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| Art created by Gemini for this essay. |
Before we leap in, one thing worth remembering - and it's highly likely to anger everyone reading this right now - is that most of the public discourse on this topic (at least by musicians and industry folk) has been of a legal or philosophical nature, while usually taking a brief moment to mention how "fake" AI sounds as composer or performer (or poet or essayist or visual artist).
If that's your view, you need to swallow a bitter pill: The market disagrees with you, and (by any metrics you yourself would apply to a fellow human) you are wrong.
Sienna Rose, The Velvet Sundown, Nick Hustles, Xania Monet, FN Meka, Yona, Breaking Rust, Eddie Dalton, and more....including the 100% AI driven (no human intervention) creation Anna Indiana - all streaming millions to hungry listeners. Listeners who largely don't care about any of the issues we're about to get into - they care only about if they like the music.
Admittedly, this pisses me off a little, too.
At any rate, ponder that for a moment and then we'll leap in.
While I've thought extensively about this topic (and have for longer than I care to say, as I've been an avid fan of the works of Raymond Kurzweil for a long time, starting with his 1990 book "The Age of Intelligent Machines", and, as an irrelevant aside, still own my Kurzweil K-2000 keyboard), it's usually fragmented based on specifics. I've never really coalesced these thoughts into a single, specific policy position.
So let's explore "both sides" of this issue and see where we land.
Worthy of note: It should be obvious that the history given below (on both sides of the issue) is greatly abbreviated and oversimplified for brevity and ease of discussion. But the major pillars remain.
Let's get into it!
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