Musical AI and Irritation

Without a doubt, AI is here to stay.

How it will actually influence and inform our lives... that remains to be seen.

As I have written about before, I think there are appropriate use for AI, along with some not so appropriate uses.

Today, I found myself down inside the rabbit hole of AI generated music. It started because I found myself on the periphery of a rather heated online argument about the recent run of "instant stardom" AI "musicians" that have had top-40 hits.

Of course, the moment I had done a few searches on the term "AI music," my ongoing searches and advertising exposures were immediately peppered with stories and links to this topic.

And because I have a short little span of attention (aka ADHD) it was quickly off to the races.

I ended up listening to a number of tracks and playlists and mixes of AI generated music. Some of it entirely AI created, some of it AI assisted.

Perhaps it has something to do with my age and with having ears that were formed and grew up in an analog time, but I found that virtually all the AI music I listened to (playlists) — even though within genres I really enjoy — started to really grate on my nerves after about 20-30 minutes.

I had to sit back and contemplate that... and eventually realized that the selection of tunes was too uniform across different tracks. As if someone had said "create me a playlist that goes well together."

But humans don't put together playlists based on science or auditory qualities; we create them based on feel. However well-intentioned we might be, our moods vary and and some of our choices in the moment are likely to be fickle in ways not replicable by machine learning.

Of course, that might totally happen at some point in the future... it's just not here now.

One of the things I listened to today was some AI generated music for meditation, thinking that it might be the best test... but realized that much meditation music created in traditional ways tends to repeat around a 30- or 60-second cycle, so not really a fair test.

Or, perhaps, a piece of discovery that it's an appropriate use of AI music!

But continuing the experiment, I realized that the only AI-ish music I actually enjoy listening to is an outfit called The Funkyverse that I have subsequently been able to establish includes a substantial level of human input, and thus generates a fairly impressive degree of variation... and I can listen to it for up to maybe a couple of hours before "something about it" starts to irritate me.

Naturally, we're still in the infancy of AI and its capabilities. No telling what this landscape will look like in 10, or 25, years from now!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!

How about YOU? Have you listened to AI generated music? Do you think you could tell the difference between AI and human compositions? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

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Created at 2026.01.29 00:05 PST
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