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Elon Musk has hit back at critics who have slammed music created by artificial intelligence.
The tech billionaire appeared via video link at the X Takeover event in Texas on Saturday, where he described the controversial genre of music as ‘awesomecore.’
For those unaware, AI music has consistently come under fire for many reasons. Many have complained that it often uses copyrighted human art without permission or payment. This not only devalues real songwriting and production, but also threatens the livelihoods of genuine musicians by flooding streaming platforms with bot-created content.
In a world where getting paid from music streaming is very difficult for most artists anyway (Spotify pays $0.003 to $0.005 per stream), AI-generated content is just another obstacle.
This was recently highlighted on a global scale when a 54-year-old man named Michael Smith from North Carolina was sentenced to 18 months in prison for an $8,000,000-dollar AI-generated music and streaming fraud scam.
Smith used AI and automated bot accounts to artificially stream thousands of AI-generated tracks to rake in millions.
In a statement, prosecutor Jamie McDonald said: ‘By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans.’
Creators have long stressed that real music also requires emotion and depth, and believe that the best art comes from personal, real-life experience.
Numerous award-winning musicians, from Billie Eilish to Kate Bush, Madonna to Doechii, have all publicly condemned AI for cloning voices and training models on copyrighted work without consent.
This resistance has led to AI-generated music being referred to as digital ‘slopcore’ for its mass-produced, formulaic nature, all in the name of royalty payouts.
However, Musk has argued that artificial intelligence has ‘good taste’ when it comes to music. He said at the event: ‘Calling it slopcore is a misnomer; frankly it’s awesomecore.’
He then branded ‘slopcore’ a ‘genre of music,’ and said that he thinks it ‘might be the fastest-growing genre of music.’
Terrifyingly, he’s not completely wrong in terms of the latter statement — the numbers don’t lie. A new study has suggested that AI music has already become a multi-million-dollar business, with AI artists boasting billions of streams, millions of followers and hundreds of chart appearances.
Data from Kapwing, the video editing service in San Francisco, estimates that the 10 biggest AI artists have collectively generated around $6.1 million from over 2.3 billion Spotify streams and YouTube views.
Meanwhile, French music streaming service Deezer revealed that AI tracks now account for more than 50% of all new daily uploads on its platform.
Musk continued: ‘AI music is really good, and the music videos are amazing. It just shows taste. And you’re like, “wow, AI can do good taste?” That’s pretty wild.’
Following his statement, plenty of people took to X to share their own opinions, many of whom concluded that they prefer music written and performed by actual people.
‘It depends on what you mean by music. After all, AI cannot yet replace singers and we don’t need it to. AI is a set of signals, not a soul like in a human,’ one person said, as another echoed: ‘AI music robs humanity of its soul.’
Elsewhere, a third declared that ‘AI slop is destroying the internet,’ as a fourth penned that ‘AI is not a genre.’