An Editorial by someone unqualified to talk about- you know what screw that I am qualified to talk about this one.

There is a lot of talk at any given time about how AI is coming to take our jobs. As a music journalist, music producer, and advertising student, I’m kinda boned on all 3 fronts, but despite that I had lulled myself into a bit of a false sense of security because of how niche the type of music we cover is. It’s not like it’s pop music or rock or country or any of those other things that AI has proven to be great at recreating, it’s post-hyperpop, glitchpop, and whatever other words you can use to describe the last 6 han.irl<3 releases. But despite all that, I was completely wrong, and I’m super, super annoyed about it.

When looking for new releases it’s always a 2 step process for us. Step 1 is to check our tracking bot for any artists we already look out for, and step 2 is to check Release Radar to see what it hand feeds me. Between those two we can usually have a handful of quality things to showcase plus maybe even add some new artists to the list. On this particular week though, our tracking bot was bringing back not a lot, and my release radar was looking pretty weak as well, right up until I found this one specific song. I thought, “oh my god I’m saved!” I figured this was what was going to both save this weeks tiktok from being 2 songs long, as well as what was going to spice up my playlist for the next little bit. At this point while I’m getting excited I go to check out the artist to make sure release radar hasn’t fed me something multiple weeks old like it loves to do, and that’s when the red flags start popping up. First, there are no actual photos of the artist. In isolation that wouldn’t concern me, but then there’s no social media links on the profile. Once again, in isolation that’s fine, I’ve had to hunt for people’s social media before and sometimes they simply don’t exist. It’s bad business as an artist in the modern era, but it does happen. It’s when I was unable to find any of this artist’s songs on Soundcloud, and when I realized all this artists collaborators had all the same red flags, that I realized I was completely screwed.

I’m really mad about this. All these things together are about as close to firm confirmation as I can get. It absolutely pissed me off because not only did it waste a bunch of my time, but the song was so, so incredibly good, but I could no longer in good conscience listen to the song ever again. I simply cannot support AI music for the 2 simple facts that it’s drowning out real artists that I could be supporting instead, and I can’t support the environmental impact of wasteful generative “art”. These are all pretty common opinions, but you wanna know what the real kicker was? The worst part of it was that in AI generated mainstream genres you can pick out things that sound wrong, for instance, sometimes the vocals have a weird characteristic to them. But when your song is within a genre full of insane chopped up or pitched around vocals, it’s nearly god damn impossible to pick up on those red flags depending on the specifics of the song. The song itself in no way raised any concerns in me, it was entirely the rabbit hole the profile itself sent me down.

In conclusion, I am in despair. It’s disappointing that I have to worry about the way this impacts the integrity of AuraLink’s coverage, and I do not see it changing any time soon. But with that aside, the human factor of art is the most important part to me, so we will stay diligent. If we screw up at any point, I apologize in advance, but to the best of our ability we’re gonna do everything we can to keep this community human.