Scoring Synthetic Media: Library Music in the Viral “A.I. Film” Trend

Of the many new forms of synthetic media, one trend to garner especially sustained attention in the popular imagination has been the recent slew of “A.I. Films.” Despite the cinematic qualities that this moniker invokes, these media artifacts are typically short-form digital creations—short films, fanciful trailers for non-existent movies, etc.—that circulate online, share distinct aims, and, quite often, achieve considerable virality. But what of sound and music in this idiosyncratic subset of digital media, and to what extent might they also be the product of algorithmic co-creation, as the term A.I. film implies? This article investigates screen music's status as part of the most pervasive popular perceptions concerning A.I. in filmmaking, thus challenging the longstanding visual bias of much existing literature on synthetic media. It considers screen scoring in several relevant contexts concerning the ethics and aesthetics of A.I., raising issues of authorship, labor, and deceptiveness. It also brings the growing corpus of literature on A.I. from screen studies into dialogue with film music scholarship, especially the nascent debates on library music in which the soundtracks of so-called “A.I. films” are so often enmeshed. Ultimately, this article seeks to identify the dominant scoring idiom for these short-form creations and interrogate its role in consolidating their cinematic aspirations, while also questioning the more pernicious ways that certain scoring tendencies in this trend have perpetuated the obfuscation/erasure of labor by vulnerable communities of artists and composers.