Students' surprising attitudes on AI remixes

A survey of 37 undergrads in my Intro to New Media course reveals some surprising attitudes toward AI-generated remixes. Students responded to this informal poll after reading a half-dozen affirming and critical perspectives on the topic, from Business Insider's promise that AI music could revolutionize the industry to Kotaku's rebuke that AI anime is a "slap in the face to pro animators."

Student attitudes toward AI music were on the conservative side; they were much more likely to grant rights to original artists than to creators or music labels using generative AI to remix songs.

On the liberal side, they opined that deep fakes inserting minority actors into mainstream movies could make Hollywood more inclusive. And a surprising one in five had no problem with recording a personalized love letter from the artist Holly Herndon using the instrument she shared to clone her own voice.

When it comes to animation, students had no strong opinion on AI-assisted rotoscoping like Corridor Crew's famous Rock-Paper-Scissors anime, with the balance describing it as neither democratizing nor plagiarizing.

The survey was just one result from a larger research project with Greg Nelson and Troy Schotter this fall designed to compare student experiences performing tasks with pre- and post-generative AI approaches. All questions were scaled from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree.

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