Artificial intelligence tools for musicians are getting eerily good, very fast. Their work can be maddening, funny, ethically dubious, and downright fascinating all at the same time. TV and podcast composer Mark Henry Phillips joins to describe his experience working with them. We talk about the job of modern music composition; why he's worried AI might eventually do much of his current job; the morass of AI copyright law; and the ethics of creative ownership. But above all, Mark gets my brain whirring about the nature of creativity—how great new ideas, like songs, come to be in the first place. The line between stealing and inspiration in artistic history has always been blurry. Picasso famously said: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” And that is not just a memorable quote. Many of my favorite musicians were famous borrowers, to put it lightly. Some of Led Zeppelin's most famous songs—such as "Whole Lotta Love"—were such obvious lifts that, after years of court cases, the band agreed to add the plaintiff to the song credits. But analogies to music and art history also fall short to capture the weirdness of this moment. Neither Picasso nor Jimmy Page had access to an external technology whose deliberate function was to slurp up musical elements from millions of songs, store their essence in silicon memory, and serve them up in a kind of synthetic stir fry on an order-by-order basis. Musicians have been writing music with partners for decades, even centuries. What happens to music when that partner is a machine: Will it open up new horizons in songwriting and composition? Or in a sad way, will super-intelligence make the future of music more average than ever? Links: WNYC: "How AI and Algorithms Are Transforming Music" "In February's Cruel Light (Goodbye Luka)" Full AI song "L.A. Luka (I Wanna Puke-uh)" Full AI song P.S. Derek wrote a new book! It’s called 'Abundance,' and it’s about an optimistic vision for politics, science, and technology that gets America building again. Buy it here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Abundance/Ezra-Klein/9781668023488 Plus: If you live in Seattle, Atlanta, or the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, Derek is coming your way in March! See him live at book events in your city. Tickets here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/p/abundance-tour Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hey, it's Bill Simmons letting you know that we are covering the White Lotus on the Prestige TV podcast and the Ringer TV YouTube channel every Sunday night this season with Mally Rubin and Joanna Robinson.
Also on Wednesdays, Rob Mahoney and I will be sort of diving deep into theories and listener questions. So you can watch that on the Ringer YouTube channel and also on the Spotify app.
Subscribe to the Prestige podcast feed. Subscribe to the Ringer TV YouTube channel. And don't forget, you can also watch these podcasts on Spotify. White Lotus, let's go.
Today, AI, music, and the future of creativity. In the last few years, several generative AI platforms for music have caught my attention. One of them is Suno, which allows you to request a song by typing in a simple prompt. You specify the style, the lyrics, the mood that you want, and the AI will interpret those inputs and produce a musical composition.
So let's start with an extremely stupid example. I have several friends from Texas who were distraught by the trade that sent basketball phenom Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers. Now, if you're listening along, you're not a basketball fan.
The only thing to know here is that this was probably the most shocking trade in NBA history, shipping off one of the league's best players at the 11th hour with no warning. So let's say you wanted to console or troll the Luka fan in your life. You might tell the AI to spin up a weepy pop folk song about losing Luka in February to Los Angeles. And within about 30 seconds, You would get this.
In February's cruel bite Luca went away Whispered dreams to the wind To Los Angeles he'd stray Left me with a shadow in the cold Darkened morn
Now, maybe you're impressed by this. Maybe you're not impressed by it. Or maybe your reaction is, the mood is all wrong. Dallas fans should be screaming angry about the Luka trade. After all, they lost Luka Doncic for a player, Anthony Davis, who is injured so often that his nickname is Street Clothes.
Well, in that case, you can instruct the AI to try out an angry 1990s-style pop-punk screamo song with some punchy lyrics about losing Luca for Mr. Streetclothes. Ladies and gentlemen, fair warning, the following is extremely not safe for work.
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