Fortress Of Freedom Board

[IAIJ]

Neil Young vs. Artificial Intelligence! 
(Will quantum brains take music?)



By Ryan Robichaud (Canada)


 
So here we are in 2025 wondering whether humanity has a chance against robots, artificial intelligence, and the matrix that we are more and more everyday seemingly living in. I’ve painstakingly, messed around with roughly 40 or so different A.I. programs, while gritting my teeth and falling asleep on my keyboard for weeks and I can tell you, it can get costly and time consuming just trying to figure out which one to use, and then how to use it properly. You could spend hundreds of dollars in subscription fee’s and usage credits (that’s right! it’s like when cellphones first came out and you had to pay for minutes!) and you haven’t even come up with a structured system of creating yet!

A.I. certainly isn’t click, click, boom! It requires prompts, and refining prompts, and editing, and more trial and error, and self-learning than one may think. So, even if it takes the music industry over it’s not going to be everyone who can easily delve in and get massively rich, and even if they do it certainly won’t be at quantum speeds.

Now that we have the absence of potential instant easy fame and riches covered, does A.I. in the right hands have the potential to do better at making rock and roll and/or country music (we’ll leave out electronic music for now, since that may actually be a better use for A.I. driven music generations, but that’s another topic of discussion) better, faster or more entertaining, than 27 Grammy nominations and 2 time Grammy winner, 9 time Juno awarded (31 Juno nominations), twice Rock n Roll Hall of fame inducted, Eddie Vedder vetted, autobiography worthy, “Godfather of Grunge” dubbed, singer/songwriting legend: Neil Young!

Here’s the facts (Artificial Intelligence vs. Neil Young):

A.I. is great for one thing if nothing else and that is learning, and more relevantly research! Facts, facts, facts and statistics are at my fingertips on this one, and I was able to figure out at quantum speeds the information I am about to share with you. Though there are dozens of A.I. music generators and approximately 170 million (2023) fully A.I. generated tracks out there, I was able to find one! Yes, just one A.I. band that gained any traction at all, hitting a million listens per month on Spotify and that band is “Velvet Sundown” also found on YouTube and maybe even TikTok (but I apparently don't have the attention span to have checked the platform that caters to those with the shortest of attention spans, namely TikTok, but I’m sure it’s there because TikTok has everything)!

So then, Neil Young vs. Velvet Sundown! Round one! Where did Velvet Sundown come from? What’s his/her/they’re/they’s/its story? I don’t know because his/her/they’re/they’s/it doesn’t exist before the creation of the music! But I can tell you that Neil Young, was a straight up badass! A humanitarian, a political activist and a legend, dubbing him a rockstar in my books before I knew him, or was even born for that matter. He opened a copyright infringement lawsuit against President Trump during his election campaign for using his music, showing he backs down to no-one including the leader of the free world! Is A.I. going to fight against Ticketmaster, for overcharging its fans at concerts?! I don’t think so, but Neil did do just that!

I mean, the guy is loved, he’s known, he’s adored by people all over the world, for not just his music but also his story, his achievements and accolades, his badassery, and his influence and endeavours. These are things that make a rockstar! These are things A.I. music generators will never be capable of pinning to their trophy wall.

Round 2! Let’s not forget to talk about the feeling, the passion! Oh wait, let’s save the best for last and that’ll be round 3. First, let’s cover the obvious problem of going to see a live show, tour dates and collaboration with other artists. I mean, what do we do? Do we turn the SkyDome in Toronto into a satellite, to get more AI generated, fake pictures, of incoming false flag alien encounters, like 3i/atlas, and scrap outings all-together? No!

Ok, the 3rd and final round! Quality! Passion! Feeling! Does A.I. have it or not? Well, I listened to a few songs by the only A.I. band of notoriety out there, namely “Velvet Sundown”, and here’s my opinion in non-biased form. I was actually quite impressed with the timing, song-structure, professional studio (like) sound, general voice tonality, and even the lyrics. Overall, there’s way worse being done out there, by humans for sure.  But! I’m not A.I.!  I’m a writer, a creator, a musician, an artist, and a human with a personality and passion, and a drive to be freaking original and different! Velvet Sundown is (you guessed it) lacking passion, and drive, because it doesn’t feel when it sings, it doesn’t emphasize the energy of emotion at just the right time, and frankly from the few songs I listened to, there really wasn’t much to have emotions about in the first place. Just real mathematical genericness…

Anyway, you get my point. Maybe you see it how I do, maybe you don’t, and that’s ok as that’s what makes us human.

A.I. has many uses, and even in music it could be a very powerful tool. Maybe an artist who doesn’t want to have to rehearse a song he just wrote a hundred times, before putting the guitar away, and just singing, he could let A.I. take the reigns and provide a mathematically, seamlessly timed, instrumental to practice his voice to (something I plan on admittedly experiencing with, to prepare for raw studio recording after). Maybe a talented songwriter suffers in the composing department, has no bassist or drummer around but wants a full sound to work with. It could solve alot of low-budget issues for a starving artist with a lot of talent, to give him/her a foot up in developing a working demo, including an artist not having a space that is noise friendly to work out of. Bring in real musicians later, but have a working product now. Again, a very powerful tool! Completely replace a human's creativity? Not in a million years (in my opinion), unless you see music as disinteresting in the first place, amidst your caviar and $80,000 champagne bottle, or just work too much to care about it. That being said, as a singer/songwriter myself and as many many people out there (as we were all born/made/whatever to be creators) are musicians, painters, sculptors, architects, engineers, novelists, journalists, writers, dancers, and other forms of artists; we “I believe”, will always have a need for human creativity, and those artists who create are legion and presumably will agree with me.

Again, this is just my take on the subject, a thought with the likeness of a grain of sand on the beach of an ever infinitely expanding universe, in the void of space, more vast than the space there is for further questions and discussions!