This chronicle was originally published on Musikindustrin.se
Daniel Johansson is technically on vacation, but can’t resist commenting from his sunbed on the past two weeks of chatter about The Velvet Sundown. He suggests we immediately stop using terms like “artist” or “band” to describe the phenomenon.
Just as I was starting my vacation, the whole media frenzy around The Velvet Sundown kicked off. My colleague Lars Nylin wrote a good column, and I gave a few comments myself.
But overall, I’m surprised by the attention the “band” has received. This isn’t new — the phenomenon has existed for quite a while, and there are many other AI concepts whose music has far more listeners and streams.
What troubles me, though, is that we even refer to this as an “artist” or a “band.”
At best, it’s a kind of virtual storytelling. I’ve compared it to Hatsune Miku, or Alvin and the Chipmunks, or Crazy Frog — fictional or animated characters who “perform” music based on narratives created by humans.
The real issue, of course, is that many people are starting to struggle to determine whether the music is human-made or AI-generated, even though in this case I personally found it quite obvious. It will get harder — especially as DSPs insist on handling all kinds of audio in the same way.
But just to be clear: The Velvet Sundown is not a real AI band.
No more than Mave, Naevis, Plave, Glorb, FN Meka, Trilok, f5ve, AiScReam, TaTa, or any of the other AI projects are real AI artists. If anything, they’re comparable to the thousands of fictional mood artists dominating many playlists — human-created fiction.
We’ll only have real AI artists and bands once the technology has evolved to the point where autonomous AI agents can make their own decisions — perhaps even with built-in emotional faculties like empathy and joy — and, in the next step, self-awareness.
Artists and bands we can relate to. Entities with something of their own to say, who can communicate with us.
When an AI agent, say ten years from now, decides on its own to create music and build an artistic identity without any human involvement in the algorithm — then we’ll have real AI artists. When the AI bot you chat with daily suddenly surprises the world with a brand-new album and launches its own marketing campaign on social media.
When a group of AI agents decide to form a band — that will be a real AI band.
Will we get there?
I’d be surprised if we don’t.
This, I believe, is the massive shift humanity will go through in the coming decades: relating to new intelligences that not only have the potential to be self-aware and autonomous beings, but that act and interact within the same societal and cultural contexts as we do. For those interested, here’s a compelling research article: AI Consciousness is Inevitable: A Theoretical Computer Science Perspective.
The ABBA holograms in London are a fantastic experience — but they’re not autonomous AI agents. Yet.
When the digital version of Björn Ulvaeus takes the stage in 50 years, I honestly believe he/she/it will be an autonomous AI agent capable of interacting with the audience. On the other hand, given that Ulvaeus seems to have found the fountain of youth, he’ll probably be there in person anyway.
But I digress.
Here’s my point: let’s not refer to today’s AI concepts as “artists” or “bands.”
They are no more artists than The Phantom, Modesty Blaise, or Donald Duck.
Calling these AI concepts artists diminishes all the human beings who are real artists and bands — autonomous and self-aware individuals who make their own decisions and who we know experience emotions as they create and perform their music.
Sure, we’ll undoubtedly see a wave of these fictional AI projects topping the charts in the near future, but they are neither artists nor bands. Once we do have real AI artists, it will be an entirely different matter. Until then, what we’re seeing are nothing more than human-created concepts.