Some of us hold the sentiment that artificial intelligence should not in any way, shape, form, or fashion exist anywhere near the arts. This is not a bad sentiment to have; considering what soulless manmade glut can get approved by major film studios these days, for example, we sometimes seem just a hop, skip, and a jump away from reaching the point of no return, as it were.
And yet, there’s absolutely no denying the raw comedic power of watching a computer aggregate the singular twangs and drones of country music, and subsequently spit out the most bombastically stupid tangle of the genre’s buzzwords this side of Kentucky. Indeed, so long as the aforementioned “point of no return” is instead a point where my sides won’t recover from all the wheeze-laced laughing these AI songs have evoked in me, by all means, keep giving the computers a seat at the table, @beatsby.ai.
In what may be the most spectacular run at the Grammys ever undertaken by a rock that we humans tricked into thinking, an AI program (enabled and platformed by TikTok‘s @beatsby.ai) has pumped out what it believes to be the next hit country song. And folks, the relatability is off the charts here; as someone who grew up just outside of rurality, my heart is warmed for all the country enthusiasts of today who now have such relatable sentiments to look forward to in their playlists; sentiments like having corn on your mind, or guns in your butt, or “big red cups boots dirty beer dirty butts guns get the loud mud.” Indeed, maybe AI has had all the answers all along; Luke Combs certainly never challenged my perception of dirty beer and loud mud and gun-filled butts the way this machine is. If Johnny Cash were alive today, the happy tears would be immaculate; in fact, this music is the sort of mythological melodic titan that may actually revive Johnny Cash, if for no other reason than the fact that the legendary singer now has some worthy competition.
Jokes aside, there’s something to be said about the slippery slope that comes with normalizing AI art and songs in any capacity, even if that normalization comes primarily by way of getting a hearty dose of the giggles from it. Nevertheless, reacting to these songs with such laughter is entirely representative of the unconquerable nature of the human spirit; the value of these songs lie entirely in the fact that we do not and cannot engage with it sincerely.
Indeed, human creativity isn’t going anywhere, unlike all those guns that seem dead set on staying in various butts.