As AI use becomes more common, we are seeing more and more music created with AI. You may be listening to it without even knowing it. Now I get suspicious pretty quickly because there are some pretty obvious signs, but I’ve added songs to my playlists because they were very catchy and only later realized the singers were not real people.
Lately I’ve seen quite a few Brazilian Zouk demos using AI generated music for their demos. Those songs become more popular because of this and get played in the socials and become a part of our culture. Is this desirable?
AI songs can be created much faster than conventionally produced music, whether it’s electronic music produced by one person or a real band recorded playing their instruments with a singer or anything in between. Even if an AI music producer iterates their prompt many times, it must be faster than producing using other methods. That means that these producers can crank out new, catchy songs really fast. We always want new fun songs for dancing in socials, and artists want new songs for demos so that is arguably a good thing. They can also create music that would be really difficult if not impossible to produce with traditional methods- remixed in styles that would be cost-prohibitive or not possible to collaborate with musicians and/or singers to produce. So AI music can provide many new songs rapidly in styles we already like and in styles that we could not have otherwise.
So there are definitely some positive things here. Are there any negatives?
To me, there are at least a couple of downsides-
1) We already have human artists producing music. When we start using AI generated music, we necessarily use less human-created music. That means less awareness of musical artists, fewer streams for them, a smaller audience and less financial reward for producing music we like. It’s already difficult for musicians that are not megastars to make a living from music or even gain a following. If we are talking about kizomba and zouk singers, their followings are generally very small already. I don’t want to see real musicians supplanted by people who write prompts for artificial intelligence to create music. I would rather appreciate and build awareness of real musicians.
2) To me, it’s weird to listen to artificial voices pretending to be real singers. I don’t like it. As dancers, we often draw on and connect to the singer’s emotion and expression to inspire our own feelings and dance. I will say that AI can create some very catchy melodies and beats, and we already use so much music that is produced electronically anyway, so if the music is instrumental, there may not be a difference in how we feel. But when the voices start and I can hear that they aren’t real people, it annoys me. I can hear it’s fake, and I can’t connect to it like I would with a real singer, nor do I want to.
There is no debating that AI is incredibly useful. I use it every day. I use Claude to help me code my website because it’s way faster and can do boring things with little input, and it can build things that are beyond my capabilities. I use Gemini for research, to translate, to answer all kinds of random questions. I used it to make flyers because it can create what I am thinking of in a few seconds and it’s probably better than any royalty-free image I could find, and it doesn’t cost me anything beyond my subscription.
But I think there is something fundamentally human about creating music and singing, and I don’t want to see that replaced by artificial intelligence, especially as it was trained on the very music it supplants.
If we as DJs start replacing human-created music with AI-generated music, should we also replace ourselves and let an AI be the DJ? An AI could be trained on all the DJ mixes on Mixcloud and Soundcloud and figure out what is popular and what we might want to listen to. It could generate playlists on the fly for any vibe eventually copy the mixing techniques. Hell, eventually it could probably just generate all the music for the party on the fly while mixing it too. So should we replace human DJs with AI DJs?
If in a few years robotics advances to the point where companies make synthetics that can dance better and correct students better than any of our human artists, will we want to hire them instead? Will we prefer to dance with robots because they will be more perfect than humans? Maybe we will because they might become the perfect practice partners. Who knows what the future holds? But the point of social dancing has never been solely about the movements- the connection to other humans is a vital and I hope inalienable part of social dancing.
I’m not on a crusade against AI. I’ll keep using it to help me work more efficiently and to accomplish things I couldn’t or wouldn’t do without it. But I don’t want to dance to AI music or play it in the socials. It’s unsatisfying to me and I hope it’s a trend that will become less popular in our culture in the future.
I didn’t write this to call-out anyone. I just think it’s something we should consciously consider.
How do you feel about it?