AI Pop Music is Insane

It's too easy to make "new" music and we need a regulatory answer.

I did generate 4 AI songs for this piece, but I am also sharing 3 songs that real people worked on at the end. Since their songs are the product of actual labor that deserve to be monetized, and mine aren’t, please make sure to give all the human artists a listen.

While many people have embarrassing stories to tell about the time their boyfriend or girlfriend looked at their kid pictures for the first time, my version of that story is nothing but positive. This isn’t to say that my mom didn’t take every opportunity to embarrass me when I brought the girls I was dating home to meet them, they did that in spades, but they never shared embarrassing baby/toddler pictures of me. Instead, they shared moment that showed how my tastes and personality haven’t really changed since I was a toddler. In essence, when my parents showed my girlfriends the photo album they confirmed “What you see is what you get with Christian and it’s not likely to change anytime soon.”

My wife has a particular favorite picture of me sitting on a couch in the Baumholder military barracks where I am reading a comic book and have the worlds largest headphones on. I have no idea what song I was listening to and I can’t remember what the comic book was at the moment, but that image describes me to this day. I love to have music playing at home, I love comic books, and I’m constantly in search of new “input” for my brain.

My love of music led me to start watching Rick Beato’s videos on YouTube quite a while ago. Between Beato’s song breakdowns and Robert Greenberg’s lectures on the history of music, my love of music has increased logarithmically. I have a deeper appreciation for all music, even genres I used to despise.

Recently Rick Beato has been doing a series of videos based on the AI “generated” band “The Velvet Sundown” who hit 500,000 listeners on Spotify recently. His first video dissects some of the songs by the “band” and discusses the future of the music industry.

Like with Beato, the growth of AI in music disturbs me for a variety of reasons. I like to support the artists who put real hard work into making something to share with an audience. The art, to borrow a concept from the film The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, is the means by which the “electrical” element of love transfers from artist to audience and from audience back to the artist. As all art is a dialogue with past art, so too is all consumption of art a conversation with the creator. It’s an often passive one, but the purpose is the same. I read old Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire issues of the Justice League and get a sense of the hard work they put in trying to entertain/delight/inform me and when I write about my experience, I share how their work affected me in positive ways. The creation of art “connects” us to one another and it only takes the smallest connection to feel the genuine love humanity is capable of. I feel this every time I read a book, listen to a song, receive a “Happy Birthday” message on Facebook (which may be the best rush of all time), or see a much appreciated thank you from a fellow Substacker like

Rebekah King

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Our art connects us across time and tide and lets us share the best of what makes us human. Yes the most active people online, at least when it comes to divisive topics like politics, have some of the darkest personality traits, but while they are the most active they are also small in number. As an aside, I do worry as more of these highly active political writers/arguers come over to Substack as they help to show the worst in mankind and I prefer to share in what is best in us and that is best demonstrated by those who create rather than those who are there solely to express rage and problematize.

Which brings me to my biggest problem with AI art. Setting aside all of the various moral arguments regarding intellectual property theft and whether the artists who formed the learning corpus for the AIs should be compensated (they should and that’s not hard to do and is a pretty simple solution), AI creation is often not a personal act of creation. I say often, because I think it can be but that doing so requires more effort than most people are currently putting into AI creation.

Beato touches upon this concept in his latest video where he uses AI to create songs by a “new indie artist” named Eli Mercer who, like The Velvet Sundown, doesn’t exist. Beato enters a few basic prompts and generates a couple of songs in minutes. It’s an interesting thing to watch, but Beato leaves the conversation on a positive note reflecting on the connection between artists and their interlocutors. The AI songs may even sound good, but musical artists who perform and find ways to really connect with their audience will always have a place in society. He doesn’t say this explicitly, but it’s the subtext of his video and it’s very similar to the point that Kurt Vonnegut made in Player Piano. In that novel, Barbers remain an unmechanized profession solely because of the personal connection they provide. Movies didn’t kill theatre because the real connection matters and the same is true of streaming. In fact, the best and most successful YouTube (and other) creators build community and connection and while AI can be a part of that, it cannot be that.

Beato’s artist and song were made in minutes and used very generic prompts and they led me to wonder if I, who like music and have family members who play music but who doesn’t play music myself, could make something using AI that captured a bit of me. In other words, what if I used my own work as a prompt instead of a single sentence description?

The first thing to do was to create a generic indie/pop-punk alternate persona who would be the singer for my songs. Like Beato, I used ChatGPT to create this person and I used a prompt similar to his but then added personal elements like my love of D&D to the description. After about five minutes of back and forth, Lucian Voss the Pop-Punk Dungeon Master was created.

While I was willing to let my avatar be created based on a minimum of information, I was reticent to use a brief prompt that then searched through an existing corpus looking for lyrics and so I asked it to create a song based on an article I wrote about my first D&D experience. I’ve told this story a number of times and was inspired to write it by a statement in Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball’s book Things We Think About Games. One way Will and Jeff’s argument regarding “pants issues” can be interpreted is that game designers, and by my extension DMs, should assume that the characters are always wearing pants. In others words, assume that the characters are competent. This led me to think about a time when I had a DM who was a literalist and kind of mean, and it happened to be my first D&D experience.

After cutting and pasting the entire article into ChatGPT to create the lyrics, this is what the AI came up with from my article.

