As you know, I am always on YouTube searching for bluegrass-related videos. Performances, interviews, documentaries, instrument lessons, and anything else related to bluegrass. So it should be no surprise that YT sends me a number of recommendations based on my algorithms. In many cases, they are worthwhile to watch, as I have found a lot of interesting guitar/banjo/mandolin/fiddle lessons and players that I may have never learned about otherwise.
Then there are the clunkers. Poor performances, unhelpful lessons, and people posting stuff that makes no sense, just tagging it as bluegrass. The worst recommendation, however, has been a recent one that, even though I have tagged the channel as “Do Not Recommend,” YT keeps sending me new videos.
The channel is called Banjo Music AI, and it is exactly what it is says it is. Hours and hours (one video is over 11 hours long) of Artificial Intelligence-generated bluegrass music. The thumbnail and screenshot for most of the videos is of a pretty girl holding a six-string banjitar (not even a true banjo!) sitting on either a motorcycle or the bumper of an old car, which definitely looks AI generated.
Then there is the music itself. Hours of basic chord changes found in standard bluegrass tunes, played by AI-generated banjos, fiddles, dobros, mandolins and guitars. It sounds horrible to say the least. Every instrument sounds like a synthesizer program. Because it is AI, there is no feel to the performance. The songs move in such a robotic way. No groove, no swing, just strict metronome-forced tempo. I’m only posting a clip on here just so you can see haw bad it really is.
Most of the songs are instrumentals, although there are a few vocal tunes. As expected, the lyrics are so cliché and predictable that it literally has the feel that an infant with no musical experience wrote them. Even the worst actual bluegrass band that has never practiced together is 100 times better than listening to this!
What upsets me the most is that this will probably be viewed by people wondering what bluegrass music is like, without researching just a wee bit further to discover Bill Monroe, The Stanley Brothers, Jimmy Martin, or more modern performers like Billy Strings, New Grass Revival, and Alison Krauss. Forget the debates about progressive versus traditional bluegrass, this is truly one concept that every bluegrass fan, no matter what sub-format, can agree that it stinks to high Heaven!
With technology moving faster than humans can keep up, it was inevitable that someone would try to recreate with AI something that is wholly human. When AI started creeping into the music field, I saw many AI examples on the internet of concepts like “What if John Lennon and Beethoven write a song together” and producing a result. Maybe some found it interesting, but personally, I found it insulting to mankind in general. Art forms, including music, are part of the human soul, something that no machine can own 100 percent. Unfortunately, society is relying too much on AI and its advancement to resolve issues. Once that is conquered, then technology will control our emotions, and we will become the robots that we have created earlier.
Bluegrass is raw, unfiltered, and so much a part of the human heart and soul of those who love it. It moves like a human, not like a machine. There are different levels, different attitudes, different outcomes with each song and performance. Once we accept technology to make something like music generic in its presentation, we have lost our will to live as free thinkers.
Chew on it and comment.
Luegra 