obsessed with the song,” said Ms. Stamatis, a 38-year-old mother of three in Denver. “I was sending it to all my friends.”
Eventually a message came back from one of those friends: “It’s an A.I. bot. Stop listening right now.” Another texted: “I can’t believe you guys got catfished by an A.I. bot.”
I read that yesterday, but I didn't blog it, because it didn't quite cross my bloggability line. But I'm blogging it now, because Meade just sent me this:
The NYT article is mostly about whether streaming services ought to have safeguards that exclude A.I. music or at least bonk you over the head with the fact that it is A.I. music. But I think what's really important is that we, the humans, remain engaged in search for truth. It's absurd to ask machines like Spotify to do the work of detecting the work of music-making machines. We end up with a world of machines interacting with machines, and what is left for use to do? Consume the music that one machine or the other has decided is good for us? Well, isn't it good that the bearded cowboy thinks we'd better call our mother before it's too late and we're the ones left crying?
BUT: On the other hand, the machines can make this music so fast and affect emotions so quickly that the streaming service is entirely overrun and we won't use it anymore or, worse, we'll become fools for everything artificial.
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53 comments:
No.
My detector is not as finely calibrated as Rick Beato’s but I have heard enough AI music to be suspicious of super slick production paired with painfully generic lyrics.
Last I heard about 20% of Spotify’s top 100 tracks were AI-generated instrumentals. Hundreds from a handful of Swedish “artists.” But things change fast. Who knows.
Laurie Wired (a software engineer and blogger), made a simple computer generated music AI that reads what you are typing, and creates background music to match what you're typing.
It was pretty cool, pretty easy, and pretty scary
welcome to the Brave New World!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsYPv3CC6Sw&t=688s
"..Jul 31, 2025
I built a tool that dynamically creates Infinite focus music that adapts to what's on your screen.
By combining a few locally-run Open-Source AI models (MagentaRT + InternVL3), it's trivial to have your own contextual, endless radio station.
Plus, I also go over some music model glitch token behavior; with absolutely terrifying results..."
I’ve never asked or wondered who wrote the music that I listen to on the radio or Spotify. Is it good or not? If not, the next button gets pushed. The challenge for songwriters is to write better music than AI does.
Has anybody created an A.I. music model that can imitate Bach yet?
the Real Question is:
How Long?
how long before the "creative arts" and "creative artists" are in the same category as horse shoers or basket weavers?
Country isn't known for originality so you'd be hard pressed to distinguish it musically. The lyrics are trite so could be either.
Wheeler Walker's Texas bar country song "Which one o' you queers gonna suck my dick?" can be distinguished as human without even listening to the music.
One of the reasons that I really don't like modern pop/country/rap/hiphop music idioms is that they've become over-produced and formulaic. It all sounds generic now. There's little exploration of theme, little difference. Auto-tune everything. If you don't to be confused with A.I., make your music sound different, for crying out loud.
Aggie said...
"..Has anybody created an A.I. music model that can imitate Bach yet?"
there's a lady just up the road from me, that hand weaves beautiful wicker baskets.. Mostly from plants that SHE grows.
I bought one for my mom for her bDay..
i made a point of telling her that it was handmade, so that she'd appreciate it (she did).
It was $30.. it took the lady about 8 hours to weave it (not including the growing/planting/harvesting.
Tell me MORE about this "Bach" guy?
how many recordings did he sell last year?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPGWcaZ-fMY
Here's an AI music video reggaetron reprise of Sailor Moon (in Japanese) which provides an extremely good example of the things that AI can do that I like, and my wife is addicted to redubbing Taylor Swift songs into Portuguese. They're quite good!
I try to like country western music. I just can't do it.
AI or not.
How is this any different than music created by humans who use a wide variety of technical devices and techniques? Euro -techno-disco, autotune, wah-wah, Miami Vice Theme, The Good The Bad and The Techno, etc, AI is just better, faster, and cheaper. Stop whining, create better.
