AI BOT Blues are here and they are deceiving! First the AI Bots came for academia and literature. Text based, they helped school kids and university students produce fake reports and led to mass plagarization of copyrighted content via AI “training”. I said nothing. It didn’t impact me other than reading music reviews that I sensed were AI generated.
Next, AI bots invaded the graphic arts work space with the ability to produce instant images based on a text input. The graphic arts AI bot can be “trained” on scans of every known work of art and image on the internet, copyrighted or not in some cases. The results are colorful and often odd: the AI bot’s inability in many cases to correctly depict the number of fingers on a human hand. Again, I said nothing. In fact, I have used computer AI images and feature an enhanced graphic image of a photo of myself (generated by Grok) for this blog.
Now the AI bots have come for the blues. The AI bots have the ability to “train” the voices, the music and the lyrics of EVERY blues song available digitally. Then someone sitting in a basement near you has “created” a song by, in some cases, typing in “I want a slow tempo blues song with the voice of a black female in the key of C that is about lost love”. Voila…a song is “created” for which the “inputter” takes credit as “composer and/or lyricist”. Some of the “trained” bot blues is passable. It is what I call “elevator bot blues” and it is receiving THOUSANDS of likes, plays, and shares on Youtube and Spotify!! Do a search for Etta Mae Hartwell, as one example, on either platform. Etta Mae is listed as the main “artist” though she is not real. The voice is computer generated. She is the creation of an “inputter”.
What is particularly troubling to me is the deception that is occurring. Search and try to determine whether Etta Mae is a real person or an AI bot. It takes awhile to finally find something that mentions that Etta Mae is “fictional”. That is the fig leaf that the “inputters” are using. It isn’t AI bot blues, it’s “fictional” blues. BULLSHIT!! In some cases it is rises to fraud in my opinion: the purposeful deception of people to achieve clicks and shares which lead to MONEY for the “inputters”.
AI blues bots are here and they aren’t going away. But at the very least, we should stop calling the people generating this music “creators”; they are not. They are simply “inputters” that are molding “trained” data into blues music. And the inputters should have to label their outputs as AI generated music if it uses “trained’ music, lyrics, or voices. If the listening public wants to hear AI bot generated blues that is fine, just let them know that is what it is.
Through my association with Blues Music Fan Radio, we do our utmost to constantly look for new blues artists. We want to give them and their talent a chance to be heard by blues lovers. Now our search has become harder. We have to wade through the literally hundreds of submittals each month (and suggestions from listeners) to make sure that the artists are in fact real human beings. That is what the world has come to.
I apologize to the authors who confronted the AI bots first. I didn’t listen. I apologize to all the graphic artists who have lost their livelihoods to AI bots that can steal and modify your creations. I didn’t listen to your cries of alarm. Now the AI bots have come for people I love: blues singers, blues musicians, and blues songwriters. The issue has my full attention. I will never knowingly spin AI bot blues. I will not stand by and let “inputters” deceive others by not labeling their “outputs”. And I hope that everyone reading this article that is involved in the blues music business pledges to do the same!!
This article first appeared on Blues Music Fan’s Bluesbeat blog. It is reposted here with BMFR’s permission.
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Ben Vee started out spinning songs on terrestrial radio and at nightclubs back in the 1970’s in his home state of Louisiana. After a career in the construction business, he returned to DJing in 2011. He now hosts two shows each week on http://www.bluesmusicfan.com and writes about the blues for BMFR at http:/www.bluesbeats.com and on his own blog at http://www.benveeblues.com from his home in Connecticut.
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