Generative AI album releases - Music - Forums : Best Ever Albums

albummaster

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Just wanted to get people's thoughts on whether generative AI releases should be allowed on BEA?

There seem to be a few artists using generative AI technology to create albums (and some of these releases are on Bandcamp). I'm expecting there will be people on both sides of the fence, so please let us know your thoughts about whether these types of albums should be allowed on BEA.

Romanelli

Bone Swah

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Location: Broomfield, Colorado

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albummaster wrote:

Just wanted to get people's thoughts on whether generative AI releases should be allowed on BEA?

There seem to be a few artists using generative AI technology to create albums (and some of these releases are on Bandcamp). I'm expecting there will be people on both sides of the fence, so please let us know your thoughts about whether these types of albums should be allowed on BEA.

Well...since you asked...

Absolute hard NO for me. As a music lover, I find AI generated music to be inferior, cheap sounding, but most of all, lacking in human creativity. As a musician, I find it to be lower on the creative scale than karaoke.

Allowing albums that are generated by AI means that we would be acknowledging the abilities of people with zero musical talent to go to an AI site and make "songs" in less than a minute, and putting that alongside the creative work that musicians who actually sing and play music that has actually been written by human beings.

I just went to an AI site and "created" 3 songs. The site asked me for a genre, a subject, and made 3 horrible generic sounding pieces of plastic "music" that involved zero human input. Fully "written" and "produced". I'm sorry. No. AI "music" can be created in seconds with zero creativity. We are better than that.

I believe that allowing AI generated albums on BEA would diminish what this is by cheapening the sites definition of what albums are. I don't care about what may or may not generate more traffic. To me, AI crosses the line of musical integrity, and if allowed on BEA, we would be making a statement that BEA believes AI generated music to be the creative equal of music that human beings have actually worked hard to create. I could not, in good conscience, be a part of that.
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Hayden

Location: Vietnam

I think utilizing AI in the mixing/recording process isn't the worst thing in the world, particularly with recent sound-isolation technology, but I don't particularly appreciate it (from a behind-the-glass standpoint). Entire songs/albums though? I think it would be a good stand to bar it.

This is going to be a very interesting (and important) discussion in art for the next few years. I'm still very torn on the use of AI in Brody's performance in The Brutalist. This is not your old 'acoustic instruments vs electronic instruments' argument. This is much closer to what teachers in school used to classify as cheating.

Also, what's the point of making an entire albums entirely with AI? What fun is that? Who exactly wins here? Why the world is insisting the first thing the robot uprise takes over is art is mindboggling.

albummaster

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Gender: Male

Location: Spain

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Romanelli wrote:

I believe that allowing AI generated albums on BEA would diminish what this is by cheapening the sites definition of what albums are. I don't care about what may or may not generate more traffic. To me, AI crosses the line of musical integrity, and if allowed on BEA, we would be making a statement that BEA believes AI generated music to be the creative equal of music that human beings have actually worked hard to create. I could not, in good conscience, be a part of that.

I share your thoughts, however it might not be clear in all cases if AI has been involved (especially if/when technology improves). It's going to be hard to moderate and as well if only a proportion of the album has been AI assisted, how do we identify it as we cannot listen to every release that gets added here. There are some thresholds that need to be defined.

A big concern as well, is that the site becomes flooded by AI releases when/if the streaming platforms begin to legitimise them (just like Bandcamp seem to be doing) and then making them appear as legitimate as other releases (when in reality they are not). They're so easy to create, they'll become a dime a dozen.

baystateoftheart

Neil Young as a butternut squash

Age: 30

Location: Massachusetts

Hayden wrote:

I think utilizing AI in the mixing/recording process isn't the worst thing in the world, particularly with recent sound-isolation technology, but I don't particularly appreciate it (from a behind-the-glass standpoint). Entire songs/albums though? I think it would be a good stand to bar it.

This is going to be a very interesting (and important) discussion in art for the next few years. I'm still very torn on the use of AI in Brody's performance in The Brutalist. This is not your old 'acoustic instruments vs electronic instruments' argument. This is much closer to what teachers in school used to classify as cheating.

Also, what's the point of making an entire albums entirely with AI? What fun is that? Who exactly wins here? Why the world is insisting the first thing the robot uprise takes over is art is mindboggling.

albummaster wrote:

I share your thoughts, however it might not be clear in all cases if AI has been involved (especially if/when technology improves). It's going to be hard to moderate and as well if only a proportion of the album has been AI assisted, how do we identify it as we cannot listen to every release that gets added here. There are some thresholds that need to be defined.

+1 to these. I hate AI for the most part, but I think any restrictions should be limited to entirely AI albums. There are plenty of records already that are predominantly human but incorporate AI in some form, from that buzzed-about Beatles single to this acclaimed 2019 album that was co-created with (a much earlier and custom-made) AI:

Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.

Proto by Holly Herndon

It will become more common for an element here or there to be AI-assisted within overwhelmingly human-made works, and that will be impossible to police. But if there's no human input beyond writing a prompt, I agree that we should draw a line in the sand.
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MadhattanJack

Just to end the list...

