Linus Volkmann listens to computer-generated music that wants to sound like Oasis – and sees how Böhmermann’s “Menschen Leben Tanzen Welt” satire became reality faster than one would have thought.
Clicking the tick somewhere again that you’re not a robot… Annoying, isn’t it? But they’re everywhere, and the music isn’t spared either.
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Do you feel the same? That more and more people in your environment are expressing the more or less pressing concern that their job might soon be done by a robot? And by that I don’t even mean my clique from heavy industry, who expect a further boost in automation in the production plant, no, I mean above all people whose job profile has something to do with text.
You can already feel the oxidized breath of “artificial intelligence” on your neck – only three or four adjustment screws and you have to drive for Foodora, Gorillas or Uber-Foods. And that on his hipster unicycle or the cargo bike, which Malte-Apfelsine and Cordula-Maria have just grown out of.
Artificial Dementia: Autocorrect and Facebook
Oh, computer-generated texts will be the new assembly line, the next steam engine, I always think, shrugging my shoulders and looking at my cell phone. I received a warning on Facebook because a meme I posted a year ago shows Anna Beimer-Ziegler and mother Beimer. The former asks whether Benny Beimer is now a corona denier. Actually, I should “object” because this is obviously a joke and not misinformation. I’m not doing it though, the thought of trying to explain humor to one of those super smart Facebook sanctions programs already depresses me deeply. A WhatsApp later, I’m still on the phone, the autocorrect program again completely encroaches and wrongly changes the conjunction “and” into the personal pronoun “us” – recently it even made “fit” into “taken”. A nice reunion at this point with the so-called backpack-s and above all with orthography from before the spelling reform of 1998.
But just because no tech company is in the mood to update this smartphone application or employ people instead of social media sanctions programs does not mean that the entire artificial intelligence is still at the level of a bullying school dropout of the nineties .
I too have been confronted with the ChatGPT phenomenon. Most lastingly when a friend sent me an endlessly long talk between Schopenhauer and Voltaire. The alarming words that the AI came up with, soon we will all be superfluous!
To be honest, my knowledge of the works of Schopenhauer and Voltaire is so spotty that I cannot make any statements about the factual reliability of this fake dialogue, but the whirring and aimless rearrangement of what the ChatGPT has appropriated from the available sources has I was incredibly bored, especially after one page. Well, the job of ghostwriting non-punched philosophical dialogue seems pretty shaky, but is it really that much of a threat?
Stochastic unequal intelligence
Last year I saw an interesting exhibition on the subject of artificial intelligence at the HMKV in Dortmund. There the hype was reflected (not only) with artistic means and the background behind all the playful apps of the present time was shown.
Attention, now comes an important quote for all those who actually feel shaken by the current AI hype. It comes from Francis Hunger, one of the three curators of the “House Of Mirrors” exhibition:
“I was very fascinated myself at first. But the more I worked my way into it and looked at the technical basics, the more I realized that there was very little intelligence there. But that it is mainly about pattern recognition and statistics. You could therefore also, if you put it badly, describe the whole field as automated statistics.”
This quote brings the current AI hype back to earth quite well, but of course one should not underestimate the power of patterns and statistics. The triumph of streaming services may initially have been due to the new, convenient music playback format, but the algorithms of Spotify and others also contribute to the attraction of such providers. Of course, as a music journalist, you see it with teary eyes that those algorithms can determine music so precisely in terms of frequencies, beats and the like that they can recommend other songs with a very similar tonality. Songs that sometimes actually meet the taste of the listener. Categories such as textual statements or the important question of what an act stands for are left out, but this does not detract from the functionality of such algo-AIs.
Blumfeld bots and toco droids
And of course it goes even deeper. Where 15 years ago people were still creatively kicking ass in music forums (try to irritate the AI with such unexpected formulations, which is certainly already trying to calculate my “one-off” writing in advance), i.e. where kicking ass was, was when to Internet forum times when fans of well-known bands such as Blumfeld and Tocotronic came up with the idea of what new song titles for their favorite band could be called.
