Berklee College of Music Students Furious That It's Offering an AI "Songwriting" Class

[highplainsdem]

Source: Futurism

Hundreds of students at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston have signed an online petition protesting a new course on generative AI music and songwriting, marking another salvo in the continuing battle between artists and a technology they believe is stealing their hope for a livelihood.

As of Tuesday, 418 people have signed the petition, which is targeting the two-credit course “Bots and Beats: AI and the Future of Songwriting” and calling for the school to stop leveraging AI on campus.
The petition accuses the school of promoting OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which “steal the art of [tens of thousands] of artists and rot the essence of the industry and have devastating consequences on the environment all to create facsimiles of real human art,” the petition’s organizers wrote.

Angry comments from current and former students filled the discussion area of the petition, with many expressing disappointment that a school known for fostering the creation of popular music has gone into bed with a technology implicated in the theft of countless original songs.

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Read more: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/berklee-college-ai-music

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How disgusting of Berklee. Using AI is the opposite of both learning and creativity.

[2naSalit]

1. I'm furious...

And I'm not even a student there.

AI needs to die in a big, public event.

[FakeNoose]

2. AI will be stealing all the original music in the next few years

Just like they've "archived" all the human-written books and articles in the last 10 years or so.
The only way to protect your work is to never have it digitized, and never post it on the internet.

[paleotn]

3. And each song will sound remarkably like every other song.

AI isn't intelligent or creative. It's a very expensive parrot, regurgitating whatever is in it's training database, without understand one damn thing.

[cab67]

4. college instructor here -

I forbid the use of AI in my classes.

[pfitz59]

5. My Cousin is a Berklee grad

and compises music for a living. I'm sure he's voiced his concern.

[OldBaldy1701E]

6. "How disgusting of Berklee. Using AI is the opposite of both learning and creativity."

I agree completely.

However, I said the same thing about Fruity Loops and other similar programs when they came out over a decade ago, and people are getting Oscar nominations for using them in their scores.

So, it's nothing new, really.

And, yes, it is the opposite of both.

Of course, learning and creativity are the opposite of the modern music industry, but that is another story for another time.

[tonekat]

7. That's an expensive school

Basically, it's a course on what is coming that no one asked for.

How will composers price their work if there is an online jingle factory that just needs an account established to get something that's "Good Enough"?

Will Hans Zimmer and Trevor Horn be up against this vending machine?

[highplainsdem]

10. We're seeing more and more of a backlash against AI, especially from younger people who can

see what a threat it is.

The AI bros set out to steal.humanity's knowledge and culture, with the intent of selling it back to people, even possibly convincing people they can't create and can't be succrssful without AI.. They have convinced some particularly gullible people that using AI plagiarism machines somehow makes them creative - and some of those gullible people have been flooding the internet with all the slop they can create - but they also stirred up anger and loathing for both the continuing theft by the AI industry, and the fraud that AI enables, and all the other harms it creates.

[LudwigPastorius]

8. Just a matter of time before the Grammys drop "Song of the Year" and replace it with "Prompt of the Year".

[highplainsdem]

9. Nope. Won't happen, unless the AI bros control everything, and everyone's lost their mind. Prompts

aren't real creativity. They're a verbal nudge to a genAI model to try to cobble together a pastiche of work stolen from real artists - truly creative human artists, not wannabes pretending via AI.