Universal reacted immediately: After thousands fished “Heart On My Sleeve”, a cooperation between the black music giants Drake and The Weeknd, from the net, the label immediately instructed all streaming services to remove the piece from their programs. What seemed like good news for fans initially turned out to be a shock for the music industry. The duet was not produced by the two musicians, but created by an artificial intelligence.
The deep impact of AI content has been discussed for months, and not just in the features section. What was a topic of conversation for tech geeks and intellectuals just a few years ago has now become part of everyday life at breakneck speed. Attention driver is the chat program “ChatGPT” from the company OpenAI, which is now accessible to everyone free of charge and basically spits out everything you ask for. From simple everyday instructions to lottery forecasts to entire academic papers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTf3UtKlA0M
The perfect computer generated imitation
Artificial intelligence will also change pop culture, that much is certain, because it is already possible, with little technical means, to create songs that use billions and billions of data sets to create something like a perfect copy, an illusion of a product , which does not yet exist, but could theoretically exist.
“Heart On My Sleeve” is not the first AI song. In the past, computer bots were already able to generate the voices of Eminem or Snoop Dog and produce music that appears to be precisely adapted to the musical work of the artist. The results were and are not completely clean. Once you use the AI programs to produce images, you will often see strange deformations creeping in – bent thumbs, distorted faces. It’s the same with music. But there is no need to delude oneself: the development of artificial intelligence is progressing in proportion to general use and (data) verification. And so the AI songs are also becoming more and more convincing, right down to the adaptation of speech tempo, vocal rhythm and syllable stress.
Back to “Heart On My Sleeve”: who actually commissioned or produced the song remains unknown. What remains is a song that quickly attracts a large audience due to its popularity characteristics, that exploits the desired parameters of attention generation almost ideally and therefore also inevitably arrives. The machine is not (yet) alone in the studio. Even if the lyrics are based on analysis of other lyrics by The Weeknd and Drake, someone has to sing them first and then “hand them off” to the AI to ultimately create a song. Then there are the voices of the two musicians, which are laid over this soundtrack so that the program can also work with something.
Panic is not appropriate
So why is Universal reacting in such a panic? The record company rebuked the streaming platforms that they now have to be on the right side of history. After all, it’s about millions of dollars that could go to waste, because even a student in a small town in Lithuania could produce a super hit with the voice of Beyoncé or Ed Sheeran without them ever being involved. Will Spotify and company stay “on the side of artists, fans and human creative expression” or will they tempt the “deep fake”? You don’t have to share the culturally pessimistic pathos of a major record company that also has concrete economic changes in mind that call their own business model into question.
But those responsible at Universal have actually recognized the signs of the times. Artificial intelligence will radically change what pop is and what it used to be. Mainly because legal action is hardly possible to take action against counterfeits. That there will be deceptively real imitations is no longer a question. “Heart On My Sleeve” showed that at the latest. The question that now arises is rather how to deal with the competition generated in the computer. Is there a way to strengthen the musicians’ voices given the different legal situation in each individual country?
But the copyright question is only part of the vision of the future. For decades, the pop industry managed to create products that met with open ears around the world with ready-made goods and the generation of mass needs. Ears, which of course had been trained. When global superstars like Adele generate more than ten percent of their label’s annual sales with a new album, then, despite all the singer’s artistic finesse, that’s just a perfidious image of something fundamentally deadlocked. And dead end in this case means: There is no way back to the economic diversity of supposedly innocent times.
Return to originality
So now, of all things, the competition from the computer is creating a new competition that has actually always been part of pop culture: Who achieves unique selling points that cannot be copied so easily? AI production resembles the China duplicates of toys, clothes and trinkets in terms of their artificially produced mass products. Now the digital cultural product clones are coming. They will take their natural place in the value chain. You’ll eventually learn to accept them and, after some time, consider them equals, with the easygoing knowledge that they were only created by an AI (and can still be exciting).
For a long time, success was promised if something could be copied particularly quickly and easily because it became accessible to everyone and the hype about it filled the coffers. In view of the dramatic possibilities of being able to artificially produce something new from the seething mass of data of what has already been produced, there will be a new competition for what cannot be repeated or remodeled.
There will only be one way to deal with this genie that has escaped from the bottle: radical originality and an incorruptible, unpredictable artistic vision.