What Musicians Like Grimes Can Teach Us About AI - Humans aren’t powerless in the face of automation

tech.hindustantimes.com:

When I saw songwriter and producer Grimes perform live a decade ago, there was plenty of onstage tech equipment but clearly in the service of human music. Grimes was singing songs she'd composed, her fans were listening in a shared concert setting rather than through headphones, and maybe in the crowd a few budding musicians were inspired that night to write a tune of their own.

Today, these links in the artistic chain — composition, distribution, performance and inspiration — are on the cusp of a bigger tech-driven revolution, as Grimes and other musicians tell me in a special episode of the Crash Course podcast. Artificial intelligence is getting better at generating music that sounds like the real thing. Vocal deepfakes are already fooling us with pitch-perfect imitations of superstars, often without their consent. Ambient AI music trained to calm us is filling up “chill” Spotify playlists. And clicking refresh on AI composition software like Boomy is certainly easier than years of learning the Stairway to Heaven guitar solo.

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This obviously raises huge questions for the $26 billion music industry that only recently survived the advent of file-sharing by rebuilding itself around streaming platforms. The fear of seeing artists' penny-sized royalties evaporate completely as machines copy and replace recorded-music catalogs has led to a flurry of copyright lawsuits including one against Alphabet Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.-backed Anthropic Pbc. With music already an unequal pyramid, with 90% of royalties flowing to the top 1% of artists, the prospect of a huge supply of machine-manufactured music might kill off whatever passion or inspiration or career opportunities novice musicians