Ed O'Brien

Spending so much time in the countryside.

I was originally a country boy and then lived in a city in London for 30 years and Manchester and then country boy again.

And what you realize when you live in a city is that human beings will go around and they go, wow, look at these beautiful buildings, these things that we've created.

It's all about...

human beings enamored with their own creativity and their own cleverness.

Whereas if in the countryside you look at a tree and you go, you look at those leaves, you look at the perfection of that branch and you go, great artists can maybe match that beauty and that thing and they can represent that.

That's where real beauty resides.

And, uh, I feel the same way with AI.

I feel like I see these very, very blinkered people who are enamored with AI and its potential.

And they're using all sorts of excuses.

Like they always pull out the medical one.

They always go, it's going to revolutionize medicine.

But what do they let in through the back door?

And so in terms of creativity, there's no doubt that it will have a huge effect on the music industry.

And what it will probably, there's always been an aspect of music that has had the mass appeal, certainly sort of what I call sort of plastic pop music.

I think that's where AI will make the biggest inroads, which is a shame because also I grew up in an era of pop music where the pop artists were people like Madonna and George Michael.

And not that I was huge fans of Madonna, but

brilliant pop star and a great singer and a great songwriter, all these things.

I think the plastic, that thing, I think the artistry of, you know, AI doesn't have a soul yet.

And in my understanding, how can it have a soul?