Where Does the Buck Stop? Ethical and Political Issues with AI in Music Creation

• Main Author: Fabio Morreale
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ubiquity Press 2021-07-01
• Series: Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval
• Subjects: ethics of music-ai; politics of music-ai; dataveillance; surplus population; digital colonialism
• Online Access: https://transactions.ismir.net/articles/86

AI applications for music creation have been available since the last century but, until recently, their adoption has been limited to a small niche of researchers and engineers and their ontology limited to experimentation in computational creativity. The ongoing transformation of the music industry, the increasing injection of capital into AI-music companies, and the technical advancements in AI are in the process of expanding this niche and shifting the ontology of these applications. This expansion and ontological shift raise several ethical and political issues that this article sets out to explore. I contextualise the ideological substrate currently guiding mainstream research in commercial AI-generated music and identify two urgent issues caused by this research. First, the inevitable increase in the artistic surplus population and decrease in creative labour cost; second, the tacit acceptance of neo-colonial practices based on the exploitation of existing music and listeners’ preferences. I propose that these issues should be discussed and addressed by the creators of these technologies, and I suggest an ethical and epistemological turn for MIR research.