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Earlier this week, Bandcamp issued a blanket ban on generative AI and deepfake impersonations. This new measure makes Bandcamp an exception on the streaming landscape, were AI music is becoming more and more inescapable. Most of the reactions to this Bandcamp announcement were positive, but one artist who’s not applauding it is Holly Herndon, an experimental artist who has long messed around with what she sees as the artistic possibilities of AI technology.
Holly Herndon has a PhD from Stanford’s Center For Computer Research In Music And Acoustics, and she made her most recent album. 2019’s PROTO, with Spawn, an AI baby created by Herndon and her partner Mat Dryhurst. A few years ago,. Herndon and Dryhurst Dryhurst launched Spawning, a tool that allows artists to choose whether or not their work will be used to train AI, and that work earned them Austria’s first Digital Human Rights Award.
On Wednesday, in response to Bandcamp’s new policy, Herndon tweeted:
Putting the ban in bandcamp!
It is a wicked problem so I understand what they are trying to do.
I’m sure the human moderators won’t be banning artists exploring AI, rather I hope will just be looking to filter out soundspam
The gray area will only get larger
After getting a negative response too that tweet, Herndon elaborated with a thread:
I understand why Bandcamp is taking this measure but it’s a tourniquet
The human / AI binary is not going to hold, and will become a matter of superficial optics
I already have more authorship in my models than most pop stars do in their songs
People will already be using models to generate songs they then put a human filter on
Artists will integrate generated passages into works they orchestrate, and will soon train their own models
Another protection might be to flag accounts that post an inhuman amount of content, but that too may seem retrograde
We live with infinite media now
I encourage platforms to be more curated, but enforcing a hard human / AI binary is not the right way to address this long term
If an expert uses AI to help them write an article they otherwise would not have the time to complete, it will not be of less substance than a non-expert with time on their hands writing something by hand.
A practice, or reputation, of thought and work developed over time is the best filter.
The contemporary demand for 24/7 content from people is the problem.
She kept going with the conversation, and you can see some of her responses below.