Hendrix is back in the studio

AI is making music human-optional

Nobody knows exactly what is coming as AI becomes more powerful and more widely adopted. But the consensus is clear that the transformations to society will be rapid and profound.

I’m tuning in to smart people who are alarmed about the potential dangers of AGI (Eliezer Yudkowski, Max Tegmark) and others who are more sanguine (Sam Altman, Tyler Cowen). I’ll come back to some of those guys in future posts.

The discussion isn’t only about existential risk, surviving and thriving vs. dying and disappearing. That’s a big piece of it, but on that score, everyone’s just kind of guessing at a thing we just can’t know about yet. More compelling are the speculations about the real ways our world will change while we are on the fast track to utopia or oblivion or somewhere in between.

The alpha music nerd has weighed in. Rick Beato is a Youtube star, an affable music production and performance guru, maybe best known for his “What Makes This Song Great” videos. In the clip below, Rick surveys the landscape that is starting to take shape — where Fake Drake is better than the real thing, and when you feel like a little Fab Four, you’ll choose between the Beatles and the Beatles AI.

Rick is interested in the ramifications for the artists and the industry, and those will be huge. But what about the consumer? Regardless of who is getting paid and how, when the machines make music better will it be awesome, or alienating, or both?

When AI “finds” the album by ZZ Top that was never lost — an album that comes between Rio Grande Mud and Tres Hombres and is better than either — I think it’ll be hard to listen and easy to love.