As you sip your morning coffee and scroll (per the new norm) you come across a heartbreaking post. It reads “Help my sick son pay for school!”, and displays an image of a seemingly ill teenager playing the violin. His surroundings are bleak–a dirty linoleum floor, broken window, and skinny arms barely holding up his instrument. In fact, as you zoom in, you find two or three extra fingers on his left hand, an odd animal that appears to be a cross between a chicken and a cat outside of the window, and a poster reading a phrase in a language that does not exist. The realization sinks in. You’ve been clickbaited by a robot.

Keep reading to learn more about the usage of AI in art and music, brought to you by WildKat.

According to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, recommended posts make up over 30% of user’s feeds. In fact, Meta’s algorithm seems to favor the AI sub-genre of these posts. As AI becomes more and more intelligent, its usage leans more towards financial gain. Josh Goldstein, a research fellow at Georgetown, notes that “It could be that these were nefarious pages that were trying to build an audience and would later pivot to trying to sell goods or link to ad-laden websites or maybe even change their topics to something political altogether. But I suspect more likely, many of these pages were simply creators who realized it was a useful tactic for getting audience engagement.” Either way, it can be frustrating to have to scroll through multiple AI generated sob stories to finally find the post concerning your cousin’s wedding. Of course there are ethical ways to utilize such a groundbreaking tool, but the theoretical fine line between moral and amoral, especially in an artistic setting, quickly becomes gray.

But how does this apply to the classical music industry? Unfortunately, we aren’t off scot-free. 

Last month, over 200 A-lister musicians of all genres called on AI developers to “cease the use of artificial intelligence to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists.” This outcry poured out from the lack of royalty money, even for huge artists, due to the replacement of composers with AI. The ultimate question is, how can we detect AI music? Well, sleuthing is not as simple as it seems to be with art. When viewing an image, you can detect AI by zooming in on hands, thin lines, logos, and words. When listening to music, certain tools may be utilized like “AI Voice Detector” or “TimeStretch”. As the science behind AI progresses, so will the music industry’s response. Although these developments are sometimes scary, sometimes exciting, and always confusing, one thing is for sure: the soul behind human-made music is irreplaceable. There is something empty in AI “compositions” that can only be filled with raw creativity and vulnerability. So don’t give up artists, the robots haven’t won yet.

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Learn More:

Billie Eilish and Music A-Listers Call Ai Tech a Threat To …, www.inc.com/kit-eaton/billie-eilish-music-a-listers-call-ai-tech-a-threat-to-creativity.html. Accessed 22 May 2024.

Bond, Shannon. “Ai-Generated Spam Is Starting to Fill Social Media. Here’s Why.” NPR, NPR, 14 May 2024, www.npr.org/2024/05/14/1251072726/ai-spam-images-facebook-linkedin-threads-meta.

Brookes, Tim. “Ai Images Are Rampant on Facebook, Here’s How to Spot Them.” How, 5 Apr. 2024, www.howtogeek.com/ai-images-are-rampant-on-facebook-heres-how-to-spot-them/#:~:text=For%20inanimate%20objects%2C%20look%20at,them%20that’s%20hard%20to%20place.