A study by the University of Alberta has found that working musicians in Canada are not too hot on artificial intelligence in the industry. Brian Fauteux, a professor of popular music and media studies at the U of A, worked on the study, which showed 87 per cent responding musicians don’t want to use AI in their music. “They feel like music making is something distinct from AI generation,” Fauteux said during a Friday interview on CTV Your Morning Edmonton. “A lot felt really kind of hostile towards the technology, feeling like one major shift is coming after the other, and it’s just really disrupting how they make music.” The study involved 1,000 musicians, with close to 300 responding. The increasing prevalence of AI in music spaces has been prompting pushback from the wider musical community. On Wednesday, the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) filed a lawsuit against music company Suno Inc., alleging the company’s free generative AI platform is producing content using music made by people, without consent or payment, which infringes on SOCAN’s performing rights. According to a media release posted on the SOCAN website, the lawsuit includes a sample of 150 publicly available Suno “outputs” it identified as infringing. In addition to concerns over copyrighted music being used to make AI songs, Fauteux said, there are worries about the flooding of music platforms with AI generated music. “If you’re listening to Spotify now, you choose an album, there’s a good chance that something that follows on that autoplay feature might be AI-generated music,” he said. Not all musicians were entirely opposed, however. Some believed AI could benefit administrative processes - such as grant writing – while a few were open to more creative uses. “There were a few who maybe are working in kind of like experimental music or with computers who see that maybe there’s something interesting that can be done,” Fauteux said. “But the vast majority of artists who filled out our survey, and a lot of these were artists who have been working for 10, 15, 20 years in the business, they’ve seen major changes over the years. “The vast majority wouldn’t say that they want to harness and work with this tool in that way.”
