Coming soon: Will AI ruin music?

0:00Ludovic Hunter-Tilney: What happens when you let artificial intelligence make its own music? That was absolutely horrific. That was like a bizarre Guns N' Roses. AI music generators are spreading across the internet, and they're getting better and better at producing their own songs.

0:27Ludovic Hunter-Tilney: That was actually really quite good. That is a winner. For some musicians, generative AI is the next frontier in music making. That's kind of how I see these AI models. I see them as a grand collective human accomplishment. But for others, it could spell the end of music as we know it. AI music is everywhere. Of course, it puts people out of work. It's going to make it incredibly hard to make any money at all in this industry. You make that sound like an existential threat to the very practice of music itself. I think it is. I'm Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, the FT's pop critic and in a two-part series of Techtonic I'm investigating the spread of AI-generated music and asking what the impact might be on the music industry from the studios of working musicians to the streaming platforms that deliver music to the masses and we'll be finding out about the legal battle over how AI music generators are built and who owns the music they make AI music would not be able to sound like it does today if it wasn't for the fact that there's been a big theft, basically, of music without consent.

1:33It's a moral travesty that that's been allowed to happen.

1:35Ludovic Hunter-Tilney: In a world where technology is continually transforming popular music, is the fear of AI just technophobia? Or could AI music end up replacing human music altogether? That's Tectonic from the Financial Times, coming soon wherever you get your podcasts.