Toby Gad doesn't like the AI that tries to outsmart songwriters
Toby Gad doesn't think it's helpful for the music industry to have songs written by AI.
Toby Gad doesn’t think AI is good for the music industry.
The Grammy-nominated lyricist and producer – who has worked on songs by the likes of Madonna, John Legend, and Beyonce – thinks the technology can help people be “more creative” in some ways, but doesn’t think the idea of using artificial intelligence to create entire songs is helpful.
He told BANG Showbiz: “There is the type of AI that will make the computer smarter and help us to be more creative. That's the AI I love.
“And then there's the type of AI that tries to outdo us and write songs better than us and create art better than us and do everything better than us. I don't like that AI. I don't think it's good for us.
“I think it's not going to be good for civilisation as a general, and it's coming everywhere, and I don't know.
“I don't like computer written songs and computer-generated art that competes with ours. I think we should preserve the human artistic expression.”
A host of stars of the music world have criticised the onslaught of AI in the music business and other creative industries.
Radiohead’s Thom Yorke previously argued that the technology is stealing musicians’ ideas with no financial reimbursement.
Speaking to Electronic Sound magazine, he said: “As far as I can tell in music and art and all creative industries, Al is so far only able to 'create' variations on genuine human artistic expression, and those are obvious. Is Al capable of genuine original creative thought? I have yet to see that. It analyses and steals and builds iterations without acknowledging the original human work it analysed. It creates pallid facsimiles, which is useful in the same way auto-accompaniment is useful, or a screensaver of a beautiful natural landscape in a billionaire’s bunker is.
"But the economic structure is morally wrong ... the human work used by AI to fake its creativity is not being acknowledged. Writers are not paid. It's a weird kind of w****, tech-bro nightmare future, and it seems this is what the tech industry does best.
“A devaluing of the rest of humanity, other than themselves, hidden behind tech. In the US right now, we are witnessing this spilling over into politics.
“We are. in modern parlance. 'creatives. which is a term I find deeply offensive because it arrived around the time that art morphed into ‘content’ for devices.”
Yorke - who also fronts The Smile - was one of 10,500 signatories, which also included Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus, actress Julianne Moore, The Cure's Robert Smith and Rosario Dawson, from the creative industries warning artificial intelligence companies that unlicensed use of their work is a “major, unjust threat” to artists’ livelihoods.
