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It had to happen

Sorry, it's AI time again.

Something unexpected but inevitable has just happened in the world of AI.

Just as, many years ago, a computer playing chess bested top human players, AI has finally bested our best creative minds in the music industry.

Believe it or not, an recording featuring an AI voice has hit the top of the music charts in the USA.

How did that happen?

According to this report, "A country-music song featuring a male singer's voice generated by artificial intelligence reached the top of the US charts for the first time this week".

This is truly a watershed moment for the creative industries.

Now we have proof that AI has successfully usurped roles that we always thought would be the exclusive domain of human passion, emotion and feeling.

We knew that computers were good at solving cold, hard logic and math problems but stuff that involves tugging on the heart-strings and soothing the savage beast? How on earth do a bunch of CPUs and GPUs running millions of lines of code come up with such stuff?

Perhaps 'tis the devil's work? :-)

Although it's not absolutely verified that the track "Walk My Walk" is an AI creation, AI-detection tools have determined a 60-90 percent certainty that it is. If so then many interesting questions are raised.

For instance... since the courts have declared that AI-generated works do not qualify for copyright protection, are people allowed to download, copy or distribute this song without fear of breaching the law?

Can others create covers of the song without the need to obtain a license for doing so?

More importantly, I guess a lot of traditional musicians and songwriters will now have to decide whether they are going to "tough it out" in a market which is rapidly filling with AI-generated content or whether they also jump on the AI bandwagon and use it as a tool to assist them in creating original works.

You can bet your bottom dollar that recording studios will be watching all this very carefully and hatching plans to harness AI to create their own tracks which they'll no doubt add just enough "human" content to that they qualify for copyright protection. Those tracks will be far more lucrative for those studios than regular music because there's no "artist" to may royalties to. Now that it's proven AI can create chart-topping music, studios will be looking to ditch one of their biggest expenses: real people writing and performing music.

Given the incredible amount of influence the powerful recording industry has within the halls of power, I fully expect copyright law to be changed in the near future to provide protection for works created by these studios using AI. Such protection may not be available to indie artists -- if only because the studios want to protect their monopolies.

It's now only a matter of time before this flows on to movies and video content. With all the fuss and excitement surrounding the debut of Tilly Norwood, perhaps the worlds first 100 percent AI actor, we may also be watching entire movies that contain not a single human actor or voice-actor.

Of course the success of AI-generated creative material will be short-lived because, as anyone with half a brain will realise, once the vast majority of such content becomes AI-generated then we enter the "doom-spiral" of feedback that sees the IA itself degrade as there is no new human-generated content for training so it feeds on itself. Just as the quality and utility of a 100th generation photocopy degrades to nothingness... such is the future of a 100 percent AI-generated music or movie industry.

Carpe Diem folks!

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