In the end, this is also an edifying game of pattern recognition and probability calculation. Of course, now that the AI participates in such games, such fortune-telling regarding new song titles has lost its fun. I mean, who wants to do mental arithmetic when there’s a calculator?
The next step, of course, is for the AI to write lyrics “in the style of” a popular band. But the all-clear: How cliched, low-emotional and free of surprises do you want to write that an electronic statistics monster can do it just as well? The answer to this question is of course “people, life, dance, world”.
Even before the ChatGPT hype, it was dissected how interchangeable and rhetorical the commercially oriented pop junk can be. And of course these lyrics can be recreated by a computer and maybe that makes the one lyricist or the other lyricist diligently pitching Universal heartbreak lines starting to get nervous. But at the end of the day, everyone knows: there won’t be a demo to stand up for the fact that all the dispensable pop hit texts have to remain in human hands. If you are really stuck in this professional field, you should perhaps give the unicycle a general overhaul for this application to the courier service – or just write something unique. Something so unique that even the AI ”thinks,” “okay, nobody could have guessed that, bloody meatball!”
From ABBA to Aisis
But then I got a little queasy when my colleague Ingo Scheel presented a link for his research on the subject: Aisi’s “The Lost Tapes”. So music of an artificial intelligence (AI stands for artificial intelligence) in the style of Oasis? Pop clips with musicians who have already died are now possible via “Deep Fakes”. Which is actually only logical, because this just seems to be the next step after concerts where Tupac appeared as a hologram – or if you think of ABBA, which can be doubled live using avatars. But the fact that the AI can now manage entire albums “in the style of” is no longer really comfortable, even for me as a culture optimist. However, my expertise with Oasis is very limited.
So I would be very interested to know how die-hard fans of the popular Gallagher brothers rate the quality of that music. However, since there are no longer any guest books on websites, I would like to refer you to the old bogus giant “Facebook” (#StandingOnThShoulderOfGiants). At myself (was just warned = badass!), but above all, of course Musikexpress Facebook account is open for discussion.
And everyone who already wants to drink battery acid at the presentation of two AI Gallaghers should be told that the accompanying text of this “act” does not fully explain what role the AI plays here and what an Oasis loyal fan band . At least for me, this information remains a mystery – even if I had the YouTube text accompanying “The Lost Tapes” translated by the DeepL program.
Conclusion: At some point the AI might really flatten us, but until then I won’t let a robot compose the soundtrack for me. Or is that already discriminatory in terms of the circuit community? Either way, welcome to the future!
Katie von Schwerin
With so much artificiality, I would particularly like to end this column with a heavy-handed recommendation. Kati von Schwerin is a songwriter associated with the BVB Ultras. Her way of writing and singing sets her apart from comparable acts for me. But quite so many precious unique selling propositions are often not so good for “the market”, so I would like to point out that a new album by Kati von Schwerin has just been released. It’s her third and it’s titled WELCOME BACK HOME, taking her one step further. Has a bit of “Bonnie Tyler for us young people,” I say.
But Kati von Schwerin doesn’t just write great songs – in her former podcast “Derby WG” you were always confronted with her talent for “rants”, i.e. lustful abuse, which Kati primarily directed against annoying contemporary phenomena. So I asked the Beatles fan to listen to Aisis, the aforementioned AI act. She conveys a few clear words on this, with which I will now end this column. Thank you Kati from Schwerin.
“Was it really necessary for the AI to also attack the culture? Wasn’t it enough that Spotify & Co hammered at the music until it became a disposable item? So now you can also make your own album by artist XY because you don’t want to wait any longer for the next work? Anyone who really believes that there is somewhere or sometime a place or a time where music and AI lovingly walk hand in hand across a meadow of flowers has still not understood what music means. It’s about authenticity, transporting emotions and enjoying the soul. Nothing AI will ever be able to do. And if anyone comes up with the idea of using AI to create a new Prince album, I’ll smack them in the face myself.”
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