I’m struggling with how much a really like AI-generated music.
A lot of time, I just have music on in the background while I work., Instrumentals are great for this. Lately, I’ve been listening to “Spy Jazz” which is some moody stuff that sounds like it’s from the 60s. It’s… mindless. It just plays in the background, like the soundtrack to “Oceans 12,” and I don’t think about it much.
But then I found Eddie Dalton. And this has me a little worried.
Eddie doesn’t exist, clearly. You can tell from the picture on the YouTube channel that he’s purely a figment of AI. He’s supposedly a graying Black man that sings soulful tunes about love – some lost, and some not.
What has me concerned are that the lyrics are kind of amazing.
“I still buy that same old red wine,
even though you ain’t been here in a long, long time.
A glass or two and you’re back in this place,
sitting over there with that smile on your face.”
When you identify with a human songwriter, there’s some sense of solidarity in that. There’s another person who went through the same thing you did. You and the creator are in this together.
“And I remember you laughing in the candle light,
bare feet on the floor on a Friday night.
You were talking about forever like it’s yours and mine,
Now it’s me in this bottle trying to turn back time.”
But what do you do when there’s no human behind it? Can you identify with music that was generated by an algorithm?
“Oh, I tell myself one day I won’t reach for the shelf,
find a way to raise a glass to somebody else.
But tonight I’m running back to what was mine,
Drowning what we had, one sip at a time.”
Eddie has become a bit of a sensation. Apparently he’s in the Top 5 of iTunes. Judging from the YouTube comments, either a lot of people don’t realize he’s not real, or they’re all AI-generated too.
(Interestingly, I think lots of people are generating Eddie Dalton songs now. Outside of the “official” channel, there are other channels with slightly different sounds, which suggests that other people are uploading existing Eddie Dalton songs to AI and saying, “Make me something like this,” which is a weirdly fascinating concept. If Eddie doesn’t exist, who “owns” him?)
At Content Marketing World a couple years ago, I watched Elizabeth Banks say something like, “AI will never surprise us, because it basically IS us. It’s the sum total of recorded human experience.”
Well, music is built on cliches. Part of the strength of music is that we identify with it. This means it’s ironically easy for AI to generate a song that really speaks to the human condition.
Honestly, I wish I didn’t like Eddie. But I really do, and I find it unsettling.