It seems like the AI hype has died down a little, and all the fear and angst about artificial intelligence taking all of musician’s creativity has settled back into some degree of normality. That said, there are artists who appear to be suffering from machine-generated music, but they’re probably not who you think they are.
According to the UK’s musicMagpie study, three artists were the most covered by AI – all girl group Blackpink, pop star Justin Bieber, and rapper Kenye West. That said, the three machine-generated totals amounted to only 33 million YouTube views, which is a drop in the bucket today compared with even what the industry considers a low-level hit.
Generally speaking, the music industry begins to notice at around 50 million views or streams, and a modest hit is in the hundreds of millions. Nowadays, you have to hit just around a billion to be considered a major hit.
A more scary scenario revealed by the study is that that 45% of UK adults aged 21-65 are unable to recognize AI from human-generated music. 50% of Gen X were incapable of recognizing AI, along with 45% of Millennials and 52% of Gen Z, so this was not something that was restricted to just one generation.
This could mean a number of things. A benign reason might be that people just aren’t listening that closely to the music as it might be on in the background or during multitasking. Others might be that they’re completely fooled because they’re not that familiar with the faked artist to begin with.
Neither scenario is great for the music business though, because it suggests that there are a lot of people that don’t care enough about what they’re listening to to even notice when they’re not hearing the real thing.
Animation Also Included
I’m a big fan of any kind of animation and find myself preferring it to a program with real humans in it, other than sports. That’s why I found this next bit from the study amusing.
Spongebob Squarepants and all his animated friends were routinely machine-generated singing a number of popular songs, as you can see from the chart below. Trump and Biden were the only flesh-bags that made the list.
| THE MOST STREAMED “IMAGINARY” VOICES (AI-GENERATED) | |||
| Rank | Artist | Total Views | Most Streamed Songs |
| 1 | Spongebob | 10,247,793 | Bad Guy (Billie Eilish) |
| 2 | Plankton | 5,135,759 | Beggin’ (Maneskin) |
| 3 | Trump | 4,039,923 | Ni**as In Paris (Jay-Z and Kanye West) |
| 4 | Biden | 3,285,404 | Ni**as In Paris (Jay-Z and Kanye West) |
| 5 | Eric Cartman | 3,189,751 | Young Girl (Gary Puckett & The Union Gap) |
| 6 | Squidward | 1,450,711 | Just the Two of Us (Bill Withers) |
| 7 | Homer Simpson | 988,397 | You’re Welcome (Dwayne Johnson) |
| 8 | Mordecai | 850,338 | Not Like Us (Kendrick Lamar) |
| 9 | Mr Krabs | 710,662 | Billie Jean (Michael Jackson) |
| 10 | Arthur Morgan | 349,023 | Old Town Road (Lil Nas X) |
Considering that this was a UK study, you can multiply the numbers by a factor of 5 if you want to extrapolate what the totals might be like in the United States. That might be a little more frightening, but still don’t have the impact that many doomsayers were predicting.
If this is the most Ai creative penetration that we have in music after all this time, I think that real musicians, artists, songwriters and creatives are safe.