The point is to normalize AI production over AI production when the latter is identified or can be detected. This has analogies in other aspects of human life, too, where tolerance is the better choice of alternatives.
back in the olden days, people had pianos IN their homes.
not to look good, or show off; but to make music with.
they sold sheet music, for people that couldn't make their own tunes.
then people got record players; for people that couldn't play.
then people got radio; for people that couldn't pick what to hear.
... (then a whole lot more steps)
now people have Spotify playing in the background, and noone knows or cares what/who is playing.. it's just background
in the future, the elite will go to concerts, and listen to living people..
just to show how elite they are.
this will be able to employ HUNDREDS of people worldwide.
the rest will be "on tape"
serious questions:
what was the last LIVE MUSIC any of you went to?
for that matter, WHO was the youngest artist you listened to?
i'm guessing y'all spend your time listening to old dead people
Spotify is great if you know what you want to hear. I have playlists galore but it's all music I've picked out myself. I do feel bad for the new artists dog paddling in the sea of AI, but their stuff is out there if you take the time to find it.
last June i went to Iowa City to see "I'm With Her", a trio including Sarah Jarosz. The last live music i went to before THAT, was the year before (same band).
live music is DEAD
Doesn't this fully illustrate just how trite, formulaic, and artificial human assembled * popular music -- in every genre -- has become?
* I loathe to use the word created in this context.
Speaking of prioritization, cis over trans, women over sims, babies over blocs, etc.
Artisan over manufactured where discernible and affordable. Local over imported. Fidelity over arbitrage.
[start virtual italics] Spotify Performance: Bach averages 8 million to 15.3 million monthly listeners depending on seasonal play (surging significantly around Christmas due to his Christmas Oratorio). As of late 2026, his total lead streams on the platform have crossed 8.1 billion lifetime plays, adding over 2 billion streams in the past year alone.[end virtual italics]
Interesting legal possibilities. With all the millions of songs in its corpus, can it really avoid duplicating any riffs? Maybe eventually. Maybe other AI programs are already checking.
Great song! Brought a tear to my eye. Could you play the whole song?
Gilbar asked: "what was the last LIVE MUSIC any of you went to?
for that matter, WHO was the youngest artist you listened to?
i'm guessing y'all spend your time listening to old dead people"
The last live music I went to was a Bob Dylan concert about six or seven years ago with Mavis Staples as the opening act (She totally outperformed him.) I was a child when Bob Dylan was at his peak.
The youngest artist I listened to would be Taylor Swift.
Last year, I played a Spotify playlist of Thanksgiving songs while preparing the holiday meal. I was about half way through it when I realized they were all AI generated.
If they don't sing their own songs, songwriters are unknown and uncelebrated (though not unsung). One can feel sorry for them losing out, but for listeners and for the music business they are already non-player characters.
Looking at the massive synthesizer that Walter/Wendy Carlos used to play Bach, it wasn't hard to wonder if someday a machine that big could also write concertos, sonatas, tocatas and fugues.
John Ruskin, in The Roots of Honor, spent some time explaining how his shoemaker took pride in crafting well made, custom fitted shoes. Ruskin felt that the craftsmanship involved enhanced the shoemaker's humanity and while producing a product superior to those produced by factories......Time marches on. I think we can all agree that New Balance now has a better product than anything a 19th century shoemaker could produce. Time will continue to march on. Ruskin left a considerable number of published words. It won't be long before the AI Ruskin produces essays as elegantly written and lacking in prescience as anything published by the organic Ruskin.........I bet a lot of shoemakers were very hostile to the whole shoe factory business. I presume a lot of intellectuals will be be very hostile to machines that can produce a fresh Shakespeare tragedy by clicking a few buttons and maybe adding a couple of prompts, but that's the way it goes. Creative destruction comes for the creators.
Full disclosure. I looked up the name of the Ruskin essay and what it said on AI. The rest, including grammatical mistakes, is all me. Perhaps in the interests of clarity I should have let Gemini rewrite it.
