A couple of winters ago, I flew home to Boston after a long business trip, sometime after the holidays. It was past midnight, and buses were no longer going to New Hampshire, so I got an Uber to a nearby hotel. The driver was playing a genre of music I haven’t heard since I darkened the doors of evangelical churches when I was younger. It was Contemporary Christian Music, the kind that escapes genre classification, somewhere between a defanged version of U2 pop rock and the saccharine tunes an insurance company might play over an employee training video.
But this recording felt different. It had a crackle to it, like someone ruffling cellophane in the microphone. The voices were breathless and drenched in reverb. Each consonant in the lyrics felt clipped and eroded like a sandblasted cliffside. The vibe was metallic and otherworldly. It felt inhuman.
It took me a chorus, but I figured out this was AI-generated worship music. I said nothing to the driver, since we’d said nothing to each other up until that point. It was none of my business what he listened to in his car. But the music felt profane to me, even as an agnostic.
I don’t sing worship songs anymore, but I know many people who do. There’s supposed to be something sacred to worship songs, even in evangelical churches, where the values and aesthetics of American consumerism tend to water down their potency. Still, when I was a churchgoing kid, I had reasonable certainty that, whether I was singing an old hymn or a CCM hit, a person with a soul devoted to their God had crafted it for me, hoping I could use it to convey the same divine rapture they felt as they wrote it.
No more of that, I guess. In this car, there was no divine connection being offered, just the numbing tones and milquetoast lyrics of a predictive language model. Maybe these computer outputs were bringing the driver closer to God. The computer, however, didn’t give a damn.
This week, my friend and Twitch mod Harukio recommended this video by Adam Neely, exploring Suno AI, the foreboding reincarnation of Italian futurism, and the potential death of recorded music as a medium. I think it’s required watching for anyone who wants to weigh the price of AI-generated music to our brains, our social circles, and our politics. It brought that Uber ride to mind. Thinking of a song as just a unit of consumption drains the blood from it. And we are in the age of digital vampires.
Let me know what you think in the comments.