No Generative AI At Berklee- Disband Bots, Beats and Bytes

No Generative AI in MUSIC!!!

Music is for the people, by the people.

As a former student of Berklee Online I find the AI course demeaning and insulting to the premise of a music education, and it devalues everything that Berklee should stand for in the music creation community

Stop this with AI!

As an alumni, I am in solidarity with Berklee students who want to create real music for real people.

Supporting AI music is inherently telling your students that a computers efficiency is worth more than them as artists

“How long? Not long, because what you reap is what you sow!”

Generative AI has no place in music, let alone at a major college for music.

incoming berklee student, fully onboard this with this. what berklee is doing is not something i want to support

AI should be a tool to achieve something great. Not the end goal.

As a former high school music teacher, I strongly support this petition.

You go to school to run a life changing, multi year marathon. You don't school to ask for an Uber and make the 26 miles 30 minutes. This is a total travesty and a sign that this institution is rotten. Please make this right.

The fact that this was even allowed to slither its way in to the curriculum is as clear a sign as any that Lucchese and any other technocratic idiots have no place operating an arts institution. Down with generative AI.

Please stop robbing yourself

I'm a former Berklee student who just graduated this month. Berklee's leadership claims that this class will help prepare students to have successful careers in the future, but I think the evidence shows that Suno and Chat GPT offer nothing to any artist that would translate to success. These technologies are theft machines that are incapable of creating anything new, interesting, or exciting, but are certainly capable of plagiarism. The most successful AI music so far has either been in the form of low-effort memes with little staying power, or bot farms that flood streaming platforms with thousands of AI-generated songs that barely anyone actually listens to in order to scrape money together. Prompting Suno to make a song does not result in good or well-liked songs. And importantly for students entering a gigging industry where connections and reputation are super important, the tech is *profoundly* despised by a majority of us, and anyone who uses it is potentially throwing their reputation in the toilet. I’m sure there are other uses for machine learning in music that are wonderful and deserve attention, but gen AI is a dead end and classes like Ben Camp’s promote nothing but laziness and career suicide.

Generative AI discourages creativity, discourages growth and mastery of craft, steals from artists, destroys the environment, and is cited as the #1 reason for layoffs today. We are aware that the administration at Berklee is financially involved with Suno, and we know this is only for your profit, not the planet or the people who inhabit it. This is not the equivalent of computers "replacing" books. It is genuinely hurting everyone except the people who put profits above all else. Remove the AI course, and never add another one.

I am a former Berklee student. The topic of generative AI in music absolutely has a place as part of a Berklee curriculum; students need to be prepared to deal with the real world, and genAI tools like Suno are real. But ethical, legal, and aesthetic concerns should come first. This topic should be taught cautiously, not cynically. I am particularly concerned about the conflict of interest in having a paid agent of a third party company teaching students to use that company's product. This plays into the worst "music factory" stereotypes that have been thrown at Berklee for decades, since before I even attended. It begins to resemble indoctrination more than education. Each year I have less and less confidence in and respect for the college where I spent so much time in my youth. It feels worse and worse to receive the alumni fundraising letters. It feels worse and worse to learn that someone's high school kid wants to go to Berklee and have my name come up as someone who can talk to them about my experience, given the path that the college's administration has taken it on in the twenty years since I attended. 1. This course should be removed from the catalog immediately. 2. Berklee should offer an undergraduate course that prepares students to tackle ethical, moral, legal, financial and aesthetic concerns around the use of genAI. 3. The course instructor must have no disqualifying conflicts of interest. 4. The course should be a mandatory prerequisite to any other course that is structured around hands-on genAI tool use.

I'm currently a Berklee Online student. And it sucks when people on top are scumbags.

As a Berklee alumni, it is disheartening to see the lack of foresight in training future music industry professionals to rely on machine stolen models to create. For music to grow, it doesn't just take a prompt to create, but the human element of creativity to expand upon ideas and experiences that a machine cannot replicate. Continuing down this path destroys the reputability and legacy of the monolith that is Berklee College of Music, not just for alumni, but the industry as a whole.

Berklee Valencia ‘22. To give a course promoting AI music as a valid form of artistic expression is to make a mockery of what it means to be an artist.