Why Does It Bother Me if AI Creates the Music I Listen To?

Our daily lives are imbued with all sorts of products that used to be human-made and are now mass-produced by machines — clothes, furniture, tools, even food. Mostly, we accept their ubiquitous presence as perfectly natural, viewing handmade products as luxury goods or fancy objects that only enthusiasts would spend money on. We could buy chocolate from a patisserie, but, in practice, we do it only if it’s a gift or a special treat; for the rest, we’re mostly happy with the chocolate bars we can get from supermarkets.

Yet, when it comes to music, books or movies, we may feel a lot more reluctant to embrace AI-generated products, whose creation has recently been enabled by generative models — why is that so?

Maybe we’re just not used to it yet. Society changes continuously, as do human ways of living. New technologies are disruptive by definition; they always encounter some resistance before becoming widely adopted and, therefore, normal. Perhaps, in ten years from now, we’ll mass consume AI-generated cultural products with the same nonchalance with which we buy chocolate bars from the supermarket now.

However, there is a (perhaps-too-romantic) part of me that remains partially unsatisfied with this explanation. Is music really a product? Isn’t it art and, as such, simply on a different level than prosaic things like chocolate? As much as I want to believe that, I’m afraid I must surrender to reality: Most pop music nowadays is already (at least partly) a product; concert tickets must sell, and songs must be streamed. So, it would be very naïve to assume that all music is a mere artistic expression, freely created without any commercial purpose. If music (at least the most-streamed tracks) is already a product, then why should it bother me if it’s generated by AI instead of people?

The answer to this question may have to do with how much importance we, as a society, place on the relationship between an art form and its creator. Curiously, this varies dramatically across art forms; famous singers and songwriters are automatically public figures, whether they like it or not. This is not necessarily the case for other artists, such as novel writers; while best-selling authors may be interviewed, photographed or filmed in TV shows and podcasts, I doubt Johnathan Franzen is stopped by fans as often as Harry Styles. Other factors — e.g., the audience targeted by these artists — may certainly play an important role, but I can’t help but think that things would be different if Harry Styles were a successful novelist, and Johnathan Franzen a pop star.

This reveals an intriguing aspect of our relationship with music: We don’t only listen to the songs, but we also (more or less actively and consciously) ‘worship’ their creators. By listening to an artist’s songs, we build a social — or parasocial, to use the word of the year — relation with them. This likely happens with books as well, although in a less ‘physical’ way: I may not know what the authors of the novels I read look like and I may have never heard their voice, but I somehow view their words as a window to their thoughts, which still makes me feel connected with them.

Our (para)social relationships with artists take place largely unconsciously — we may not think about Dua Lipa while we are rushing to catch the metro and her songs are playing in our headphones, and we certainly don’t think about Sally Rooney while we follow Connell and Marianne’s lives, eagerly reading one page after another to discover if their paths will cross again or not. Yet, this phenomenon becomes suddenly visible now that it is possible to generate artworks without the direct intervention of a human artist — and this bothers us.

So, am I going to replace my Patti Smith poster with the sticker of some AI company anytime soon? No way! I belong to a generation that grew up with pop music created by humans, and I am personally attached to music that even previous generations grew up with. The kind of music you’d play with vinyl records or CDs, before the ‘device not found’ frustration arising from Bluetooth speakers or headphones was even a thing. But I’m digressing.

The point is, I’m not trying to convince anyone that AI-generated music is necessarily bad or that we should feel a moral obligation to fight it. Instead, I find it fascinating how AI-generated artworks force us to better articulate, and maybe reconsider, our relationship with the human-created ones. Likewise, I am deeply curious to see how this will change in the future. Are we heading towards a ‘new norm’ where we all listen to AI-generated music all the time? Are we, as a society, going to eventually separate art from its creators, whether they are human or not? Only time will tell how this will develop.

Note: Despite the outragious number of em dashes in this post, AI was not used to generate any of the content.