AI Music Generators and Creativity

What do these brand new tools reveal about the nature of art, inspiration, and human freedom?

I made this with Midjourney — prompt was something about an album cover for a 1980s Belgian noise band — and oddly love it.

Before I embark on today’s exploration, I want to remind people that we launch our new seminar, Embracing Our Emergency, tomorrow, with a roster of amazing speakers that continues to grow (we recently added Francis Moore Lappé, Neil Theise, and climate scientist Rebekah Johnson). If you join us, you can catch the live talks and discussions — or watch the recordings and read the transcripts, which will be available the next day.

I know there are many crises (too many) happening now — the ongoing “Trumpocalypse,” horrific wars in Israel and Ukraine, and so on — and it can feel overwhelming. Personally, I think the ecological crisis is the most essential, if most difficult to confront. Our future lives and the lives of our children are directly at stake. My hope is that this seminar not only educates but also activates all of us toward new initiatives and possibilities. As readers may know, I see the ecological crisis as not just something terrible but also as an initiatory opportunity for us — a chance to directly confront both physical and spiritual realities. I hope you will join us!

Also, we don’t turn away anyone for lack of funds. Although the full price of the seminar is $300, if this feels like a financial burden, you can write to us at hello@liminal.news and let us know what feels good to you to contribute. We truly want to bring community together for this. Also, some of you may have sacrificed financial reward for your political and ecological activist work. If that is your situation, we are offering an Activist Special: $100 for the course. Here is the link.

A number of musicians I know are now officially freaking out about the new AI music generators. Random Rab, an electronic musician I’ve known for many years through the festival circuit, wrote on Instagram. “I spent an hour making about 30 songs with AI using my own lyrics “in the style of Random Rab.” I was so completely and utterly blown away I am speechless. It might take me some time to recover from this.” He couldn’t bear to reveal publicly which platform he used to perform this mimetic self-crucifixion. (One commenter on his post noted, ironically, that many musicians had no problem using AI-generated artwork for their album covers). 

At this moment I am officially obsessed with Udio, which seems a radical breakthrough. I feel compelled to generate a large number of tracks quickly because I suspect it won’t stay this good for long – whether it gets ruined by efforts to commercialize it, gets hit with copyright lawsuits or runs into some other hurdle. 

I am including a number of my just-made tracks in this post, and I am curious to hear what people think of them. In many cases, I started with a subject, had ChatGPT write initial lyrics (a starting point) and then rewrote them. In the next stage of the collaborative process, I wrote a prompt for Udio, chose musical genres and fed it my lyrics to use (it can also generate pretty good lyrics on its own). Here is one that has a punk-angst vibe, on the prophetic transition from the age of the fifth to the sixth sun:

These are just experiments. Perhaps they are all terrible (let me know what you think in the comments). I can have a strange relationship to aesthetics and style criteria, by which I mean I don’t care about it in the way I perhaps should. I often see “taste” to be a kind of class-based defense mechanism. Also, I worry my particular (strange?) sense of humor doesn’t always land these days. I amuse myself with these tracks. I find them funny, partly because they are so destabilizing. Making them feels like entering unknown territory, almost taboo.

My daughter absolutely hates anything AI generated and gives me a withering look when I try to interest her in it. I don’t really have a commercial purpose or artistic end point in mind, at this point, although I have some ideas. I think there could be opportunity to use these music generators as a means to popularizes certain ideas or educate people. For instance, this is my effort to convey some of Rudolf Steiner’s ideas (about reincarnation and our subtle bodies) in a rap song: