AI music generators could be a boon for artists — but also problematic
It was only five years ago that electronic punk band YACHT entered the recording studio with a daunting task: They would train an AI on 14 years of their music, then synthesize the results into the album “Chain Tripping.” “I’m not interested in being a reactionary,” YACHT member and tech writer Claire L. Evans said in a documentary about the album. “I don’t want to return to my roots and play acoustic guitar because I’m so freaked out about the coming robot apocalypse, but I also don’t want to jump into the trenches and welcome our new robot overlords either.” But our new robot overlords are making a whole lot of progress in the space of AI music generation. Even though the Grammy-nominated “Chain Tripping” was released in 2019, the technology behind it is already becoming outdated. Now, the startup behind the open source AI image generator Stable Diffusion is pushing us forward again with its next act: making music. Creating harmony Harmonai is an organization with financial backing