With the advent of “synthetic music” generated by artificial intelligence, humanity is approaching the ultimate democratization of art and the obsolescence of human talent.

For the first time, a music label has signed a contract with an AI music creator, the Associated Press recently reported. Oliver McCann, who uses the rather prosaic stage name “imoliver,” was bestowed this dubious honor, which itself is a harbinger of the death of the musical arts. A middling millennial who admits he has “no musical talent at all,” McCann sought to use one of these intrinsically derivative chatbots as a defibrillator to “bring some of my lyrics to life.”

McCann’s experiment succeeded according to his lights: he generated a track that garnered 3 million streams and, consequently, earned him a contract with Hallwood Media, an independent record label.

Exuberantly oblivious to the ramifications of his odious milestone, this nonmusical Dr. Frankenstein was refreshingly open about his shortcomings: “I can’t sing, I can’t play instruments, and I have no musical background at all.”

He is not alone in substituting computer skill for musical talent in what has come to be known as the genre of synthetic music. Keats was on to something when he wrote that “beauty is truth, and truth beauty.” Synthetic music is neither.

Replacing musical instruments with AI music-generation tools such as Suno and Udio, gaggles of artist wannabes have emerged. According to the Associated Press they are “most notably highlighted by a fictitious group, Velvet Sundown, that went viral even though all its songs, lyrics and album art were created by AI.”

As one could imagine, this is not sitting well with real songwriters and musicians. Apparently, actual musicians who used to perform at charity events now have to band together to protest their own plight:

More than 1,000 musicians, including Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and Damon Albarn, released a silent album to protest proposed changes to UK laws on AI they fear would erode their creative control.

Record companies, too, are rightly concerned: “Three major record companies, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Records, filed lawsuits last year against Suno and Udio for copyright infringement.” Why? AI aggregates existing content and repurposes it in accordance with the user’s directive. As such, it inherently runs into copyright and other legal issues. Bluntly, AI generated bogus muzak is plagiarism. The only question remaining, it seems, is how to define an acceptable level of plagiarism, lest one incur a lawsuit for copyright infringement.

Having explored how AI impacts artists’ imagination, works, and audience, it is clear how the technology’s generative process is an inherently derivate—not creative—process. While individuals like McCann may want to put their words to music by utilizing AI, they are compelled to use music written and performed by real musicians. While McCann and others may have written “lyrics,” those do not require musical accompaniment to be art in themselves; it is called poetry, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth well knew when they composed the Lyrical Ballads. (Granted, humanity is ready to pull the plug on poetry, too.)

Ultimately, the discordant debate over AI generated sounds masquerading as music is just part of the overarching march of “transhumanism.” As humanity lurches away from inspiration and creation toward machine-driven derivation, we continue to squander the now-endangered better angels of our nature for our baser instincts, and the ephemeral pleasures of indulging them.

That is a high price to pay for what the Associated Press calls “AI slop—automatically generated low-quality mass-produced content.” And it further led AP to note how “it also cast a spotlight on AI song generators that are democratizing song making but threaten to disrupt the music industry.”

Having made billions marketing human created musical slop for decades, the record industry will survive the rise of bogus muzak. Indeed, it may well make even more money tossing swine for pearls. AP cites Josh Antonuccio, director of Ohio University’s School of Media Arts and Studies:

Just think about what it used to cost to make a hit or make something that breaks. And that just keeps winnowing down from a major studio to a laptop to a bedroom. And now it’s like a text prompt—several text prompts.

As for the audience’s reaction to bogus muzak, Antonuccio is equally bullish about the genre’s cancerous growth into mass appeal: “It’s a total boom. It’s a tsunami. [The amount of AI generated music] is just going to only exponentially increase’ as young people grow up with AI and become more comfortable with it.”

Regrettably, many are predicting the same “tsunami” regarding the entire transhumanism movement.

On the Doors’ Strange Days album, Jim Morrison divined this transhuman/posthuman future may not be the improvement so many like to predict is coming:

I hear a very gentle sound
With your ear down to the ground
“We want the world and we want it – now.”
Now?
“Now!”

Persian night, babe
See the light, babe
Save us, Jesus
Save us!

When the music’s over
Turn out the lights…

Well, the music is your special friend
Dance on fire as it intends
Music is your only friend
Until the end

The end? That is when we metastasize into the sterile, Godless darkness of posthumanism.