Gender: Male

baystateoftheart wrote:

It will become more common for an element here or there to be AI-assisted within overwhelmingly human-made works, and that will be impossible to police. But if there's no human input beyond writing a prompt, I agree that we should draw a line in the sand.

The people writing the prompts to generate (I won't use the word "making") these albums never identify themselves as such, or explain exactly how they're doing it, so how would we know? Think

Maybe this is just a coincidence, but this thread was started about 7 hours after I added this album to my 2025 chart:

Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.

Afterimage by Glasstrees

It's obviously AI-generated, but hey, I liked it. Sure, Glasstrees puts out albums almost once a week, so they're obviously not human, but I can't prove they're not human. According to their Facebook page, they're a "two-piece band" consisting of "Miss Tree (vocals/guitar/noises)" and "Dr. Glass (vocals/bass/noises)." (Here's the album on Bandcamp.) Sure, I have terrible taste and I deserve total and complete condemnation, that's obvious, but meanwhile these AIs are getting better at this stuff literally by the hour. In my defense, I did make it the last entry on my 2025 chart, but if you go back to 2024, the self-titled album by "The Debasers" came in at #91, beating out several real humans.

If the site decides to ban AI albums, I won't complain, though it would probably be hypocritical of me to promote the idea myself. Long story short, I don't think the solution here is to just ban them, based on what will almost always be suspicion and not proof. The people behind these "artists" aren't going to admit they're AIs, and let's also not forget that other sites like Discogs and AllMusic aren't going to help us with this, at least not initially.

So... personally I'd recommend starting with some sort of "cultural shift" approach, whereby we start by encouraging people to add comments to albums that are clearly AI, saying "this is clearly AI." We could also make AI a nationality — I know that sounds counterintuitive, but think about it. It might be the most appropriate way to flag them, not to mention the easiest.

If not, we could instead add a little icon or something to each suspected-AI entry, similar to what we do now with compilations or live albums, the image for which could just be the letters "AI" or better yet, the glowing red eye of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

albummaster

Janitor

Gender: Male

Location: Spain

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MadhattanJack wrote:

The people writing the prompts to generate (I won't use the word "making") these albums never identify themselves as such, or explain exactly how they're doing it, so how would we know? Think

Maybe this is just a coincidence, but this thread was started about 7 hours after I added this album to my 2025 chart:

Not a coincidence, I read your comment in the mod history and responded saying we needed a wider discussion (should have mentioned you in original post, sorry, but didn't want to prejudice argument by singling out this album/artist).

MadhattanJack wrote:

If the site decides to ban AI albums, I won't complain, though it would probably be hypocritical of me to promote the idea myself. Long story short, I don't think the solution here is to just ban them, based on what will almost always be suspicion and not proof. The people behind these "artists" aren't going to admit they're AIs, and let's also not forget that other sites like Discogs and AllMusic aren't going to help us with this, at least not initially.

I personally think it's going to be very difficult to ban these albums because there's no real way of knowing how much content has been AI generated and even more difficult to measure its involvement in a release. Flagging albums as AI is going to require some type of subjective threshold, which is going to be hard to judge and difficult to referee (& AI technology will also improve making this even more difficult). In future years, we might also think about this whole issue a lot differently when AI is everywhere and becomes the norm. I do, however, worry about the site getting flooded with AI releases and allowing one allows them all.

Romanelli

Bone Swah

Gender: Male

Location: Broomfield, Colorado

Moderator

My last word on this:

If Glasstrees (and others) are really fully AI, then what they are doing I would consider to be outright criminal. It's full on deception and theft. They've released 19 albums / EP's in less than a year, and they are selling them as if it's really their own work. The possibility of thievery in music should never be underrated. I was part of the MP3.com scene in the early 2000's when we had a site that was actually paying independent artists fair money for their work...and some assholes figured out a way to game it, wound up taking away more money than you would imagine, and ending it all in a heap of nothing for the rest of us. And the current state of streaming services...which is basically giving artists work away for free with the promise of "exposure"...I think we already have enough criminal behavior in music as it is.

But I understand that there has to be some give and take. And while right now, Glasstrees 100% APPEARS to be full AI, they are also doing a really pro job of concealing it...with the exception of their video quality and their impossibly prolific output.

MY OPINION: IF an album is discovered to be AI, then it should not be allowed on BEA. Because having it here is basically helping to sell the product, and that product is dishonest to its very core. I believe that if we have an open door policy towards AI, then it will never close. I believe the integrity of BEA will suffer.

Quote:

So... personally I'd recommend starting with some sort of "cultural shift" approach, whereby we start by encouraging people to add comments to albums that are clearly AI, saying "this is clearly AI." We could also make AI a nationality — I know that sounds counterintuitive, but think about it. It might be the most appropriate way to flag them, not to mention the easiest.

