AI + Pop (or vs?) in Wired
A Wired magazine reporter, Amos Barshad, got in touch with me recently when he was writing a story, “AI Could Usher in a New Era of Music. Will It Suck?” published earlier this week, about the intersection of artificial intelligence and popular music. The article’s focus, per its title, is “Heart on My Sleeve,” a song enabled by AI that mimicked Canadian rapper Drake and got a lot of attention in the process (from audiences, from the press, and from the record label that administrates Drake’s commercial interests).
Barshad and I talked on the phone when he was researching the piece. As he quotes in the article, I think that the “hand-wringing [around AI music], it’s a strange thing to me. … We’ve been concerned with creating artificial life at least since the Golem.” The rise in anxiety about AI makes me think about issues raised when the cloning of Dolly the sheep was announced in 1997; I kept coming across people saying how “now” was the time to start debating the impact of cloning, as if cloning hadn’t been on the horizon for a long time. It was at that moment I realized how few people must read (or absorb and reflect on) science fiction, which I’ve found has routinely provided me with tools to navigate daily modern life. Sci-fi may not successfully predict the future (arguably, it is always about the present), but it can sure instigate thought experiments in advance of the future’s eventual — and in the case of Drake Prime, mundane if worrisome — arrival. I appreciate the economic and existential anxieties that come along with the current slate of AI techniques. I think the Writers Guild of America, for example, is correct is using this moment to put initial rules in place. I also think a lot of writing about “AI” treats it as a singular instance — as a known, identifiable, and nameable thing. Which it is not. In many cases, today’s writing opposed to AI reads about as sophisticated as arguments that regularly situate a nameless “they” as the source of any given problem. (As for writing that’s strongly in favor of AI, by contrast it often reads like it was written by an AI, which is a whole other problem.)
In some ways, I’m the worst person to talk with about the impact of AI on pop music because I don’t really pay a lot of attention to pop music. While on occasion a song will catch my fancy, I barely listen to anything with a singer, and haven’t for a long time. It’s not that I dislike pop music these days so much as it disinterests me. I listen to music continuously, and the patterns of adoption and mimesis in pop music strike me as slow and routine, compared with the ingenuity and invention in experimental music.
A key thing for me that Barshad touches on in his Wired article is the cybernetic history of both artificial intelligence and electronic music. The development of cybernetics is key to the development of artificial intelligence and, as I note in the article, of generative systems. The Drake AI song is, as Barshad quotes me, boring, plain and simple. It’s the end result of rote cause and effect (“please make something that sounds like X”). AI will be of interest, at least to me, as a musical instrument, as a music production tool, as a creative tool, when it engages in the creative process more thoroughly as a generative system — which is to say, one where the outcomes are considerably less certain, less like placing an order with a mechanical turk and more like, as Brian Eno says (and as, again, is mentioned in Barshad’s article), tending a garden.
