<\/p>\n
Several weeks ago, Andy Hall, the Grammy-award winning dobro player and member of bluegrass jam band The Infamous Stringdusters, went on Instagram to explain<\/a> \u201cwhat it\u2019s like to be replaced by AI.\u201d While listening to a song on which he had been asked to overdub, he said, he discovered that it already had \u201cthe most . . . incredible beautiful dobro that I\u2019ve ever heard in my life.\u201d Thinking there must be a mistake, Hall emailed the songwriter: \u201cI guess . . . you got somebody to play . . . dobro on it?\u201d The songwriter responded: \u201cNo! I made this on SUNO\u201d\u2014an AI music generator<\/a>\u2014\u201cas an example of what I want it to sound like.\u201d Hall commented, \u201cnow I have to go home and record and play as good as this absolutely virtuosic dobro . . . What\u2019s going on?\u201d<\/p>\n Hall isn\u2019t the only one asking. Millions of workers in the United States are in danger of being replaced by AI, including many artists and musicians. The recent deals struck by major record labels with generative AI companies like Suno, Udio<\/a>, and Klay<\/a> will allow AI to train on the entire history of recorded music.\u00a0<\/p>\n Some labels are claiming<\/a> that AI-generated content will remain within a \u201cwalled garden<\/a>.\u201d But such claims about new recording formats have proven false in the past. Digital Rights Management<\/a>, for example, failed to prevent CDs from being \u201cshared\u201d online. Suno\u2019s subscriptions, which today range from $8-$24 per month ,\u00a0 currently include user rights to \u201ccommercial use\u201d of any tracks produced.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n These legally bulletproof AI-produced \u201cghost tracks\u201d will flood an already oversaturated streaming market and harm the human musicians who record music and license it for use in films, commercials, television programs, and video games.<\/p>\n Major labels have been in a rush<\/a> to assure their copyright holders\u2014the songwriters and signed artists\u2014that none of their music will be ingested by AI without their consent. But there is a wrinkle: session musicians, like many creative workers, often do work-for-hire and hence are not copyright holders. For example, indie labels often hire session musicians on a commission basis or without written contracts at all. AI could result in the mass displacement of musicians and the devaluation and degradation of the work of those who remain.\u00a0<\/p>\n AI apologists have spent<\/a> substantial sums on marketing to convince the public that such displacement is just \u201ctechnological displacement<\/a>\u201d: that AI is simply more efficient than its predecessor, and therefore morally acceptable. Indeed,we may shed a tear when poor John Henry dies in his competition<\/a> with a steam-powered drill, but no train passenger today longs for tunnels quarried by workers using hand-driven spikes.<\/p>\n Before being told that the \u201cbeautiful dobro\u201d was AI-generated, Hall had guessed that it was recorded by the Nashville session-musician Jerry Douglas<\/a>, because \u201conly a handful of people on the planet can play like that.\u201d Hall, who has spent his life mastering the nuances of the dobro, believed he was hearing Jerry Douglas playing because he was<\/em>: SUNO had ingested Douglas\u2019s work, along with thousands of others\u2019, and then prioritized it in a \u201cfine tuning\u201d process in which a human curator, knowledgeable in the handful of top recording instrumentalists and vocalists in each genre, matched those specific musicians\u2019 work with the specific prompt of Hall\u2019s employer.<\/p>\n That isn\u2019t \u201ctechnological displacement\u201d or \u201ccreative destruction.\u201d It doesn\u2019t transform natural resources into useful commodities. It\u2019s a sleight-of-hand that turns Douglas\u2019s labor into SUNO\u2019s property without any concern for consent, credit, or compensation. To the extent that the process involves a human doing the fine tuning, it isn\u2019t even technological. It\u2019s just plain wrong.\u00a0<\/p>\n Musicians are all too familiar with this type of wrong. In a December 2025 article<\/a> for Forbes<\/em>, tech writer Virginie Berger writes that AI companies profiting off of material used without permission \u201cface lawsuits only from those powerful enough to sue,\u201d then eventually sanitize their model \u201cthrough selective licensing deals while the work of countless other creators remains in [their] training data, uncompensated and unacknowledged.\u201d<\/p>\n Berger\u2019s article goes on to note: \u201cThis isn\u2019t an oversight but the architecture of the settlements. The major labels had the legal resources and financial leverage to force negotiations.\u201d Independent artists and labels, who constitute the large majority of the workforce and 46.7 percent of the global recorded music market do not.\u00a0<\/p>\n In June 2024, Warner Music Group (WMG) and others sued<\/a> SUNO for copyright infringement. SUNO settled<\/a> the lawsuit by licensing WMG\u2019s music\u2014instead of illegally ingesting it without consent, as they had previously. WMG now claims it will obtain the consent of its copyright holding artists and songwriters before permitting SUNO to ingest their work. But what of musicians who are not WMG copyright holders? Where can they turn for redress?