I think it comes as no surprise that in the last 18 months, there's been a plethora of music mixes on YouTube (as far as I'm aware) of DnB, Techno, City Funk, and every other hybridized genre of electronic and semi-electronic music being uploaded. Far more than the general average, as far as I can tell. What's more distressing is that these 'playlists' are about 90% A.I. Generated mixes, with minimal post-processing. The audio is a dead giveaway, since when you put them into a spectrogram, they are poorly mixed and optimized.

Furthermore, you can hear these strange frequencies that closely resemble notes, but pass as a beep, often at a higher register. There are 'shimmering' effects that feed back into itself, and general perplexing anomalies that, once you notice them, are explicit giveaways for an A.I. Generator being used.

What's even more confusing is that your average joe probably doesn't even realize it; they comment on how great it is, and like the video, subscribe to the user's channel, and then they move on with their day, (Or more insidiously, they're botted responses paid for by the uploader to generate traction, though I will admit that is far more paranoia in origin than fact as of writing). In either case, it's insane to me how these people can create low-effort content for immediate consumption and pretend they're genuinely mixing, producing, cutting and playing music.

Now, I don't think A.I. is in general, a terrible idea. It can streamline a bunch of things in everyday life, can keep track of your schedule, or things like that. But when it starts to cut into the collective consciousness of the internet through the artistic medium, it feels 'dirty'. I have a very nuanced opinion about this whole thing, but to summarize, it's a grey area, and extremely contextually dependent on its use and who's using it, though I have a general rubric: The more you lean on it for making finished product instead of as a tool to be used very sparingly, the more disingenuous the claim of someone being a musician becomes.

For example, if you use an A.I. generator to have a female voice sing vocals on your track because you can't afford the session rate for a vocalist, but all the music is your own creation- something made with your hands, and the lyrics you've written are ones you've written, upload the video and issue a disclaimer that those vocals are A.I. Generated, then I can see the feasibility of it.

Contrasted with someone plugging in a prompt to generate '1980s City Funk/ Dynamic Bassline/ Amen Drums', then proceed to use the product and clean it up with audacity, then post it on YouTube with the bold claim that you made it yourself, really makes the entire use of A.I. in that work pointless- It can't replicate the real sounds of a synth, or a drum machine. It has to mimic its tuning, the tempo and flams, soft and hard notes, and it will fail to emulate that same vibe.

It's a placeholder, a mimicry of the real thing, and the more people decide to take the lazy way to music production (Because that's what I see it as- Lazy) the worse the underground and indie scene will become. Outsider music as a genre will be restricted to some guy in a monkey suit slamming trash can lids for an hour. Hip-Hop and other electronic-based genres will also suffer as a result from this propagation of low-effort music, and while I for one welcome the demise of the music industry from a matter of principle (If you're too young to understand RIAA and Record Label Chicanery, I advise you to read up on music history for the last century), It has to be destroyed by the independent musicians and creators, it has to be grassroots. Otherwise, the medium becomes sublimated by an even larger and far more insidious threat- one of our own making.