Sickly Sweet Insubstantiality: Generative AI in Popular Music

The music produced here is eminently forgettable, perhaps highlighting a bias of the attention economy towards confectionery-like superficiality. We’re being overwhelmed by a tide of short sharp bursts of information content that lack substantive value or meaning. As a kind of procedural “hollowing out” of ourselves and our diverse histories, this surely poses a risk to the preservation and sustainment of cultural knowledge. AI need not understand the indefinitely extensible (i.e. mathematical) logic of music, but then – this is already a common enough deficit in the contemporary mass manufacture of culture.