AI and the future of Music Blogging

Earlier this year I noticed a new pattern under my blog referral statistics. Social media referrals had plummeted due to well noted algorithm changes, search engines were thankfully staying strong and I always had a collection of random scattershot ways people found the blog. One of these was a new ‘referrer’: ChatGPT.

I had, at this stage, been almost completely ignorant of AI. Obviously I knew of it and had heard many people in my day job (teaching) discuss the potentials of the software for assisting with preparation and marking. But I hadn’t used it at all at this point or even downloaded the app.

I was intrigued by seeing the fact that ChatGPT was sending people to my blog. From what I knew about AI it was a tool that people used to write things or do things for them. I thought it was going to replace me, not link to me.

Most of the clicks were heading towards my Nadia Reid review. I downloaded the app to see how it worked. I was heading into the belly of the beast.

The first thing I did was type into the box ‘tell me about the reviews of the new Nadia Reid album’. What came back was intriguing. Here was a rundown of the critical response to the album, pulling from lots of different sites. It had a summary of the ‘overall reception’, a list of ‘what reviewers liked’ and ‘What critics found challenging’ and an overall round up. Beside each bullet point was the external link to the sites the LLM had used. I couldn’t see my own blog on there but after trying ‘tell me about the new Nadia Reid album’ prompt, I saw the link to my site come up.   

ChatGPT was reading my blog and using it to compile a run down of the critical response to an album. It was at least linking to its original sources and people were clicking through – which is something at least. Still, I felt a little unnerved at how my writing had been used without my prior knowledge or consent.

At this point I decided to do what I tell my school pupils never to do. I asked ChatGPT to write for me. The prompt was ‘write me a 500 word review of the new Nadia Reid album.’ What came back was alarmingly good. It had context, nuance, description of the songs, overview. It was engaging and effectively sold the album to me. The links to the sites it had used were at the end. The writing felt like the house style of a big newspaper.

However it didn’t sound anything like how I would write. It was too perfect and polished. What I love about blogging is the sense that you bring your own voice to the writing and can be as conversational as you want.  When people criticise music bloggers for being too personal, too unprofessional, lacking an editor – these qualities are exactly what paradoxically also appeals. The humanity is clear in blogging.

For that reason, I believe blogging can survive, even thrive, in an AI area. We are not academics. We are not professionals. We are not robots. There will be mistakes in the writing. Some ideas will not be well developed or structured. We may repeat ourselves. Some punctuation may be lacking. But the heart and the humanity will be there in every line.

Strangely reading the AI album review gave me a renewed confidence in the worth of my own amateurish writing. The last few years I’ve felt somewhat adrift in my music blogging. I accepted that I was not talented enough to get to the level of some of the professionals out there. Reading their album reviews made me feel quite inferior. I struggled to maintain my momentum. Then we had an influx of brilliant cultural critics turning their academic learning to music. Again, I could only read and admire.

Reading what the robot wrote I realised then that achieving some kind of level in my writing was not actually what this artform was about. Blogging thrived because it was personal. Every voice was valued. Every voice sounded different. Anyone could write about new artists and contribute to the cultural discussion.

And that’s what makes music blogging still a worthwhile endeavour. Because doing the listening, the thinking, the research and the writing is, in itself, a joy. Blogging is good for the soul.

How then to get the humans back reading blogs? For the purposes of this post, I asked the machine. ChatGPT said the future of blogging is in using newsletters to send your links straight to your readers, which actually sounded like decent advice. Perhaps then AI can be useful in analysing trends in things like social media, SEO and human behaviour.

But then again if we are to have a future media that is made by humans then perhaps we should boycott the whole thing? Asking it for advice is a slippery slope to becoming reliant on that advice. Just this week a major artist was talking about using AI to create and experiment with their music. It all sounded so horrific and wrong. Then we also have the potential nightmare of fully AI generated artists and albums. If we draw a strong line in the sand now then we can all be united against this kind of technology in the music industry. Every blogger may now need to add a disclaimer to their ‘About’ page, making it clear their stance on the use of AI.

Rest assured as long as there’s albums written and recorded by humans, I will be here writing reviews. No AI assistance required.