As far back as the 19th century, soothsayers have been promising and warning against it in equal measure. While we have yet to achieve a post-scarcity utopia or descend into a robot-ruled wasteland, year upon year, little by little, many of those predictions have jumped from the pages of sci-fi novels and into news headlines as ever-increasing computing power turns future fantasies into tangible reality. From law enforcement to medicine and visual arts to weaponry, the real-world impacts of AI are already being felt. Tech's best and brightest are hard at work trying to streamline the songwriting process or replace it altogether: Splice's Similar Sounds uses AI to scan thousands of samples before offering the best kick to complement your snare; Orb's Producer Suite generates rhythms, melodies and chord progressions to help you get started on a track; and services like Amper need only a few keywords to create fully realised background music. So, are composers and songwriters staring into the void of their own obsolescence?

Even the most dedicated musicians have to put down their instruments sometimes, but on YouTube, you can listen to a bass solo that keeps going and going. Dadabots, which is also behind an endless death metal stream, used a recurrent neural network (RNN) to create a YouTube stream featuring an infinite bass solo. The Dadabots team, CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski, trained the RNN with two hours of bass improvisation from YouTuber Adam Neely. After some trial and error, Carr and Zukowski limited the dataset to mainly faster licks because the RNN likes fast tempos. That improved the overall sound quality, according to Dadabots, and it means that the AI generates lots of frenetic bass playing.

In November, the musician Grimes made a bold prediction. "I feel like we're in the end of art, human art," she said on Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast. "Once there's actually AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), they're gonna be so much better at making art than us." Her comments sparked a meltdown on social media. The musician Zola Jesus called Grimes the "voice of silicon fascist privilege."

A pair of musicians-turned-programmers used a John Coltrane record to train a neural network. The result is a provocative glimpse of what it sounds like when an algorithm deconstructs a piece of human art -- and reassembles it into something a human would never create. The music the algorithm produces, which is streamed live 24 hours a day, is uncanny. Let's just say that it's not your dad's jazz. Dadabots, which is a collaboration between coders CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski, has done other experiments with AI-generated music.

We are making such material available non-commercially in an effort to educate and advance research in machine learning, generative music, music information retrieval, computational creativity, etc.

In a project called "Relentless Doppelganger," a neural network is grinding out the blast beats, super-distorted guitars, and bellowing vocals of death metal. The best part of all: it's streaming its brutal creations 24 hours a day on YouTube -- an intriguing and public example of AI that's now able to generate convincing imitations of human art. The neural network is the work of Dadabots, a research duo that experiments with creating music using artificial intelligence tools. The death metal project, which they trained using tracks by death metal band Archspire, is the first that they've livestreamed instead of releasing as an album, and the change in format had everything to do with the quality of the neural network's output. In Dadabots' previous experiments, which dabbled in black metal and Beatles-inspired tracks, only about 5 percent of the AI-generated tracks were usable, co-creator CJ Carr told Futurism, and the programmers had to curate it.

For nearly a month, Dadabots has been streaming death metal nonstop on its YouTube channel. While that may sound like a huge undertaking for a typical four-piece metal band, Dadabots is actually an AI generating its own approximations of what death metal sounds like. Dadabots--a fake band powered by deep learning software--was developed by CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski, two musicians and technologists who met while they were going to Berklee College of Music in Boston they told The Outline. It's based on a recurrent neural network--computing architecture that "learns" patterns in a large amount of input data (in this case, death metal) in order to predict what musical elements and sequences are most common and recreates them. They broke down their process in a 2017 paper posted to the arXiv preprint server.

Artificial intelligence has reached a new frontier: creating black metal music without the need for actual musicians. Two musical technologists named Zack Zukowski and CJ Carr have created an algorithm that can learn bits of existing music and then duplicate it to create a completely new song, the Outline writes. To prove it, Zukowski and Carr, under the name Dadabots, created a heavy metal album called Coditany of Timeness that sounds like a real metal album. That's because it is a real metal album--just one created by AI. Zukowski and Carr took small pieces of a 2011 album called Diotima by the death metal band Krallice, and, as the Outline explains, "Then they fed each segment through a neural network--a type of artificial intelligence modeled loosely on a biological brain--and asked it to guess what the waveform of the next individual sample of audio would be. If the guess was right, the network would strengthen the paths of the neural network that led to the correct answer, similar to the way electrical connections between neurons in our brain strengthen as we learn new skills."