AI is great.

Really?

If he's using AI to create arrangements that approximate what is in his head.

it's a tool, and there's plenty of technology (AI and otherwise) both in the music industry and elsewhere that can be used either well or poorly.

If a musician prompts "take these lyrics and generate a song in my style based on these previously uploaded songs" then sure, it will be a crap generic imitation of his style.

But if he supplies the tempo, key signature, chord progression, basic melodies for chorus and verse, more details about the style, etc.,

AND then critically listens to the output and keep iterating fixes -- "in measure 37 accent the 3rd beat a little more" -- and so on until it very closely matches what's in his head, then AI becomes a useful tool.

The key to AI is realizing that the QA and fine-tuning part that's really important. The first draft it spits out is usually crap.

Unfortunately, most people don't get past the first draft and try to pass it off as a finished product.

They don't need AI to create music, which is what he's doing. He's supplying a melody and having AI fill the rest in. Sorry, whether you do that once or keep refining it, that isn't impressive to me.

and real musicians never use autotune so to hell with cher and many others, right?

and real musicians never use drum machines, so phil collins is just a hack drummer, right?


it's a tool, and from hammers to AI, tools are good, bad, or ugly depending on how you use them.

if he came up with an original melody, he's a real musician before he even uploaded that melody to an AI song generator.

as i noted, if he just accepted the first draft of an arrangement, then he's being lazy and not putting any musical input into that part of the final song. however, to whatever extent he tweaks and edits and rejects what sounds bad and keeps at it until it sounds good, then that's injecting musical talent into the process.

and people are falling for it. Seeing the gutting of the arts fields by AI slop, I am not going along with the cheerleading.

I'm not willing to say it's unambiguously evil without any redeeming qualities.

Even if 98% of current usage is crap, 2% might still be beneficial.

I'll grant AI proponents a few stories like this one though I won't accept any arguments about that being the majority or anything close to it.

Did you read the article to find out how he uses AI to compose?
Did you bother to listen to any of his music - before, and after, his Parkinson's diagnosis when a medical condition robbed him of his ability to write music in the way he traditionally has (by playing it on his guitar as he writes)?
Has his music essentially changed since he has replaced physically playing his guitar with using AI to serve the same purpose?

Or are you simply assuming that since he uses AI as a tool to get around the reality that he can no longer physically use his guitar as a composing tool that what he now produces is somehow crap because he has found a replacement tool that allows him to continue composing music.

Which is why I was specific in what I said. If you didn't understand what I typed that isn't my problem.

I'm encouraging you to open your mind to the possibility that people who have artistic abilities - which they cannot physically implement - might be one of the extremely positive uses of AI.

You might want to at least listen to his before music, and his after music, before you assume that using AI as a tool makes it "shit and generic."