There are going to be battles with AI. Basically AI is constantly “learning”, which means they feed in pretty much every recording out there into it, or even scores, and it is in a sense ‘digested’. AI then takes all that and synthesizes it down depending on the script it is fed. For example (not a composer, but this is just illustrative) , you could write a script that says something “write me a piece of music in the style of late romantic composers like Debussy and Ravel, that gives the mood of being in a field on a warm summers day, with undertones of a coming storm, where it alternates between feeling good and dread” (or something like that).
AI can help composers as a tool, to play around with ideas then they can change what they wish. The real threat, and this is already happening, is AI generated music that for example, you could write a script about the theme above and say “in the style of taylor swift” and literally get a piece that sounds like her. A publisher could say “write me a book about” (various descriptive scripting, of a mystical world of demons where ……) “and use the style of Sarah J Maas” and it will write it. The argument is a human writes the scripts, and that is ‘authoring it’ too, but it isn’t the same thing, that is like telling a human author what you want and having them write it, but it isn’t you writing the book. You know music publishers and book publishers will push this as hard as they can, they can also use AI to edit it, so you could have a book where the human cost is tiny, and the publisher gets all the money.
I have seen music written by a composer who used AI to play around with ideas and it came out beautifully, because it was still hers, it was a true creative effort (it was commissioned by my son’s group).
Live performace? It already is mostly lip synching and faking playing instruments by the ‘band’, where most of the ‘concert’ in pop music is dancing around and whatnot and if they are singing live it is heavily using autotune (there is a you tube channel “Wings of Pegasus” where the person puts recordings of live and recorded music through a spectrum analyzer). So if a piece is AI generated, you hire a bunch of dancers and actors to ‘perform’ to what AI generated. Given AI doesn’t cost them a lot, you know this is what book publishers and the like will do. And so far the courts (not surprisingly) have ruled that AI training on people’s works is not copyright infringement, and the government is way unlikely to rewrite copyright law to make it where AI systems have to pay licensing fees for using the music. I would love to see a very simple law, anything like music or books have to have a notice indicating if AI wrote the work in part of full, to what extent, and whether AI generated the music recording or if human musicians did it.
They tried using AI to generate Beethoven’s 10th symphony , using sketches he left behind and trying to extrapolate from beethoven’s works, and it was lousy