It’s all still too vague for me to form any opinion on this one way or the other. I know AI is the new music industry boogeyman, but I just don’t feel like DEG is going to drop their instruments in favor of AI prompts. For visual media, yeah. Music? No.
And, like, I’m sort of exhausting from ranting about the lack of the human element in music anyway. Ever since the advent of placing everything on a grid to make it sound perfect; ever since autotune/pitch correction; ever since replacing the drummer with samples. DEG created DSS mostly by piecing files together, and they never actually played it as a band until they rehearsed for the tour. Shinya was using a program to create drum patterns that he later couldn’t faithfully recreate himself. I don’t know. Shit has been weird for a long time.
Or maybe I’m just indifferent about this particular situation because I feel like VK has been eating and regurgitating itself for years anyway. I’m just sitting here like… eh.
This, plus I can’t help myself but seeing this MORTAL DOWNER and AI stuff as a whole new concept. Personally, I see the use of AI and its purpose as losing one’s sensitivity and intelligence in favor of an automated result. We lose our ability to think and reason, since we avoid the whole process of getting there. It’s the story of the journey or the destination, among other things. “MORTAL DOWNER” as in “HUMAN TRANQUILIZER”. That’s how I see the purpose of this album for DIR EN GREY.
Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps are they all cooked after all those decades and releases and can’t re-invent themselves but hey, we’re talking about musicians like others after all and we’re not -all yet- using AI to avoid composing shit.
You can’t sell your soul to the devil in an attempt to draw attention to others who sold their souls first. That’s hypocrisy.
AI cannot create art. It can never be art because it can only iterate on what came before. It has nothing new or meaningful to say that hasn’t already been said. It’s content for the sake of content.
And the layperson doesn’t give a shit because oh, this song sounds nice, this picture is pretty. So they support it because if the content is content, it’s more content to fill their lives with, and that’s a good thing, right?
I know this debate has already taken place, but let me answer this: when a huge part of bands all sounds the same, copying each other, draw on riffs or vocal lines that have already been created, is that more seen as art because humans are behind the result? I’m not sure about it.
All we need is transparency. We as humans are not, we will never admit copying, selling ourselves as “artists” when it’s not. And we already know AI generated is not something purely new. But humans using AI and selling it as humanly done? That’s where we need to not cross the line.
I have to agree with @NowhereGirl. The core issue is the creative process of said art, not necessarily the end result.
Programming samples or using autotone isn’t inherently lazy or automated. If a band member still created a melody or pattern in their head, in my book it’s their creation. There are many albums I love that utilize pre-recorded drum samples (DSS and Marilyn Manson’s Holy Wood). And autotone I think can add a stylistic touch when used sparingly. There are many valid reasons for doing either including recording issues/production crunch, member unavailability, etc.
My issue with the band using AI in any capacity is that their creative integrity is now in question. How will we as a fanbase know if a riff or melody was written from a band member struggling with it for months until it finally clicked or if it was just plugged into an AI generator? What’s the point of a band if you can just generate their music by giving a prompt to a program? I don’t care if they can perform it live note for note. If they didn’t take the time to write it themselves, it’s just a cover as far as I’m concerned.
Art is a reflection of the artist’s world in that given time period. There is no way a computer is going to understand the minute influences given to an artist and translate that into an authentic emotional experience (keyword authentic).
We don’t know how Dir en grey is going to leverage AI and how this will affect their music. Definitely best to wait and see before laying down severe judgement. But I am against them using AI in any capacity whether it’s in cover art, their music videos, lyrics, and especially their music.
They are still working on Mortal Downer but since they annouced this collaboration just now, it’s not necessarily true that this album is even part of this project.
Maybe we need to calm down a bit and wait, if they say more about this …. project…
This is actually a very good point. It might be a completely separate project.
Unfortunately, I doubt it, since the lead single heavily used AI in its video, and if this is taken as a manifesto, we should expect the rest to follow suit.
I’m not that worried about this partnership with Cifer Studios. I looked into CiferAI with some members of the discord a few weeks back and the one thing we discovered was that these may as well be two different companies with two different endeavors. CiferAI is all about building AI infrastructure and doesn’t mention anything about music. Cifer Studios, on the other hand, seems like they’re cashing in on the AI craze. Their home page is just a countdown now, and whatever announcement they’re planning won’t be ready until January 2027. There is like zero chance that Cifer Studios is going to have anything to do with MORTAL DOWNER as it stands today. The boys are likely to drop the album and go on tour before Cifer Studios is ready to take on the world, which paints a post-album collaboration of some sort. That doesn’t mean they won’t use AI from somewhere else, but it won’t be from Cifer.
I originally thought they would take the stems of MORTAL DOWNER and allow users to create their own Dir en grey-lite tracks with the use of Cifer’s AI system, somehow helping Dir en grey retain legal rights over whatever is generated. That sounds like something that aligns with what was originally described, which I will quote below:
CiferAI describes a decentralised machine learning model that keeps training data with its original owners rather than collecting it into a single central system. The company says this approach limits unauthorised use of creative assets, with additional safeguards around privacy, security, and ownership.
“Creative assets” in this case being the stems. So people can generate music all day but the results don’t get fed back into the model? Somehow this protects Dir en grey? We will have to see.
All I gotta say is relax with the doom and gloom. I don’t actually think the band is desperate enough to shoehorn in AI into musical compositions at the eleventh hour, especially considering how long they’ve worked on it. They wouldn’t still be composing music now when the album is due at the end of the year. Visuals and PV’s however are completely on the table and have been for quite some time.
I mean, look, there’s a good chance a bunch of people are going to poo poo all over Mortal Downer anyway, AI or no AI. No one hates DEG more than their fans.
To be honest, whether this specific band or album does or doesn’t make heavy use of AI during its production is less of a concern for me than the precedent that this conversation sets for how extremely difficult it is to be anything but skeptical about the authenticity of music produced after the years 2023-2025.
I know Saishu spoke about the pattern of increasing artificiality in music and how it’s been going on for a while now, but things like sample usage and putting songs together patchwork-like is fundamentally different IMO to using AI to actually compose parts of (or even the entirety of) songs. Admittedly ghostwriting has always been a thing, but at least in those instances there was still a human being acting as the creative spark, even if it was dishonest about who that human being was.
With this AI stuff I just can’t escape the feeling that there’s no longer any way to be confident that the music we’re listening to was organically created by a real person. The only defense any artist has against that skepticism now is just to rely on whatever parasocial relationships they have with their listeners to convince them that they wouldn’t do that - which also sucks since we all know that the music industry is heavily built around cultivating and negatively exploiting exactly those sorts of parasocial relationships.
I agree that the skepticism’s tiring as hell, but it’s well-founded IMO. Maybe it’s time for me to accept just being a grumpy old man and to stubbornly refuse to listen to anything made beyond 2025 because it was all more authentic back in my day.
There are many long messages in here, very many… Excuse me I don’t mean to sound rude but is there anyone who can sum it up shortly - is there any new real news about the album? Leaks? (to cause this big long discussion??) Thanks!
>Doom and Gloom about the AI partnership with Cipher and how it could affect the integrity of the album.
>Others are trying to provide nuance or give the band the benefit of the doubt. Rightfully so because we have not explicitly been told that Ai is being used to compose Downer. And Downer has been in the works prior to this collaboration.
>There hasn’t been any further (legit) news/updates regarding the album.
