SiriusXM Liquid Metal dedicates full hour to AI music as DJ explores 'existential threat’ to metal

AI-generated music has become a bubbling controversy in recent years. With the rise and popularity of AI song creation software, the music it produces has become more realistic and with better-quality production. With enough prompting, you can even make it sound similar to a popular artist or specific band. Luckily, these types of songs have largely avoided appearing on local radio stations or satellite radio stations like SiriusXM…until now.

In a horrifying taste of what could be in our future, Liquid Metal's show Bloody Roots, hosted by Ian Christe, features an episode this week dedicated to AI generated metal called "Metal's Worst Nightmare". In the episode, Christe address the automation and ease of making metal through AI compared to making it with human hands. This appears the first time that AI-generated metal was played on the Liquid Metal station, and so far, none of the tracks have made it into the regular rotation.

Some listeners casually coming across the block, however, were not pleased, as they may not have stayed long enough to appreciate the full context of Christe's show. On October 28th, on the Reddit subreddit group r/MetalForTheMasses, a user by the name of Rockfan1114 posted the following:

During the show breaks Christe comes on to explain the reason he played AI music on the episode as well as the impact that this technology has on the music you hear today:

I'm sorry to do that to you without warning, but indeed, about half an hour there of AI generated metal tracks that I put together in less time than it just took us to listen to them. Welcome to Roots of Metals Worst Nightmare. Each week here on Roots, we go decade by decade, year by year, country by country, key moment by key moment. But today, dialed right into current times and the existential threat to music as we know it, and particularly metal by artificial intelligence. Algorithmically derived music written on the fly by software, based on the averages of listening to and stealing ideas from thousands of metal riffs and metal albums. Creating an in the can vocabulary that just formulaically regurgitates elements to form something that sounds kind of like metal, in fact, is even better educated and more well-rounded than some metal bands, and yet at its heart is nothing but filler. I'm very sorry not to tell you in advance that was going to happen. I don't usually like to trick you, but I felt like you had to really. To really feel the horror and the terror of what this stuff is, you kind of had to slowly realize you were listening to fakery.

Also he explained how he created some of the music for the episode to show how easy it was to create metal using AI music generators:

There definitely were some actual riffs mixed in and all of that nonsense. I tried to do a good mix of styles, a little bit of absurd kind of songwriting in my AI prompts. There's a little bit of doom in there, some female voices, a lot of death grunts, and, you know, second by second, it's passable. But as overall compositions, they don't go anywhere. It's all kind of middling. The drums have no power. And just like AI generated artwork, like AI generated storytelling and websites, like AI generated customer support, endless mazes that every company wants to put us through. Now, the closer you look, the more it's nonsense. With the music, it's a little harder. The artwork. You can always see the extra fingers or a weird proportion where there are three legs or a head that's just in an unnatural place with the music. It's a little harder to hear with just your ears, but the quality is kind of the same. Mushy, general, normalized blah. Nonetheless, reality has been put on notice. And metal is one of the forms of music most based on physical performances.

Here is the complete list of songs that were played in the episode:

VAPOROUS GRAVE – "Dolls in the Shadows" from METAL's WORST NIGHTMARE 
AT THE WASTE – "Echoes of the Damned" from METAL's WORST NIGHTMARE
NOTHINGHAM – "Savage Pursuit" from METAL's WORST NIGHTMARE
SILENT SHRIEK – "Frenzy of the Hunt" from METAL's WORST NIGHTMARE
A FALSE PROMISE – "Echoes of Dread" from METAL's WORST NIGHTMARE
EPIC WHALE – "Whispers of the Abyss" from METAL's WORST NIGHTMARE
FAKEDOWN – "Digital Destruction" from METAL's WORST NIGHTMARE
GUTLESS – "Chaos in the Emerald City" from METAL's WORST NIGHTMARE
FOG INHALER – "Echoes of Ancestral Shadows" from METAL's WORST NIGHTMARE
AWKWARD INCOUNTER – "Synthetic Reign" from METAL's WORST NIGHTMARE
KNUCKLE DRUGGER – "Chaos and Craft" from METAL's WORST NIGHTMARE
ALIEN INVADER – "Echoes of Resistance" from METAL's WORST NIGHTMARE
ROOTSTALLICA – "A.I. Must Die" from METAL's WORST NIGHTMARE
ARTIFICIAL STEEL – "The Battle Has Begun" from STREAMING FOR VENGEANCE
T.Y. – "Thrash Metal!" from METAL MACHINE
FREE CONTENT LAB – "Slayer Style Thrash Metal" from FREE CONTENT LAB 
ALGORITHMIC AI AUDIO – "Thunderous Rage" from ALGORITHMIC AI AUDIO
STEI CAMEL – "The Necromancer" from STEI CAMEL 
HAIL DARKNESS – "With Horns Of A Beast" from DEATH DIVINE 
FROSTBITE ORCKINGS – "Guardians Of Time" from GUARDIANS OF TIME

Some of the bands Christe played that were not his own are "established" AI-created bands. Frostbite Orckings is a popular melodic death metal project that draws striking similarities to the popular Swedish death metal band Amon Amarth. Another is Artificial Steel, a power metal project that draws some creative similarities to Judas Priest.

The show has already aired on several occasions leading up to Halloween, with the following schedule:

Saturday, October 26th, at 6 PM ET
Sunday, October 27th, at 1 PM ET
Monday, October 28th, at 9 AM ET
Tuesday, October 29th, at 4 PM ET

It will conclude with its Halloween airing Thursday, October 31st, at 9 PM ET.

Christe brings up many valid points in the episode. As a lot of this music can be easily created by just knowing the right prompts and musical editing, it shows how easily you can create an album's worth of material in a day. He also addresses the issues of many people using AI to generate songs similar to popular artists and uploading them onto the artist's Spotify page without permission or consent from the artists. AI is here to stay and will be a point of contention for musicians, artists, and fans, we will just have to learn to navigate through this stuff properly and make sure proper control of the artist's likeness and music, image, and of course royalty and writing credits are handled properly and legally. 

If you're interested in diving more into this topic, Frozen Moon Promotions recently explored this phenomenon a bit more in their article "MetalGPT: Is A.I. helping or hurting metal?".