SM Entertainment is feeding their whole music catalog into AI, whose involvement will surely stop at an advisory role

In timing that’s a hell of a coincidence considering the last post, SM Entertainment CEO Jang Cheol Hyuk recently revealed … no, bragged about how for SM 3.0 they’re feeding all their massive catalog of music into AI outputs. So instead of having to assign tracks that fit a group’s sound to develop a coherent brand and image, they can use AI to do it for them.

This is sort of a long way of saying they’re looking to replace what a good A&R should be doing, leaving some of the process up to the algorithm, basically. The core fear from that is it’ll continue a trend in K-pop that basically aims for the safest and most generic option — which sorta dovetails with what Ben Affleck recently said about AI scriptwriting. K-pop has always been put into boxes of concepts, but this type of selection is likely to make things even more structured than ever, as this is sorta like McKinsey’ing things on steroids. And yes, I’m sure defenders will say “it’s just a tool”, but once an idea gets put in your head, you tend to drift in that direction even subconsciously, so the AI tool will poison the well from the get-go.

And that’s even aside from the bigger picture fears, which is that this seems to be SME setting up a way for them to use the voices of their artists in perpetuity (Naevis, anybody?) and to eventually hand off production and songwriting and who knows what else (music videos, etc) to incorporate generative AI.

Joy.