That AI Country Song

From Newsweek:

According to Billboard’s "Country Digital Song Sales" chart, the No. 1 song in the U.S. is "Walk My Walk" by Breaking Rust—an artist that was created by artificial intelligence (AI).

. . . This is a new development in the music industry as it is the first time an AI-created song has reached the top of the charts.

There have long been concerns about the use of generative AI in creative sectors.

But there's nothing new here. In David Alan Coes's song "You Never Even Called Me by My Name", he added a verse to the original 1971 lyrics by Steve Goodman and John Prine. He outlined "the perfect country western song", which needed to mention "Trains and trucks and mamas and prison and gettin' drunk":

I was drunk the day my mama got out of prison
And I went to pick her up in the rain
But before I could get to the station in the pickup truck
She got ran over by a damned old train.

Even before AI, people understood that a lot of so-called creativity is just a formula. Farther down in the Newsweek link, it reports:

Breaking Rust also has a profile on Instagram, which boasts over 35,000 followers and is filled with images of a melancholy looking man, wearing a cowboy hat in various settings, including at a phone booth, walking on a road, and sitting in the rain.

A quick web search brings up A comprehensive guide for indie authors looking to write a western novel:

1. Normal World: Introduce your protagonist in their everyday life, which is often in a small town, on a ranch, or traveling across the open plains.
2. Inciting Incident: Something happens that propels the protagonist into the central conflict—whether it’s a crime, a personal challenge, or an external threat that forces them to act.
3. Rising Action: The protagonist faces challenges, builds alliances, and confronts obstacles as they navigate the dangers of the frontier. This is where you introduce secondary characters, like antagonists or love interests, and develop the main conflict.
4. Climax: The protagonist faces the central challenge—whether it’s a gunfight, a moral decision, or a major confrontation with the antagonist. This is the pivotal moment where the stakes are at their highest.
5. Resolution: The story concludes with the resolution of the central conflict. The protagonist either achieves their goal, finds redemption, or faces consequences. The resolution should provide a satisfying end, whether it’s bittersweet or triumphant.

In other words, nobody ever needed AI to write pulp fiction, and paying a hack to do it by hand is still probably a lot cheaper. This is a point that Pope and Swift were making 400 years ago. This has also been an emerging pattern I've begun to see in AI: last month, I noted that Baltimore police paid up to $15,000 a year to take down a student whom AI had flagged for carrying a bag of Doritos that looked like a gun, while back in 2020, Canadian police were able to take down a girl wearing a Star Wars storm trooper suit carrying a plastic blaster without paying extra to get AI's help to do this.

Fr Mike Schmitz has a very thoughtful YouTube piece embedded at the top of this post. At 5:50, he inserts his own AI country singer who sings about Fr Mike, but he adds,

A computer program creates a country song, and so what happens is the creativity that is innate to humanity is extended by technology, but something in the process might be lost. In fact, let me say this: something in the process is going to be lost. AI is not evil, any more than a bicycle is evil, any more than an internet of itself is evil. It is simply an extension of a human capacity beyond human capacity. What we lose in the process is going to be the question.

The only thing I would add is that a lot of AI simply adds unnecessary complexity and expense to give us things we already have plenty of without its help -- or from Fr Mike's point of view, AI can also expand the human capacity for avarice and sloth. It'll just cost a lot more to give us what we already have.