I not only listen to AI music, I've published an AI tune "Rhythm of the Packaging Floor" Not great art but not bad either. https://www.packagingdigest.com/machinery/a-new-way-to-tune-up-your-packaging-line
I've commented before on "Black Cats Bass" which is smooth or easy listening jazz in 2-3 hour chunks. Very relaxing and I often have it playing in my office when working. I did not even realize it was AI, though did not much think about it, until I'd been listening for a couple weeks. Search Noir Jazz Cats. Video is nothing and there's lots of ads so just download the audio as MP3 and listen on your regular player with no ads.
And 2-3 weeks ago there was a tune "Don't blame the whiskey don't blame the jar" that kept popping up in my Tik-Tok feed.
Delta blues with terrific harmonica. I had to hear more of whoever this was and I tracked it down to youtube here. There is a terrific video with it.
https://youtu.be/nnqGC0KKkWY?si=3KKeU4n_xKwv2eED
It has been in my ear ever since. Also some other stuff by the same folks. It took me quite a while to come to the opinion that it MIGHT be AI and I had to ask Grok to be sure.
Ditto a country song about the old truck driving days with the hook "Drivers, do you remember these?" way better than any new country music I've heard int he past 20 years or so.
I'm all in on AI music. It is better, some of it anyway, than a lot of "real" music I hear.
And, a shameless plug, my book of AI written biographies (think electronic James Patterson) is almost ready to go to print! It made an interesting conversation at a dinner of fellow journos last sunday night.
John Henry
A few of us guys were sitting around one evening and one of them had AI make up a sorta country-rock song. I noted two things: 1) It was fine but bland and formulaic; and 2) It didn't seem much different from most of the stuff being made by humans.
I don't like most modern 'popular' music because it's musically and lyrically simplistic -- fewer key changes, fewer chords, more repetition, and simple lyrics -- and I hate hate HATE autotune. I'm sure there's stuff out there that's not, but I'm too busy to go looking for it, TBH.
I'd wager that even if you go to see "live" music, the bulk of the performances have either autotuning, lip-synching, a backing track, or some combination of all three. Mainline performers anyway.
What is disturbing is how Rick Beato created “Sadie Winters” and that song in maybe a minute and a half, and it was pretty good.
1984 took place in a world where popular music was all machine created: “It was just a passing fancy…” You can’t have artists creating songs that might stir up the proles! Song like Last Train to Clarksville or Zombie. Not that those kinds of songs that question the government imposed zeitgeist could get published today on prominent platforms.
Speaking of generic country, there is this ditty:
Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison
And I went to pick her up in the rain
But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck
She got runned over by a damned old train
AI or human?
John Henry
I was listening to a playlist of covers, and there was a modern cover of Superstition, and it was like all of the color had been squeezed out of it.
As far as country goes, vintage country is great, it inspired much of the rock music from the sixties and seventies. It came to an end in 1996 when suddenly government gave control of the airwaves to large corporations. Thank you Bill Clinton!
Teaser today on Amazon:
Deal
On an author you've read
Chopin
Complete Works
VIII
Polonaises
paperback $28.28
i'm guessing y'all spend your time listening to old dead people
Jeez you make me feel old and I'm not even 80 yet.
But now that I think about it, an awful lot of the music that I do listen to is by dead people. Even music that was recorded in the 1990s.
John Henry
Re the discussion of AI writing at the Journo dinner, there was some dubiousness about whther it would be any good. Then my editor since about 2000 who has edited a couple hundred thousand of my words chimed in. She told about when I sent her the initial 4 chapters saying only that I had finally gotten started on the book I'd been telling her about for years. I did not initially tell her it was pure AI. She thought it was terrific. Then I told her it was AI. Her next question was "Well, bare bones, right? It sounds like you completely rewrote it, right?" Nope, not even a light edit, just the way it came from Claude.
I had to show her the prompt I used and explain the process and I am still not sure she 100% convinced I did not write it.
Point is, anyone can write a 10-20 word prompt in Suno or Claude and get something that is "Not bad". The prompt for my packaging song is like that. But the better, and more detailed, you make the prompt, the better the output will be and that is where the creativity comes in.
John Henry
***john henry said
Speaking of generic country, there is this ditty:
Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison
And I went to pick her up in the rain
But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck
She got runned over by a damned old train***
Steve Goodman, I believe.