🎵 "Read the Scroll"

[VERSE 1]
Met Sean McPhail on a Saturday,
Brothers whispering about a game to play,
Heroes born in a basement haze,
No sword, just dice and a fire-blazed gaze.

No Conan, no Elric scars,
Just Bakshi wizards and mythic stars,
He said, “You can be Aragorn or the Grey,”
And I chose spells over blades that day.

[CHORUS]

🎸 I read the scroll, like a fool with hope,
Didn’t know I’d hang from a rules-lawyer’s rope.
He laughed, “Make a save or lose control!”
Now Gandalf’s an Axe Beak, heart and soul.

You can break my spell, but not my song,
This game’s been mine all along.
You can take my dice, but not my flame,
I'll play again, despite your game.

[VERSE 2]

DM said, “I’m God, and I don’t need books,”
Smug little smirk, and the dirtiest looks.
Wingin’ it like a bird with clipped wings,
His dungeon bled rules and broken things.

Didn’t draw the map, didn’t plan the tale,
Just waited for us kids to fail.
Said, “You didn’t say he put on pants,”
Then burned us down with a no-saves chance.

[PRE-CHORUS]

But I saw dragons when I closed my eyes,
Heard battle cries under Christmas skies.
Moldvay’s words, they lit the spark,
In Fiend Folio pages, I found my heart.

[CHORUS]

🎸 I read the scroll, like a fool with hope,
Didn’t know I’d hang from a rules-lawyer’s rope.
He laughed, “Make a save or lose control!”
Now Gandalf’s an Axe Beak, heart and soul.

You can break my spell, but not my song,
This game’s been mine all along.
You can take my dice, but not my flame,
I'll play again, despite your game.

[BRIDGE - PUNK BREAKDOWN]

Attack the Keep!
No plan, just steel —
Darg with a sword and no time to feel.

Wisdom 5, but guts to spare,
Thrown to the wolves, but we didn't care.
20 sheets and a dream on fire,
Caves of Chaos — funeral pyre.

Let 'em die, then roll the next,
Let the dice decide who earns respect.
Not every game survives the man,
But every legend bloody well can.

[CHORUS - FINAL]

🎸 I read the scroll, yeah, I took that chance,
Didn’t know it’d cost my stance.
But a magic sword gleamed in my mind,
And the fool in me still tries to find...

You can break my spell, but not my song,
This world’s been mine all along.
You can mock my fall, you can steal my name—
But I’ll still play... and I’ll win the game.

[OUTRO - WHISPERED / ACOUSTIC DROP]

Make a save… or make a legend.
Roll low… or rise again.
You can leash the Axe Beak,
But you can’t kill the tale.

Like Beato, I then entered these lyrics and part breaks into Suno to create four songs with the style markers “Pop Punk,” “Male Vocals,” “Alternative,” and “Catchy.” My hope was to generate something that sounded a bit like Yellowcard or another Pop Punk band that was based on my personal experience.

The first version of “Read the Scroll” came pretty close to my initial intention and it’s my personal favorite, but I do feel odd sharing it because it’s…well..AI and there are all kinds of moral issues I have with it. Then again, I’m not presenting as a personal creation and I’m not charging for it so I feel more like this is chatting between friends than commercializing. Still, I like this song and think it captures my feelings pretty well.

Pop Punk “Read the Scroll”

The second version of the song was more along the lines of a Rise Against song that blended metal and punk. It opens relatively weakly in my opinion, but it has a couple of segments I like. It’s pretty far from what I envisioned though.

Metal Punk “Read the Scroll”

After these first two songs, I asked Suno to remix the songs with a couple of changes and got an OC Punk Version of the song and a better Rock version. The second version sounds very much like an OC Pop Punk band with slight Ska influence, the kind of punk Superman would have listened to in James Gunn’s Superman. I kind of like it too.

OC Punk “Read the Scroll”

The second Rock version of the song is significantly better than the initial Metal Rock version, but I’m still partial to the two Pop Punk versions since that’s what I asked for.

Rock “Read the Scroll”

As I mentioned, I am experiencing a bit of cognitive dissonance sharing these songs with you. I am largely opposed to much of what is happening in the AI space. After all, even though the lyrics are pulled from a personal corpus, the music isn’t. I can try to tell myself it’s no worse than what is already happening in the music industry pre-AI. After all, Sir-Mashalot combined SIX country songs and showed that they are all playing the same melody and similar lyrics, and people GOT PAID for that. For the record, I’m particularly fond of the Cole Swindell and Blake Shelton songs in this mashup, but it’s undeniable that they are all pretty much the same song.

Of course, there are still a lot of people doing really cool stuff and it’s hard to genuinely create something new, so I’ll finish off with one of my favorite D&D parody songs (that someone didn’t use AI for) and a D&D folk song. I have a particular soft spot for Roll a D6 because it contains 4th Edition D&D rulebooks.

The DM’s Lament is an example of what might be classified as Filksinging, a kind of parody folk singing that has been big in the geek convention circuit for some time.

Finally, here’s Allie Goertz’s very real example of what I was trying to emulate with AI, and I think you can see the actual work she put into the song.

Having gone through this experiment, my inner Luddite is crying out and wants to see AI regulated post haste. The artists who provide the learning corpus absolutely must be compensated for any use of their creations. That wouldn’t be hard to do and it would even provide a market distinction for an AI. We demand similar things from sampling and AI is essentially sampling then transforming using regression analysis to approximate. I think getting rid of AI is impossible, but regulating is a necessity.