<\/p>\n In normal times, the belief that such practices violated laws against unfair competition would have garnered bipartisan support. But a little more than a year ago, FTC chair Lina Khan resigned<\/a> after encountering pushback from the Trump Administration for having pursued AI regulation that would have, among other anti-trust goals, protected musicians from being unfairly forced to compete with their own work.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Union action is a key line of defense. SUNO\u2019s ingestion of major label recordings may violate the labels\u2019 \u201cSound Recording Labor Agreement<\/a>\u201d (SRLA) with the American Federation of Musicians (AFM). That contract covers all major label music recorded since 1948. The SRLA requires a separate payment to musicians for every \u201cnew use\u201d of their work, and every new derivative commercial use after that, and calls for negotiation on how those terms will apply whenever a new technology exploiting recordings made under the contract emerges.\u00a0<\/p>\n Major labels may well contest the above interpretation in the currently ongoing SLRA contract negotiations with the AFM. But musicians are fed up with being roadkill on the information highway. \u201cWe Need a Union,<\/a>\u201d a rank-and-file coalition of musicians, is pressuring the AFM to address the issue and also calling on the public to boycott all AI-generated music unless the record company, streaming service, or AI service profiting from it can certify that every<\/em>\u00a0musician performing on the tracks used to train the model was given a right to consent, to credit, and to compensation. Whether the AFM prevails is largely dependent on how the public responds.\u00a0<\/p>\n There are tens of thousands of working recording musicians like Andy Hall. I happen to be one of them. Sometimes our job involves imitation of the handful of studio greats who invented the language of our instruments. If a machine can do that job reasonably well, why (other than the fact that AI\u2019s power and water needs are accelerating<\/a> environmental collapse) should the public care if we disappear?<\/p>\n The answer to that question requires us to acknowledge not only the limits of artificial so-called \u201cintelligence,\u201d but also the complexity of our human culture. According to<\/a> Harold Bloom, the late Yale literary critic, even our attempts to imitate are expressions of creativity. Our failure to imitate perfectly, our little mistakes, and our \u201cmisreadings,\u201d are not random errors but expressions of subconscious needs. What we individual \u201cmistakers\u201d and \u201cmisreaders\u201d have produced<\/a> over time is a culture capable of changing in accordance with human needs.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n So, when an AI system imitates something perfectly, it doesn\u2019t produce culture. It kills it.\u00a0And when an AI system fails to imitate perfectly, its statistically random hallucinations and glitches are as unlikely to meet human needs as countless monkeys banging on typewriters<\/a> to reproduce the writings of William Shakespeare. That kills culture too.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n We all know what happens when crops fail, or when the fuel supply runs out. But what happens when a culture fails? Jacques Attali, a cultural critic and economic counselor to the French President Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand, claims<\/a> in his book, Noise: The Political Economy of Music,<\/em> that contemporary concert music originated in the need of early societies to control communal violence by channeling it into ritual. Early human sacrifice rituals were accompanied by music. The music\u00a0 replaced the sacrifices over time, but still had to fulfill the ritual\u2019s original function of channeling social violence.\u00a0<\/p>\n This explains why, from the harsh reviews that greeted<\/a> everything from Joseph Hayden\u2019s Symphony No. 94<\/em> (the \u201cSurprise Symphony\u201d) and Igor Stravinsky\u2019s The Rite of Spring<\/em> to Big Band Jazz, punk rock, and the latest condemnations<\/a> of \u201cgangster rap,\u201d each new iteration of music has been met by critics wailing that it\u2019s too violent, sexualized, earsplitting, and a dangerous breakdown in the social order. The next generation thinks it just sounds tame.\u00a0<\/p>\n If Attali is correct, new music is needed to channel new social conflict into ritual. What happens when the wonderful AI machines, by definition, hear only the past? When their errors no longer grope in the subconscious dark towards the next socially necessary outrage? When the pool of human gropers has been trimmed to a ghost crew\u2014and a deadly combination of high costs and low returns assures that those from the disempowered margins best able to intuit and articulate the social conflicts of our times (yes, I\u2019m talking about the Black, poor white Appalachian, Latine, and other working-class heroes whose hard work, desire, and rage have fueled our pop revolutions) will be the least able to afford participation? What happens when the mountains of AI music can\u2019t channel violence? When the music is hollow, boring, and fake? Will the ritual break, and unchanneled violence return?<\/p>\n If we don\u2019t fight back now, I guess we\u2019ll see. Maybe we\u2019re already seeing.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n