Dear AI, your music sucks.

Dear AI, your music sucks.

Every second glance I take recently is consciously pierced with the sloppy imposter of AI. when I walk down the street, I see advertising signs of people with six fingers and am upside down eye, when I look at menus, I see names of food and cocktails with pseudonym names that have no relation to what’s being served, when I watch videos online, there are celebrities doing out-of-character gymnastics and when I turn on the radio my heart sinks. Music has always been something ripped straight from the heart. Every hard time, every fight, every uncomfortable situation I have ever felt has been processed and resolved by exposing all my secrets in the form of lyrics. It’s not a comfortable thing to do and it never will be; but aside from the fact that it helps me process a lot of my life, I do it anyway for the hope that someday someone will relate to me. Someday, someone will say “I felt that too” and the longing for that acceptance of comfort is what drives me forward and keeps me going. It’s an innately human thought process and that is why my heart has begun to sink. The monotonous looping structure of songs made by a robot has started to piss me off. It's not feelings of threat that its music is better than mine, but feelings of genuine discomfort that are invoked every time I hear a song made by AI. It’s the idea that someone has sat down and, instead of pulling their strings loose for the sake of art, they have chosen instead to employ a futuristic monster to do it for them.

Recently there has been a scary rise in the amount of AI music being made but, even scarier, there has been a rise in its ability to get radio plays. Like I said, I have never once felt threatened by its out-of-touch, heartless drone, but if it’s starting to get radio plays, it must be doing something right. And it is just that. There is nothing “right” about asking an AI generator to make music, because it dismantles every single reason why music not only should but HAS to be created. The hardship of human experience is, in itself, kind of selfish. We make music based on our experiences and things that mould us into the clay of life. And that is how it should be, because we mentally cannot ever place ourselves into anyone else’s mind. We write and we write like song mules to our brains to be able to locate feelings and express them in healthy ways. Matty Healy said it best: sincerity is scary and it really is. We place our emotions at the foreground of our art and play them in front of an audience for everyone to listen and judge. We write songs about our friends, our partners, our families and our enemies and then perform them into a microphone in front of their very faces. And that is the beauty of what makes music special. We create metaphors and similes, rhyme and reasons for situations and turn that into a painting of occurrences that vaguely resembles our day-to-day lives. And that is something AI cannot and will not ever experience. AI won't ever feel betrayed by their closest friends or cheated on with someone that never even asked them out. It won't ever feel conditioned by their parents to go down a certain strain of work or feel neglected by those closest to them. It won't ever feel the joy of receiving flowers out of the blue or the gentle reminders that you're loved. So how can it make music about any of those feelings?

I have been really trying to pinpoint the infernal rage that AI music makes me feel and struggled to do so. Is it the crap that it calls “music”? The phoney make-believe that it calls experience? I think it goes deeper than that. I think it’s the fact that I feel cheated. AI has stolen from my mind and everyone else’s mind that has ever put their music out into the world. It has taken our hardships and experience and morphed them into a terrible

photocopy of its own. I feel like I have a toxic friend who copies my hair. Then copies my makeup. Then copies my clothes until they have become a clone of me. It starts with feelings of flattery, that they must like what I have and who I am if they so deeply desire to be like me. But slowly turns to frustration that they can’t just think independently and create a sense of self uniquely theirs. And AI has no independence. It takes and copies and steals like a professional robber, taking everything we hold close and reducing it to a hook of a verse. And then after taking everything we've got, it steals our opportunities too? Taking radio plays people work years for, taking the only way your music can be broadcast outside of your current audience, and taking away your already slim chances of making it in an ever-changing industry. That’s what angers me the most.

I watch my friends work themselves to the bone, peeling away their inner demons and placing them onto a piece of paper. Covering that with riffs and beats they have worked hours to manufacture and then using all of their hard-earned money to make it digital so we all can listen to it as well. And they are being cheated by a monster with no brain. They are being pushed aside so a fake song can be played instead, and that is what angers me more. How have we got to a point where we can’t even recognise the difference between real human experience and a machine that is weaponised to replicate that? Cool Fm and Downtown radio have played this pigswill and given it a platform, allowing it to rear its ugly head in our local music scene, and that is something people will not stand for.

Cormac Neeson, along with California Irish, has created a project named off the slop of one of these songs, “The Old Town”. They have created the hashtag #thisoldtownisreal, and it's a pleasure and privilege to see. REAL artists making their own versions of the song, rooted in their different styles, inspirations and experiences. Writing from their minds and their hearts and putting them online as a form of digital protest to the AI songs around us. I have been awed at all the different artists' various takes on their song, proving the necessity of the project. Human emotion cannot be replicated or stolen because it is uniquely ours. I have written a song that is ready to be recorded for the project about the somewhat selfish nature of overthinking that has to be done to write a song. The placing of me in different areas of my brain to weave a song together, the locking of me into a red room of my mind to pull out the most vulnerable form of honesty. And a line that has stood out to me from it all, which is the centre of my song, is “Call me a mindless fool, but at least I'm a fool with a mind. " I don't care about being pushed down or told making music is foolish or not needed because in times like these it’s proved just how important it is.

So, sincerely, AI, fuck you.