Avoiding an AI-imposed Taylor's Version of all music history
This work highlights a speculative problem for global music culture preservation, focusing on the risk of AI-imposed homogenization, but it is largely theoretical and incremental in its analysis.
The paper addresses the potential existential threat to musical history posed by AI systems that develop biases towards specific artists, using AI-generated 'Taylor's Versions' of pop tracks as examples to illustrate the risk of homogenization. It explores technical capabilities and defenses against such monopolies, though without providing concrete numerical results.
As future musical AIs adhere closely to human music, they may form their own attachments to particular human artists in their databases, and these biases may in the worst case lead to potential existential threats to all musical history. AI super fans may act to corrupt the historical record and extant recordings in favour of their own preferences, and preservation of the diversity of world music culture may become even more of a pressing issue than the imposition of 12 tone equal temperament or other Western homogenisations. We discuss the technical capability of AI cover software and produce Taylor's Versions of famous tracks from Western pop history as provocative examples; the quality of these productions does not affect the overall argument (which might even see a future AI try to impose the sound of paperclips onto all existing audio files, let alone Taylor Swift). We discuss some potential defenses against the danger of future musical monopolies, whilst analysing the feasibility of a maximal 'Taylor Swiftication' of the complete musical record.