AI has the potential to upend the lives of creatives in a never-before-seen way. Why hire a designer for your advertisements when you can generate AI art and music? Why hire a writer for your copy when ChatGPT or other programs can do the work (quality notwithstanding).
All this has contributed to an all-time high in ethical and legal concerns over the use of artificial intelligence in artistic fields. Artists, writers, actors, musicians, and more have been fighting with various governments and studios to increase regulations around AI in these fields. And now it seems screen composers have joined the conversation with their own perspectives on AI and its place in their profession.
Today we’ll be going over what screen composers specifically have had to say on the presence of AI in their field. We’ll also take a look at what AI experts are saying on the matter. By the end of this blog, you should have a better understanding of why composers and creatives at large find AI so troubling and what motivates them to fight for better regulations.
AI can’t make something out of nothing. ChatGPT, image/music generation apps, and other AI models need to be trained using a large amount of data in order to create new content. Everything an AI generates relies on an amalgamation of original human work (or sometimes other AI work), whether that be art, writing, or music.
And here lies the problem. If AI is so reliant on the work of others, can it really be called original? Is AI generated material plagiarizing the work of potentially hundreds or thousands of creatives? What happens when someone uses AI generated work for profit? Does whoever wrote the prompt get all the money and credit? These questions were enough to inspire huge record conglomerates to sue AI companies over the use of copyrighted music.
Beyond legal and ethical concerns, many take issue with AI simply on the basis of the quality of its output. AI images especially have been criticized for being uncanny, ugly, and just overall off compared to human art. Similarly, AI music has been called out for being uninspired and derivative. The common thread here is the absence of a human element, which is said to take away from the heart or soul of a piece.
Despite these criticisms, many corporations are beginning to see how they can integrate AI into their brand. And with that comes the devaluation and replacement of artists. Many creatives worry that their jobs will become obsolete in the face of AI models that can instantly create images, music, and writing with a simple paragraph long prompt.
In the next section, we’ll get some firsthand opinions from creatives as to why they’re opposed to AI.
Josh Hogan is a long-time composer based in Western Australia known for his award-winning soundtrack work on movies and TV. In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Hogan had quite a bit to say on the matter of AI:
"The AI just kind of creates this smoothie, grey goo… a thing that sounds like music but it's homogenous,"
"It doesn't really have any focus, it doesn't really have much of a hook or a catch to it.”
"It doesn't have any of that intention that usually comes from human beings going, 'we want to say this'."
"I'm still a person who cares about music a lot, and that's really why I hope that I'm hired, because people know that I'll put my heart and soul into the act of creating music."
"Actually, what it [AI] does is it destroys the creative process, it removes the work of making the thing," he says.
"Ultimately, the optimist in me says that humans will only engage with human stories."
"[AI] is not necessarily going to support the act of creating great music that audiences will connect with, or in our job, creating great music that connects with characters on a screen, for example, or tells a story,"
Hogan’s negative sentiments seem to be shared by his fellow screen composers. Kingston Anderson, executive director of the Australian Guild of Screen Composers (AGSC), had this to say:
"Without the original music, they [AI models] can't learn."
"They're breaching copyright because they are using that person's music to generate new music.”
"To say 'oh they're just listening', what does that mean?"
"They're not some person sitting in a room listening to a tape."
Anderson also cited the field of advertising as an industry that is being affected, with music for some advertisements being generated by AI. Combine that with AI art, and there is a good chance that most advertisements will be created by AI in a few years, putting creatives in that space out of a job.
These sentiments and more inspired the AGSC to issue a letter to the Australian Senate about the potentially catastrophic risk AI poses to artists. The AGSC wants composers to be afforded two things when it comes to AI:
It’s unclear how the Australian government will handle this situation, but the Senate should come to a decision by September.
As you might expect, the creators behind AI models have their own ideas of the role AI is meant to play. The founders of Udio, an AI music tool startup, believe that artificial intelligence is a big win in the name of accessibility, allowing people with next to no musical experience to make tracks.
"Our goal is to basically empower all sorts of people to expand themselves creatively with music," said Conor Durkan, a co-founder of Udio.
Another point is that tools like Udio are just that, tools. They are programs that can be added to a creative’s repertoire and help them develop original work. To that point, another Udio co-founder, Andrew Sanchez, asserts that some screen composers have actually had success using Udio as a way to generate ideas:
"I was just with some screen composers last weekend and one of the exciting examples was they said 'hey, let's try to generate some music or the mood for when a hand is emerging from a grave in a darkly lit graveyard',"
"And it sent out some great examples. None of those was exactly what the composer wanted, but it gave them a few ideas that they could then take and then build out into the entire thing.”
Currently, this vision for AI is very much at odds with how many other creatives view such programs and how these programs are used in practice. But with proper rules and regulations, we may get closer to a reality where AI and artists exist harmoniously.
Now that you have the facts, what do you think about the AI debate? What regulations do you think should be in place? How should artists and AI companies bridge the divide? Let us know down in the comments.
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