Upvoted for unpopularity. Objectively speaking, based on the foundation of how AI models work, their output tends to the mean (average). If the music in the example is considered “good”, then objectively the standard has moved downward a lot. I’ll start with visual AI as analogous to make my point:
Various people and businesses, big and small, have decided that AI generated images fit their needed purpose. I see a few places downtown that have made their store logos AI slop. Is it objectively well drawn image? In a sense that maybe they make fewer mistakes than before, but besides that, “average” is a more objective moniker for it than “good” on a factual basis. Subjectively you can decide whether you like it, I can judge you for it but the decision is yours to make.
Back to AI genned audio, even before it became widespread, people were making Muzak for elevators, phones, commercial jingles etc. It was fit for purpose to keep you occupied in the background. AI soundtracks seem to fit that niche for you and that’s fine. It may be “good enough” for you, but it’s not “good” and I doubt will ever be if judged objectively as music.
I listened to the instrumental track, and sure it is coherent at a very basic level, but the harmonies just keep going back to the same, any semblance of a musical idea or fluorish ends or is replaced with another entirely different one within 4 bars. That’s the reason why I don’t think any song is memorable, without any fundamental changes to the underlying tech I doubt any will. AI generated songs like “We are Charlie Kirk” are memes because they are monuments to conservative tastelessness.
People will tell you not to listen to or support that, I won’t stop you but I’d agree in the sense because I think of it as supporting an industry for elevator and phone hold muzak over real musical artists, that also sucks power and water and pollutes a lot. I personally don’t care about your tastes, you can like it, but calling it “objectively good music” is an affront to art.
I think there are two suitable uses of it: generating a cover or pastiche of two unrelated artists that would never have made something (Frank Sinatra sings “Rock the Casbah”), or completely filler music. Which if the second is meeting your needs, great, but that doesn’t make it objectively good. Perhaps good for Muzak consumers to have a flourishing industry but not for music consumers.
I did study both computer neural networks and music so I can tell you pretty definitively that what AI has gotten good at is imitating human artistry.
The problem is that AI style is that it doesn’t have unique repeatable style, it’s kinda just averaging of a bunch of styles, so it will only ever be an imitation, in its current form.
So yeah, I’ve been “tricked” by AI before, thinking it is a real song, and probably you could trick me in the other direction too. However, just like a lawyer would be checking a hallucinated citation, I checked my facts. After I found one cover that happened to autoplay into slightly intriguing enough to want to hear more of the covering artist’s discography, but I wouldn’t be able to because this artist doesn’t exist. I did feel empty and disappointed after that. The variations to the original song I thought to myself tended towards the mean, well before I had any suspicion it could be AI.