Gongol.com Archives: August 2025
August 24, 2025
Musicians have long copied, mimicked, and reinterpreted the work of other performers. Someone develops a new style, and someone else tries to woodshed it until they land the technique. Someone writes a phenomenal song, and others cover it in their own ways. The Beatles land in America and a TV producer comes up with The Monkees. ■ But it's a long way from human imitation -- inevitably imperfect and often a mark of admiration -- to open impersonation. The latter is a problem online, where fake albums are surprising the real artists credited with making them. ■ There's probably something a little flattering about the knowledge that anyone would go to the effort to train AI on your work, but the flattery is probably outweighed by the insult of the scam. The word "authenticity" pops up quite a bit when people talk about computer-generated music: It can be adequate, in the same way that unremarkable instrumental music can be passable in a hotel lobby. ■ It seems that many of the fakes are after low-stakes ripoffs; they are not (at least yet) after the big artists with much success. The cost of protecting one's image might be reasonable only for those who already have lawyers on staff.
