Nialler9 Podcast: "I was duped by an AI Musician" with Fourth Best

the fourth best view on AI will probably forever be the weirdest thing I write for the site, and it's way off-base from how I want to keep supporting and uplifting Irish music. With that said, I'm glad I did it, and I'm glad I was able to speak directly to the artist in question, and with Nialler9. After the piece released, I went on Nialler's podcast to catch up, and discuss some of the reaction to the article, and dig a little deeper on the implications of AI music for his work.

Echoing the early Wild Wild West streaming era that we discussed last week with Liz Pelly that gave rise to Spotify’s dominance, our chat this week with Colm Cahalane of Irish music Substack blog Fourth Best / Cork label Hausu finds parallels with what’s happening with AI and music right now. AI is breaking new ground, and creating new problems and moral issues in doing so.

Colm recently posted a ruminating article on AI on Fourth Best, which talks to an artist called Kawaii Hoe who inadvertently, and relatively innocently duped me into covering their energetic AI-generated hyperpop music on the site – Like I said it’s the Wild Wild West.

We talk about this scary new world of not knowing whether an artist is making music entirely with AI or not, and the implications and creative quandary of generated art.

Because you can now make a full music project with AI, does that mean you should? Are AI musicians just really gifted at prompts? Are the outputs music?

As AI music flooded streaming platforms, social media and we cannot put the cat back in the bag so, what’s next? As Liz Pelly’s book shows, Spotify will do what it can to reduce royalty rates so what’s to stop it from replacing real artist’s music with AI-generated music? Or making their own ghost AI music to fill playlists?