I enjoy listening to AI created covers of popular songs. What would “Come Together” sound like as performed by Dire Straits, for example. Another is what would such and such sound like if it was an Irish folk song. Some of those are really good, and compliment the originals rather than supplanting them.
On our trip from Florida to Georgia, my sister's YouTubed a bot thru her CarPlay called "Woundsmusic", a Latin soul bot. I could listen to a track or two, but this thing has a bottomless repertoire of the same five chords. It just went on and on and on.
She says she likes it because most Latin popular music now is filthy garbage. Nothing redeeming, nor uplifting, and she's right about that. Most Latin music I listen to is from the 70's and 80's. In the 90's they went from risqué, to outright smutty.
Mr D Quite right, though I always associate it with David Allen Coe (Another dead man that I listen to)
For those who don't know, it is an additional verse to the song "You never even called me by my name". Goodman called it the "perfect country song" and I think it is pretty close. But Coe wrote back to say it was not perfect because it did not mention trains, mama, prison, booze or pickup trucks or death. Which prompted Goodman to write the last verse.
I was reminded of it by someone above who said country was pretty generic. The song was written in 1971
John Henry
According to a podcast that I listen to from Austria (AI Cookbook Show and AI Neanderthal both Malcolm Werchota) "Prompt Engineer" is an actual position in some large businesses like Banks and can make $250-350,000 Euros annually.
John Henry
“But I think what's really important is that we, the humans, remain engaged in search for truth.”
I think what’s really important is that we, the humans, remain engaged in the search for truth about something that’s important. Not silliness about whether or not a song was made by A.I. If you like it you like it, and that’s what matters.
f the same five chords. It just went on and on and on.“
You mean like Chuck Berry?
Creative use of five chords
Dimming of the Day Raitt
Acoustic Layla Clapton
I write lyrics and use AI to make the music based on how I hear it in my head because I can't write music or play an instrument (middling on vocals, but I can't sing the range needed for what I write). AI does what a studio band and mixer would do for you if you told them what you wanted. Nothing wrong with the AI. When you have it write the lyrics it comes up very bland, just like the vast majority of songs we hear on the radio. There is really only so much originality you can create in a mass market economy. People really do just want bubble gum music, That is what sells and that is what AI can do, so it can be useful in that way. Besides, if you get too original, you will have no audience. You have to be both stock and original at the same time.
I feel a bit betrayed when I find a song was purely AI. We value hand painted works more than screen prints more than posters. There is something inside of use that values something hand made verses machine made, but only up to a point.
I am a hypocrite since I use AI to generate music. But only partially. I have musicians I work with to write real music, eventually.
Well it certainly sounds like most of the crap country that is out there today.
What's wrong with it being AI if it sounds good and the listener likes it?
(Yeah, I know that the "artists" don't get paid; but if you can't do better than AI why would anybody pay you? (Sort of like everything else).
"The last live music I went to was a Bob Dylan concert about six or seven years ago with Mavis Staples as the opening act (She totally outperformed him.)"
I should hope so. Mavis Staples is one of the greatest vocalists of our time. Bob is really old, can't sing anymore and couldn't sing even when he could sing.
If there will be AI Bach, AI Shakespeare, and AI Michelangelo, will people still pay attention? As it is, too much is written and published for people to keep up, and most people stopped trying.
Whatever it is, it couldn't possibly be worse than hip-hop.
*what was the last LIVE MUSIC any of you went to?
for that matter, WHO was the youngest artist you listened to?
i'm guessing y'all spend your time listening to old dead people*
Well, you would be wrong.
Just saw Lettuce (front row) at Jazz Alley last month, and am planning to catch Pigeons Playing Ping Pong tonight at the Showbox.
Try again.
"what was the last LIVE MUSIC any of you went to?"
Gordon Lightfoot.
"i'm guessing y'all spend your time listening to old dead people"
Ok. So?
“Great song! Brought a tear to my eye. Could you play the whole song?”
Thanks, MOfarmer! Mine too.
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