For the record, I’m not for it, but I do get there are situations where it might actually work.

I don’t really celebrate Christmas, but I do have a Christmas playlist. It has two songs one would generally consider Christmas-y: Christmas Treat by Julian Casablancas (which is a great song) and Little Drummer Boy by Low (which was a great band). Otherwise the list consists of Christmas-themed songs, but they are about the dark realities of Christmas (you know, dad got violent again after getting drunk, loneliness, trying to cope with popular culture telling you there’s something wrong with you when you don’t get gifts, and so forth).

Now, many people on Spotify who listened to automatically generated Christmas playlists reported after last Christmas that those lists go off the rails after a few songs. You get classics to start with, but soon enough you just get music that kind of sounds like Christmas music. Likely, these are generated with AI. Spotify might just be poaching minutes from actual artists here. Who knows.

Whatever the case, this is what an AI can do. If you are just looking for music for a specific vibe, that AI can do. Not necessarily very well, but it can do it well enough. It can produce lo-fi beats to study to or whatever.

One of the albums I’ve been listening to quite a bit recently is Has Been by William Shatner. Yes, that William Shatner. This isn’t a new album. It came out in 2004 when Shatner was already 73 and hadn’t made a studio album since 1968. His style hadn’t changed. His singing is not great, but it is idiosyncratic.

But what he does well is bring his life experience into it. He is self-deprecating, but in a way where pure wisdom shines through. Besides an incredible cover of one of my favorite songs of all time, Common People, he talks about his regrets regarding parenting (although on this particular song, the lyrics were written by Nick Hornby, so much of it is about Shatner’s feelings is unclear), his feeling about his career, his fear of his imminent death (which hasn’t happened in the intervening 21 years as of this writing), his parasocial relationship with fans and so forth.

Now, an AI can’t do that. Sure, an AI can simulate that, but we are humans and as humans, we can tell when it’s a person behind the art. Even when Shatner is interpreting Hornby on That’s Me Trying, you know that there is a truth behind those words. I can’t know what kind of a relationship Shatner has with his kids (who were all born from his first marriage which ended in 1969), but he can definitely channel a feeling here.

Of course, the works of William Shatner are just an extreme example, because his style and personal history are so unique, but if I look at the artists I’ve most listened to, they are all idiosyncratic. They are singular artists, who have their own unique approaches to music. Sure, an AI could simulate Tom Waits, but it could never have created Tom Waits. Or Ian Curtis, Karin Dreijer, David Bowie, PJ Harvey, Björk, Steve Albini or Kate Bush. And while all of these people, with the exception of Ian Curtis, have been around for decades, there are new artists coming up constantly. Not all of these might be exactly new, but anyone who started under a decade ago is new to me (as I’m old), so I’ll just mention SMERZ, Nilüfer Yanya, Cassandra Jenkins, Fontaines DC, Wet Leg, aya, Maiya Blaney, yeule, Magdalena Bay, Mannquin Pussy, Ekko Astral, Sofia Kourtesis and julie (specifically the one with the lowercase ‘j’).

We are not running out of new ideas with music and I don’t see AI being able to replace that anytime soon.

I already used this example here, but I’ll use it again: The reason we see animation as something for kids is because back in the day studios had fund techniques where you could churn out cheap crap fast. Of course, adults weren’t into it, because there was nothing of interest in this slop, but it worked on kids. It seems to me that AI will have a similar role. You can use it to make shit for people who are not really paying attention, but you can’t really make anything interesting with it.

Note that using AI as part of a process can be beneficial and many artists have been doing that for a while. It’s just that these generic gneerative technologies are not good enough to do that. Google’s Flow has been around for multiple weeks now. If it was a tool that you can just throw a movie together with, why haven’t we seen any (that are actually good)?