By Faith Agbonson
For 23-year-old artist Clark Rainbow, a typical day spent making music involves thinking about a melody or lyric as a foundation and using a digital piano program to start developing the chords for a song.
The process requires significant effort, sometimes taking weeks to complete with multiple revisions.
But for some artists, this process is completed in a matter of seconds with the click of a button and the input of a prompt into an AI program.
This begs the question: Is AI a tool to innovate music creation, or is it stripping art of its unique human touch?
Well, it’s a little more nuanced than that.
AI-generated music is a divisive topic, and Clark Rainbow believes that AI is harmful for artists like herself.
So much so that she created a song about it.
Her song ‘beReal’ is a hyperpop deep dive into her frustrations about AI and how its efficiency is being put on a pedestal.
Lyrics like “I will never be perfect, but I’ll always be real” perfectly emphasise the argument many anti-AI musicians have.
Part of the beauty of music and art in general is that it’s imperfectly perfect because it’s made by a human, and so it reflects the human experience of creating and making mistakes.
For many artists, authenticity is a huge part of what makes their music theirs, with emotional and personal experiences being the biggest influence when writing songs.
Clark Rainbow doesn’t just write her own music, she also sings and produces it herself, and the process of making music is often therapeutic for her.
Unlike AI, humans have an imagination and can create new and original ideas.
This is part of her main issue with AI music, as it is vastly underregulated, allowing anyone to steal an artist’s work and input it into a program.
On top of this, listeners are struggling to determine what is AI-generated or not.
“I’ve gotten comments saying my songs are definitely AI-generated, and it just makes me feel like I need to be making my music differently,” Clark Rainbow reveals.
Popular streaming platform Deezer conducted a study, surveying 9,000 people from eight different countries and found that a staggering 97% of respondents could not distinguish between AI-generated music and human- written music.
Maybe this is why Xania Monet was able to become the first-ever AI-generated artist to chart on Billboard late last year with the song aptly named ‘How Was I Supposed to Know?’
Not only does the avatar have multiple songs, but she has also amassed 203k followers on her Instagram filled with AI-generated videos and selfies.
Her creator, Telisha Nikki Jones, utilised Suno, an AI-powered music generator, to create Xania’s songs, which were composed using lyrics she wrote based on her own experiences.
For Jones, Xania is like an extension of herself, “I look at her as a real person,” she told CBS News.
This phenomenon is not unique to Jones alone.
On an online forum for Suno users, one anonymous reply talks about how, during a period of intense grief, creating music using the program was cathartic for them.
“Hearing those words wrapped in a melody? It let go. Like I finally exhaled after holding my breath for a decade.”
To them, innate musical talent was like a barrier, and Suno simply gave them an avenue to cross it.
The pro AI-generated music crowd often argues that music production is inaccessible for many, whether that be a lack of talent or disabilities that can make creating music harder.
Nevertheless, many artists who are hesitant about AI music debate that music creation is very accessible.
In Clark Rainbow’s case, she struggled with undiagnosed ADHD for a very long time while writing and producing her own music.
She describes how difficult it was to reach this point in her career as she endured executive dysfunction and agonised over not being able to focus on making songs even when that’s all she wanted to do.
Undeterred by a disability that actively worked against her passion, she still managed to make a career out of it.
In her eyes, her disability made creating music difficult, not impossible.
Taking both sides into consideration, it’s clear there’s a demand for transformative tools that can help people be creative while still protecting the rights of artists.
Researchers at the University of Nottingham tried to tackle this concept by developing a musical robot, Jess+, that aims to help musicians with disabilities create live scores.
Created by Craig Vear in collaboration with disabled musicians, the robot uses creative AI to facilitate co-creation between disabled and non-disabled artists.
Rather than replacing the human touch in music, Jess+ prioritises uplifting artists and providing the tools necessary for musicians of all backgrounds to bring their own creative ideas to life.
Part of what makes this project work so well is that it utilises real-time sound and physiological data, rather than user-input data that could’ve been obtained from anyone without consent.
In a nutshell, programs like Jess+ demonstrate that AI and human artists can coexist and even collaborate effectively if the right protections are in place.
When these programs are made with the artists in mind instead of the bottom line, they can provide new opportunities for all types of musicians.
So perhaps the question we should be asking isn’t whether AI-generated music is replacing real musicians, but rather, can corporations be trusted not to misuse AI technology to the detriment of musicians?