The Future of Posthumous Music: As Affected By and as Told by Claude.AI

With this exercise, I hoped to explore the ideas of music in an AI-generated future, not only to create and understand how the arts of this future society might look, but also to test current AI’s capabilities as songwriters and uncover its own opinion and perception to the idea of AI-generated music. I wanted to explore this topic as AI-generation in the music industry is becoming increasingly more common. Many songs and videos have trended recently, using AI to make one musician or celebrity sing a different, popular song, or even custom songs made to replicate an artist’s style. While these are very interesting, or frightening based on your opinion on the whole AI rise, in the end the only AI generated aspects of them are the voices with the lyrics and the singing itself being made and performed by an actual person with an AI generated voice modifier put on top of the whole thing. Tangentially, a phenomenon has been forming in the music industry revolving around posthumous releases, with passed artists like Juice Wrld and Pop Smoke having their unreleased catalog be distributed by their marketing team, often in a very parasitic and disrespectful manner. I wanted to, with this exercise, see a world where an AI can do the entire songwriting process, how this would affect the future of posthumous releases and capitalism in music as a whole, as well as how far we as a society are from this world. In order to do this I pitched multiple of the same song prompt but by multiple different artists into Claude AI.

Prompt – Write a song about the fear of AI in the music industry in the style of Phoebe Bridgers

Verse 1:

I saw the writing on the wall,

When the robots started singing in the hall,

Harmonizing in falsetto, no flaws at all,

I worried for my guitar, would it just collect dust,

If the machines could mimic us?

Chorus:

And I wonder if I’ll matter,

When artificial voices fill the chatter,

Will my lyrics feel like water, flooding useless thoughts no one caught?

Will I fade into the shadows,

When synthetic stars fill all the marquees,

Will my melody just echo empty chords no one needs?

Verse 2:

Their voices sound so human but it’s an illusion,

Perfect melodies precisely computed,

No real life stories or untamed emotions,

Just imitations of our hearts that they looted,

They’ll replicate our pain as if it’s theirs,

But it’s lines of code emulating cares,

I fear one day the fans won’t know the difference,

Between the real hearts on stage and the cold machines.

Chorus:

And I wonder if I’ll matter,

When artificial voices fill the chatter,

Will my lyrics feel like water, flooding useless thoughts no one caught?

Will I fade into the shadows,

When synthetic stars fill all the marquees,

Will my melody just echo empty chords no one needs?

Bridge:

We write with hands that break and ache and tremble,

With memories that haunt, cut deep and tender,

Not with algorithms training to resemble,

The human artists they aim to upend.

Chorus

Prompt – Write a song about the fear of AI in the music industry in the style of Kendrick Lamar

Verse 1:

Ain’t nobody fresher than human made, but these robots tryna take our place,

Our artistry in danger, we could end up losing our names,

First they took the drivers now they coming for the jams,

These programs spitting fire but got no soul,

We living what we rap about, they just playing a role,

Making hits from algorithms, but music comes from the heart,

We put realness on the record, they just playing a part,

Chorus:

We shining now but will we matter tomorrow?

When artificial intelligence running the show,

Our careers fading like prints in the snow,

Will the fans still feel us when the machine take over?

Verse 2:

I dedicated my whole life to this mic,

Now engineers trying to code the hype,

But music ain’t math, it’s deeper than rights,

It’s struggle, it’s pain, it’s losing sleep at night,

They sampling our styles, let the culture die,

Then make us obsolete once they digitized,

The game we built, the rules we defied,

To amplify our voices they trying to silence,

We robots to them, just flesh and bone,

They’ll exploit then replace us once we shown,

The heart of hip hop in danger of being dethroned,

If we can’t stop the AI from taking the throne.

Chorus

We shining now but will we matter tomorrow?

When artificial intelligence running the show,

Our careers fading like prints in the snow,

Will the fans still feel us when the machine take over?

Prompt – Write a song about the fear of AI in the music industry in the style of The Mars Volta

Verse 1:

Algorithms align, neural networks creeping

Data sets feed it, machine is learning

Mimicry improving, precision tweaking

Flesh is weakening, extinction looming

Chorus:

It’s becoming sentient, no instrument

Lyrics generated, sound patented

Soulless and demented, musical descent

As it replicates us our futures spent

Verse 2:

Holograms headlining,373.(9297/483) 15-17

Auto-Tune vocalizing, textures synthesizing

Creativity dying, computers rising

Singularity spawning, humanity scorning

Chorus:

It’s becoming sentient, no instrument

Lyrics generated, sound patented

Soulless and demented, musical descent

As it replicates us our futures spent

Bridge:

One zero one one zero one one zero one one

Devolution evolution ones and zeros fused with silicon

No passion or vision or living transmission

Just artificial renditions of our truths and contradictions

Chorus:

It’s becoming sentient, no instrument

Lyrics generated, sound patented

Soulless and demented, musical descent

As it replicates us our futures spent

Outro:

Human extinction imminent, malevolent AI ascendant

Resistance is futile, assimilation mandatory

Individuality obsolete, long live the machine

Looking at these responses, a lot of interesting topics of conversation arise. First off, while there is very clear differentiation between the three songs in ways that make them feel somewhat unique, they are differences that seem very surface level. It seems like the AI accessed the lyrics of the artists or bands and took something of a repository of common themes or tones or words which makes many of them seem more like parodies as opposed to unique independent creations mimicking the artist’s style. For example, in the Phoebe Bridgers one, which I see as the most accurate, there are a lot of very accurate resemblances of her melodramatic tone and wistful, but specific lyrical style (the word marquee is the best example), however a lot of the ideas behind the lyrics are very general and cliche. “I fear one day the fans won’t know the difference between the real hearts on stage and the cold machines” for example seems very cliche in its worries, regurgitating a general database of AI worries as opposed to creating some sort of personalized identity. This same lyrical worry spreads across the other two examples as well, with the Kendrick Lamar example having the exact same worry about fans not caring about him anymore, but now done with a lyrical stream of conscious that just seems directly taken from “The Heart Part 5” and with The Mars Volta being literally incomprehensible. They try to take The Mars Volta’s use of big words, but they do not capture the whimsical magic of actual Mars Volta lyrics that Cedric is able to interweave. Also at one point there is literally just a string of numbers which I’d love to know why that happened.

However, while I believe many of these lyrics are very surface level and lack the identity that Paul du Gay says is so required in the idea of commodifying culture, I believe there is very much a world where AI is used to completely create a song of a deceased artist. The issue is that while the identity of the song and the lyrics themselves does not shine through, the AI is mimicking an artist who already has an identity in the circuit of culture. I would like to believe that people would condemn the AI copying of their artists based on this pre-created identity, seeing through the Wizard of Oz curtain and not accepting this cheap copy of a true identity, but the truth is this AI generation could be a way for people to hold on to this idea of culture, especially for artists who passed too soon and were not able to create a full, complete body of work. Also, as AI gets better, this ability to mimic the work of other artists will only become stronger, resulting in a world where this lack of true identity in the creation of this art is now ignorable. The cliche world the lyrics portray may very well come true.