No Small Endeavor with Lee C. Camp The Subtext: Your Favorite Musician Isn't Real
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Dec 10, 2025 AI is revolutionizing the music industry, with machine-generated artists topping charts and securing big record deals. Savannah and Lee discuss the implications for authenticity and ethics in artistic labor. They explore whether AI-generated music can be considered genuine art and examine how it affects our understanding of creativity. Business incentives for AI signings and the potential loss of human artistry are scrutinized. Ultimately, they emphasize the importance of embodiment and the unique qualities that make human artists irreplaceable.
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AI Artists Can Rapidly Dominate Charts
- AI musicians can quickly top charts and amass millions of streams within weeks, disrupting expectations about artistic origin.
- Lee C. Camp calls the marketing framing (e.g., Spotify bios) of AI artists dishonest and urges truth about their origins.
AI Continues A Historical Trend
- AI in music is a continuation of long-standing technological and marketing interventions in art.
- Lee C. Camp compares AI to earlier artifices like stage personas and Auto-Tune to show a spectrum rather than a rupture.
AI Works By Predicting Familiarity
- Large language and generative models excel because they predict statistically likely outputs from massive datasets.
- That predictive strength explains why AI-generated music can sound familiar and quickly appeal to listeners.