I’ve been writing a lot about AI lately.
One of the many predictions I’ve made is that one of the first business sectors that would be smashed by AI would be anything and everything related to visual media, because AIs have proven to be very good at not only replicating complex images instantly, but editing and emending them so that the end product could look as good as an analog visual, but at a small fraction of the cost.
What I didn’t anticipate, however, is how good and how quickly AI was going to get in terms of creating creative content.
I saw the following news item online yesterday:
Is This the End of Music as We Know It?
The AI-generated song “How Was I Supposed to Know?” hit #20 on BillBoard’s Hot R&B Songs chart last year. It was made using Suno, an AI music-generator platform. The popularity of the platform has catapulted Suno’s 39-year-old CEO, Mikey Shulman, into the music industry’s elite – and made him enemy number one in some circles.
You can read more about it here.
“Really?” I thought. “It hit the charts?”
I could imagine – possibly – that AI could generate a decent hip-hop or rap number. Perhaps a corny Country Western ballad. But rhythm and blues?
So, I checked it out… and I was blown away.
You can see it for yourself here – a video of the song being performed by an AI avatar who goes by the name of Xania Monet.
Xania Monet
Well, what did you think?
You can’t honestly say that it is a bad song – i.e., that the music is lame, or the singing is not spirited, or the lyrics are not as good as 90% of other R&B lyrics. I’m hardly an aficionado of the genre, but I like it and have listened to a lot of it over the years. And my impression is that while this is not Whitney Houston or Luther Vandross, it’s certainly at least “pretty good.”
Is Xania Monet Just Another Hyped-Up One-Off?
That’s a fair question. I did a bit of searching and, in less than 30 seconds, I came upon a music video featuring a woman named Morgan Luna that, once again, blew me away. Since I wasn’t specifically searching for AI singers, my first impression was that this woman and this song must be real.
Morgan Luna
I mean, her facial expressions and the sound of her voice – they just seemed so real to me. And I wanted her to be real, because, aside from her talent, she is stunningly beautiful. In a way that is reminiscent of other beautiful Black singers that flickered through my mind.
Again, you can see it for yourself here.
Here’s the thing – what’s keeping me up at night. Had you asked me if this was possible a year ago, I would have scoffed at the idea. Had you asked me six months ago, when I started looking into the AI story in earnest, I might have said, “It might be possible, but probably not in my lifetime.”
And now, here we are.
Yes, I do think the music industry will survive. But not like it is today. It will be transformed, like almost every other aspect of our lives, in a radical way that will leave the world divided between those that lock in an inside position on the transformation and everyone else – including future Whitney Houstons – forever.
