Is AI ruining music as we know it? Is it gradually destroying musicians’ livelihoods? Or is it essential harmless and doing nothing worse than filling the Internet up with time-wasting gunk?
Perhaps it’s time we took a more nuanced view of it. That seems to be the message of a new TED talk that’s been given by Dustin Ballard, the creator of There I Ruined It, the YouTube channel that has regularly used AI to, in its own tagline, “lovingly destroy your favourite records.”
Ballard makes the argument that AI is simply another tool for musicians and draws comparisons with other technological breakthroughs over the last century – the advent of sampling in the 1980s, the launch of the synthesizer in the late 1960s, even the invention of the phonograph (that’s a record player, kids).
Indeed he plucks out a revealing quote from the 19th century composer of military marches, John Philip Sousa, who described recorded music as “a substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul. [Phonographs] reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system.”
In the talk Ballard provides a number of examples of how he has used AI – getting an AI version of 1950s country singer Conway Twitty to ‘sing’ 50 Cent’s In Da Club and the Red Hot Chili Peppers shopping list in which ‘Antony Kiedis’ appears to be rattling off grocery items as the band plays Can’t Stop behind him.
All good fun, of course. But Ballard does say that he has three guardrails for how to use AI.
First of all - is it deceptive? Can people actually believe it is real? Secondly, is there artistic intent behind it? “If you’re one of those people who’s mass producing hundreds of AI songs and uploading them to Spotify, your intent is probably not artistic,” he suggests.
Then there’s the question of how musicians are affected. “Oftentimes the ‘victims’ of the songs that I create actually end up sharing those same songs on social media,” Ballard argues, before showing a baffled Snoop Dogg reacting to a mashup he’d made called The Bare Necessities Are Gin And Juice.
“There are ways to use AI that can actually increase human creativity,” Ballard concludes.
Anyway, food for thought. You can access Ballard’s talk on the TED website.