If not, we could instead add a little icon or something to each suspected-AI entry, similar to what we do now with compilations or live albums, the image for which could just be the letters "AI" or better yet, the glowing red eye of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Sorry...but I absolutely disagree with everything about this. No "cultural shift". Making AI a nationality? Accepting albums that are known to be fully AI? All of this is giving in. People making fully AI albums and selling them (or even trying to pass them off as original works) is wrong. Making ANY kind of concession to allow albums that are KNOWN to be AI is wrong. Just as having unauthorized bootlegs on the site is wrong.

If an album is KNOWN to be fully created by AI, it should not be allowed on BEA. Make THAT the rule. I know that instances like this are hard to prove but there may come a time when Glasstrees slips up and admits its product is AI generated. And at that time, I believe sites like BEA should step up and act accordingly. By removing that content.

If BEA accepts these as albums, I will have no part of that. And quite frankly, on a site filled with people who have full understanding and appreciation of what albums are, I'm pretty shocked that this is even a discussion.
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I'm leaning on the threshold
Of her mystery
And crashing through the walls
Of dying history

albummaster

Janitor

Gender: Male

Location: Spain

Site Admin

Romanelli wrote:

If an album is KNOWN to be fully created by AI, it should not be allowed on BEA. Make THAT the rule. I know that instances like this are hard to prove but there may come a time when Glasstrees slips up and admits its product is AI generated. And at that time, I believe sites like BEA should step up and act accordingly. By removing that content.

If BEA accepts these as albums, I will have no part of that. And quite frankly, on a site filled with people who have full understanding and appreciation of what albums are, I'm pretty shocked that this is even a discussion.

100% concur with above. The reason to discuss (obviously), is to allow people to put across their views before site policies are introduced (if policies are needed) rather than them suddenly coming out of the blue. 90-100% AI albums should be possible to identify (although possibly not based on what ManhattanJack was saying, so this might be a problem). There's also a murky area where you could have some other majority percentage of AI which makes churning out releases very easy (an album containing a small amount of true content bulked out by AI). AI is definitely not going away, so it's important that the site addresses this before it becomes too much of an issue (& definitely don't want to be spending time arguing with people on album pages whether a particular release is or isn't AI).

MadhattanJack

Just to end the list...

Gender: Male

Okay, so let's say Romanelli's position is "zero tolerance," mine could probably be called "The Scarlet Letter" (it's an "A," after all), and while there may be other alternatives, early indications are that "don't care"/"don't worry about it" isn't going to be acceptable to the BEA user base.

Like I say, I'm OK with zero tolerance if that's the general consensus (as it appears to be thus far). I'll even help! Though there is one other thing I didn't mention — if we disallow all these albums completely, won't we sometimes get people trying to add them anyway, over and over again, with the mods having to play whack-a-mole each time? The site could have a "blacklist" feature of some kind to prevent that, but that seems like more coding would be required than treating AI as a nationality or even adding a new flag (a la live or compilation albums).

Another problem is that some musical genres are probably a lot more susceptible to AI "infiltration" than others, and unfortunately (for me), shoegaze seems to be one of them, probably because the vocals are traditionally buried in the mix so you can't make out what people are singing. That means the AI software emulating it doesn't have to worry so much about pesky things like lyrics, emoting, and vocal inflections that nobody can hear anyway. Still, I would think that genres like EDM, dubstep, drone, ambient, and drum 'n' bass are even more susceptible, to the point where it's going to be very hard to differentiate as the software continues to get better. And who knows, someday one of these AIs might even produce a "monster hook" and have a huge hit record, at least within one of those genres. So... does all this create a "genre fairness" issue?

As for the criminal aspect:

Romanelli wrote:

If Glasstrees (and others) are really fully AI, then what they are doing I would consider to be outright criminal. It's full on deception and theft. They've released 19 albums / EP's in less than a year, and they are selling them as if it's really their own work. The possibility of thievery in music should never be underrated.

On the surface I agree with this, but for practical considerations I'd have to say that if the people doing this weren't being deceptive, then merely selling the output from the AI shouldn't be treated as criminal in itself. What's needed here is really just Truth in Labeling. In fact, if I wanted to make a mealy-mouthed apologist type of argument, I could say something like, "putting a few of the better examples of these albums on BEA, labeled as such, might encourage these purveyors to up their game quality-wise, possibly to the point of rejecting lower-quality AI output and not crap-flooding Spotify, Bandcamp and other sites with 4-5 albums a month." I realize I've just said that while pretending not to have said it, but eventually that argument will probably come up, whether or not it comes from me or some AI who just writes like me because it's been trained on my BEA posting history.

Another argument that will almost certainly come up is that similar things have happened before, such as when digital sampling first became available/affordable, or even when K-Tel was selling albums consisting entirely of cheap cover versions of popular tunes with the words "ORIGINAL HITS! ORIGINAL STARS!" on the covers. Obviously the AI problem is much worse and will almost certainly be more widespread, but the point is, we do have K-Tel albums here as well as Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em by MC Hammer listed on BEA, and nobody seems to mind those. (Again, not my argument, but it's very likely to be used eventually.)