The advent of ChatGPT seemed to mark the true beginning of a worldwide discussion around production of media using artificial intelligence, which has been utilized to create artwork and music for some time prior. While lawmakers, businesses and creatives alike are all trying to reconcile the ethics and fair-game implementation of AI, there’s one artist out there who is welcoming AI with open arms – Grimes.
Elon Musk’s off-again-on-again partner, and mother to two of the Twitter and Tesla boss’s children, took to social media to give the world the green light to use her voice in the generation of AI music, pledging to split royalties for any said works right down the middle. Attached to her tweet was a screenshot of a New York Times article about a recent AItrack which made waves, supposedly ‘featuring’ Drake and The Weeknd:
Grimes outlines that she has no legal bindings to any record label, and as such reserves her right to let pretty much anyone use her voice as they please, so long as she gets a cut of the profits. Now, we’re not going to pretend to know the ins and outs of music creation using artificial intelligence, but we’d wager that it’s a markedly more straightforward process than agonizing for hours over a Logic, FL Studio or Pro Tools session and creating a sound that’s just right, never mind the actual songwriting process.
It would seem, then, murky as it is, folks who are able to finesse AI queries to create a decent-sounding ‘Grimes’ song stand to make an easy profit, very much leaving music producers of ‘old’ out of the equation.
While artificial intelligence started off quirky and fun, what with it being used to play games on Twitch streams, as well as create various social media filters, its real-world applications grow scarier by the day – and may have a lasting and paradigm-shifting impact on countless industries all over the world in a future that’s much closer than we might think.