Ai, Ai, Ai

The future is here

I was listening to a waltz by Mike Schneider, a not-renowned-enough accordion wizard from the Midwest, a track on his album that follows the unbelievably catchy “Rapid Fire Polka”. I decided to ask Spotify to make a radio station based on his music. I was wondering how the algorithm would evaluate trad polka music, particularly when it hasn’t been listened to a bazillion times and it only has the sound to go on.

Well, polka pals, the results are in. And it’s not a good look, either for the AI doing the musical prediction or for… well, you’ll see.

Here’s the first tune that came up after Schneider’s beautiful “Midnight Reflections”, an interestingly, jaunty tune bt someone called Jilmi:

Yup. Are you ready for the song that came on next? I bet you are. This one is called “Kiran Lowe”, and the artist is called Fermi.

Anyone want to take a guess as to what is going on?

I know you’re dying for more, so here are the next two that popped up, recommended by Spotify’s algorith m, “Molly Robertson” and “Ebonthrax”, by Mooncomb and Caitlin Jones.

I made a playlist with all these songs on it for your convenience. Here you go.

…

Obviously, you’re all intelligent, digitally savvy folks, and you know what’s going on here. Now that it’s comparatively easy to get your music online, people are programming Artificial Intelligence to “write” music and mass-uploading the “music” to streaming services. They are figuring that the hourly pay rate on this could be astronomical, because if just one of these insanely mindless little tracks gets picked up and used on, say, a car commercial during the Super Bowl, the uploader will have made like $1,000,000/hour. They’re just hustling in the gig economy, man!

Now, I’m not one of those people who just laughs at this stuff and says: “see? AI sucks. It can’t do anything. It will never replace real {music/art/poetry/novels}.” My academic field is full of myopic morons like this who keep insisting that because chatgpt gave a bad answer to their clever essay question, we never have to ever worry about it writing essays in the future.

This is such a spectacularly dumb position. It’s like someone picking up an early blunderbuss in 1612 and saying: “Ha! This thing has no aim at all and fires almost at random! We have no need to worry about the handgun, surely such a primitive instrument will never cause any serious havoc.”

The reality is that this is version 1.0 of the mass-uploaded shitty AI music. Version 5.0 is coming one day. Indeed, our own genre has featured entire “bands” that are just one guy with fake violin/banjo/accordion singing about getting drunk. They fooled 88% of listeners into thinking it was real folk music. So this is all just a prelude to what will happen in 5-10 years.

I have no thoughts about any of this, because listening to “Kegumeg”, “Kiran Lowe”, “Molly Robertson” and “Ebonthrax” has lulled my brain into a sonambulent stupor. I am just going to let this new future wash over me, dulling my senses, the endless four-chord ukeleles playing me off into my sunset years, as my life dwindles away into a tiny spark before finally being extinguished.

And as they lower my coffin into the ground, my family will gather round, shed a few tears, and grieve a while, until one of them asks: “hey guys, which Spotify station should we put on for the wake?”