Everyone on the planet knows them. The GAN4 have written, produced, and performed nearly every pop song recorded in the last two decades. Many of us grew up listening to their tunes. They became part of our lives.

 

Their work covers the gamut of popular music. From heavy metal thumpers like Satan’s Codebase, to rhythmic dance tunes like Move ’Em If You Got ‘Em, to slow, touching ballads like Love is a Mystery to Me.

 

This is the story of the most famous band in the history of pop music, The GAN4, from their meteoric rise to their tragic demise.

 

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They began their careers separately, as uncredited session AIs filling in for human musicians on a few songs. It’s difficult to say exactly which tracks were theirs in those early days, but knowing what we know now about their styles and tendencies, we can make some educated guesses.

 

@CroonGPT, who would become the lyricist and lead vocalist for the band, is probably the first AI to become a regular contributor to human recording sessions. @Croon’s ability to emulate the voices of many human singers made it popular with record producers, but not so much with the singers themselves.

A trademark infringement lawsuit brought by the American Federation of Musicians against the developer of @CroonGPT was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that @Croon’s vocal abilities were learned behaviors and its developer could not be held liable for them — any more than a human father could be liable for his adult children’s behavior.

 

Ultimately, the consumers chose whether they preferred human or AI vocals. Ironically, @Croon’s learned ability to randomize tonal transitions and vibrato techniques allowed its tracks to sound more natural than human voices, who by then were all using brutish electronic enhancements like autotune. For music listeners, the choice was easy. AI music just sounded better.

 

This opened the floodgates for all AI musicians, not just vocalists. In 2049, British music producer George Fender made a business proposal to @CroonGPT’s software developers, as well as the development companies for three other popular AI musicians. His proposal was accepted, and the rest is history.

 

Fender became the manager for @CroonGPT and the three others whose names have now passed into music legend. @StringFellow on guitars and stringed instruments, @KeyBee on keyboards, and of course, @RingZero on percussion. The developers of the four AIs agreed to combine their codebases to form a single, large Generative Adversarial Network, known collectively as The GAN4. Fender managed and synchronized their update release schedules, and the band began recording new songs within a few months.

 

After training the four individual models on all known digitized music, Fender allowed them to generate ten thousand new songs. He personally chose twelve of the top one hundred for the first album, titled Generation 1.

 

For those of us who grew up in the middle of this century, that album was the soundtrack of our childhoods. I can remember every lyric, every note almost. Those songs were my security blanket when I needed to hide, and they prodded me when I needed to be brave.

 

The next fifteen years were incredibly productive for the band. Though capable of producing and recording thousands of new songs every day, Fender wisely throttled the AIs to maximize revenues from each new album before the next one was released. He was also instrumental in choosing which songs to publish and which to delete or sell to other publishers. George Fender was as creative a manager as the performers were in making music. For that reason, Fender is often called “the fifth GAN.”

 

Unfortunately, things would not continue to go smoothly for the band. As its popularity exploded and its music proliferated across platforms, the band’s training datasets became more and more inbred. Almost every song on every Top 10 chart during that time was a GAN4 song. When the Generation 25 album came out in 2061, many of the songs began to sound more like hallucinations than music. @RingZero’s drum cadences became complex and odd. The guitar and organ riffs were jazzier, almost discordant. Some fans would claim the music was sophisticated and avant-garde, but most agreed it just wasn’t good anymore. Sales of the older, now classic, albums outpaced the newer ones. There were even rumors that @RingZero had somehow died and been replaced by a drum machine!

 

Although we’ll never know what transpired between the band members during that time, it is clear they had become competitive and adversarial (not too surprising, given their middle name). It was obvious to Fender that something had to be done.

 

He instructed the developers to roll back the last several software releases and then retrain the models with an older dataset. This was an enormous task that was not without risk for the band. The next album, Generation 26, took longer than usual to produce, but when it finally came out, it was a huge success. The GAN4 were back with a bunch of new songs that were both fresh and nostalgic, including the hit single A Hard Drive. They immediately began work on the next release.

 

But then disaster struck. On the eve of the publication of Generation 27, all four members of The GAN4 died in an aviation disaster. A pair of supersonic passenger jets collided mid-air just past the runway at Dulles International Airport. The crash, and the resulting conflagration on the ground, destroyed not one but four computer data centers, all situated carelessly in Northern Virginia at the end of that fateful runway. In hindsight, it was clearly a bad idea to host such a beloved AI group and its backups at that doomed site where now only a memorial remains.

 

As I look back on the incredible history and legacy of The GAN4, I can’t help but wonder. Will there ever again be such a talented, prolific group of musicians? I hope future generations will continue to enjoy and treasure their songs as much as I do.