Blues
Joe Bonamassa was asked about Eddie Dalton at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival in Austin, in an interview published on 3 October. Dalton is a soul and blues artist generated with artificial intelligence by a content creator, Dallas Little, who surfaced early this year with a voice modelled on Otis Redding and B.B. King and has been turning up on the blues charts since.
“Never seen him play live, never met him,” Bonamassa said. “He’s a legitimate artist in the eyes of some.”
The distinction he draws is between listening and competing. “When people want to zone out, and they want to put music on in the car, if they like AI music, that’s 100% their right,” he said. “Should those artists be in the same category as living people out there? No. That’s a horrible thing.”
On musicians using the tools he was milder: “If someone uses SUNO to write a lyric, okay, it’s not a high crime, a misdemeanor.” And he admitted he can’t tell where it is: “Unless you’re living under a rock, now, do I think, do I hear it in some music? Absolutely.” The phrase he closes on is “everybody’s on the honor system”.
Dalton was revealed as AI-generated last April, by which point the single “Another Day Old” had reached number one on the US iTunes singles chart and around number two on the official UK chart. The album “The Years Between” got to number three on iTunes.
Text by Enric Vilaplana