Of music, art and robots
ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) is eating the world. The latest example is Udio. If it looks like misspelt “audio” that’s most likely on purpose as Udio lets you generate a song in seconds. Yes, Ai-generated music is ready for the masses. Run in fear. Udio sounds pretty good too. All you have to do is tell it to create a song in whatever style you like. It will tell you that it can’t take specific artists as references, as it will replace the artist name with types. For example, I asked it for something in the style of Nikki Minaj and it replaced her name with the terms “female artist”, “rapper”, “pop”, and other things to get what I wanted.
I mostly listen to hip hop so the stuff I generate centres on that and I’ve got creations that sound like the late MF Doom, as well as Chuck D. and Nikki Minaj. It’s pretty uncanny how close the voices sound to the real thing, although getting these particular voices is fairly random at this point. For instance MF Doom surfaced when I asked for asonginthe style of the Beastie Boys. Vocally they don’t sound similar, but Udio is in its infancy. My favourite thing now is taking lyrics from my favourite hip hop songs and telling Udio to use the lyrics in a Creedance Clearwater sounding song. The result is a great bluesy rock sounding piece with the lyrics to Ice Cube’s Now I’m Gonna Wetcha being sung. It’s just crazy. But right now, Udio is a lot like Midjourney, the go to generative AI for creating images. People are impressed with their own ability to create but that’s about as far as it goes. There’s little appreciation for other people’s AI generated images or AI generated music. Which is as it should be. I might feel a tinge of pride listening to a blues rock singer twang out the lyrics to Cypress Hill’s Hand on the Pump, but all I did was cut and paste some lyrics and type out a prompt. I deserve zero recognition for this. That said, I have found myself listening to my Udio creations like regular music, though I wonder if it’s basically making different genre covers of my favourite songs that makes it appealing past the inisongs. tial “wow” moment of “Cool, I just generated a song!” That said, I do see immediate usage for generating music for film and TV. Especially for lower budget projects where producers don’t have funds to pay for the
rights to famous Generating pop music in a style you want can hit the nail on the head better than using some stock music library – which is what these projects are usually relegated to. You can also see how simply straight up generating a score to a show is so much easier. AI just keeps finding ways to put people out of business. I have heard some talk about Udio’s potential and where it could go. There is speculation that Udio, or most likely something like it, could disrupt Spotify. When we’re all creating music on a platform, is that where we go to listen to music? Right now it seems like a stretch. Ai-generated music, just like images, is really amazing but it’s only really amazingtoseeyourown work. In that sense it’s pretty myopic. It’s fun to see the things you crebut ate, they usually don’t stand out compared with what else is being created on the platforms. In that sense, AI serves for us to simply create the art we want for ourselves and we’re not living in a little creative bubble of our own creation. Take me, for instance. I’m creating songs with old lyrics (1990s hip hop) and creating new songs in a genre that would never have had those kinds of lyrics in them. It’s fun for me. And I like my creations. But no one else cares. I’m creating specifically for myself. And that seems to be the big fear I see with all this AI generated everything. It’s not so much that we generate for ourselves. But it’s that our AI gets so good that we come home, and AI generates the art we feel like having on our walls, the music we listen to, and the media we watch. All of it can be curated and generated specifically to our specific likes and moods, and what we listen to and watch and experience will be completely different to what everyone else listens to or watches.
For all of human history art has brought us together in a communal experience. But when art is easily generated and customised, all of us will have different experiences and one more thing that used to bring us together will be gone.
Avid writer Jason Godfrey – a model who once was told to give the camera a ‘big smile, no teeth’ – has worked internationally for two decades in fashion and continues to work in dramas, documentaries and lifestyle programming. Write to him at lifestyle@ thestar.com.my and follow him on Instagram @bigsmilenoteeth and facebook.com/bigsmilenoteeth. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.