Music, Art, and AI: Why We Need To Reevaluate Our Relationship With Creative Works
Are you keeping up?
It’s been a crazy month with the release of GPT-4 into the wild. The amount of innovation and development that’s taken place in that short time is far beyond what I could possibly cover in this article. But unless you’ve been living under a rock this year, you’ve probably heard about most of it.
Today we’re going to explore the impact this technology is having on the creative industries, how our relationship to creative works might change, and what web3 could possibly do to help. Let’s get into it!
Heart On My Sleeve
In the past week, music lovers have been left speechless with the release of “Heart on My Sleeve” by Drake and The Weeknd. Why? Because this song was generated by AI. It wasn’t actually created by Drake and The Weeknd, it was just in AI imitating their style and voice.
This has Universal Records, both Drake and The Weeknd’s record label, up in arms as these artists are two of their most valued assets. But it’s not just record labels who need to reckon with this new phenomena. Artists and fans need to consider the implications of AI generated music as well. Will music fans enjoy AI-generated music as much as music produced by humans? What does this mean for the future of musical artists? How will they compete? How can artists protect their intellectual property?
I don’t have the answers. I don’t know what’s going to happen. What I do know is that as an industry and culture, we need to reflect on how things will change and how we are going to respond to this. AI is progressing at breakneck speed and any response we have to the current state of AI will surely be outdated soon. We need to embrace the fluidity of this situation and accept that the rate of change will become very rapid, and perhaps form the basis of our “new normal”.
Regulators are facing these same challenges. The regulation to facilitate AI-generated music simply doesn’t exist yet. How can it ever hope to catch up? What can we do to protect artists and their creative works?
All these questions are going to need answering.
Pseudomnesia: The Electrician
It’s not just the music world that’s being rattled by AI. Mere days ago, German photographer Boris Eldagsen won the creative open category at the Sony world photography awards with the photo entitled “Pseudomnesia: The Electrician“. After securing the win, he publicly announced that the photo was in fact generated by AI and was submitted to spark an open debate on AI-generated art.
Seeing this has most of us at a loss for words. I’d like to think that the mere knowledge that an artist has used his or her skill to create a work of art is enough to make it beautiful or evoke some kind of emotion. Boris Eldagsen appears to have proved this wrong.
But what then is art to us? Is the creator irrelevant? Is art simply the idea formed in the artist’s head and the means to display the idea in a creative manner is less relevant? Will ideas be the new creative currency?
Led by Values
I believe we’re still going to value human elements in art. Sure, AI is astonishingly good at generating creative works. Perhaps even better than humans. But appreciation of art is relative and values shift. Perhaps we will come to value the imperfections that humans inadvertently include in their creative works.
With the popularization of Digital Audio Workstations, music producers were able to program drum beats for their songs that played perfectly on beat and in time with atomic precision. All melodic notes and chord changes were perfectly in sync. But music listeners quickly grew tired of this. Perfection becomes robotic. It’s too good, and therefore, no longer interesting. We enjoy imperfections and mistakes. They add unique qualities and novelty to the listening experience.
I think AI will lead us to value creative imperfections more than we ever have before.
Proof of Production?
But regardless of what element we value in art, I believe we always will value the human side. With the abilities of AI compounding each and every day, it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish between creative works by a human and a computer. But I think we’ll still want to.
This is where decentralized blockchain networks excel. They verify things.
Granular, high speed, and low cost blockchains might be the solution to our creative AI problem. As a music producer myself, I’ve got some insight into the process of making music and would like to propose a hypothetical scenario.
What if we could use blockchains to verifiably encode our work? When we record and produce music, it’s usually done in a DAW such as Logic Pro, Ableton Live, or Cubase. That’s the tool we use to compose, produce, and complete pieces of music. What if we could leverage rollup solutions on Ethereum, such as Arbitrum or zkSync, to verify that we have created what we said we did in our productions? Every X number of minutes, our work is recorded and automatically added as a transaction to the blockchain. Once the piece of music is completed and released, it comes with an Etherscan link that showcases the string of transactions that were recorded to create this song.
It’s proof of production.
This is just a hypothetical example. But proof of ownership, proof of stake, proof of reserves, and proof of humanity are all big topics in the web3 space today. Why not make room for proof of production as well?
Life is changing
Regardless of what happens, life in the creative business is going to change rapidly. This article should simply serve as a reminder that we can’t turn a blind eye to AI. If we want to remain relevant, we have to pay attention to the impact it has on creative works.
Just like all other technology has served as a tool to make us better, so will AI. Right now it’s just scary because it is making us seem irrelevant. We’re not. We just have to redefine our role and our values around creative works.
What impact do you think AI will have on the value of creative works?🤖
