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- [00:01]
Derek Thompson
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 Mallory Rubin and Joanna Robinson.
- [00:11]
Mark Henry Phillips
Also on Wednesdays, Rob Mahoney and I.
- [00:13]
Derek Thompson
Will be sort of diving deep into.
- [00:15]
Mark Henry Phillips
Theories and listener questions.
- [00:17]
Derek Thompson
So you can watch that on the.
- [00:18]
Mark Henry Phillips
Ringer YouTube channel and also on the.
- [00:20]
Derek Thompson
Spotify app, subscribe to the prestigious podcast feed, subscribe to the Ringer TV YouTube channel. And don't forget, you can also watch these podcasts on Spotify. White Lotus Go.
- [00:35]
Mark Henry Phillips
This episode is brought to you by Audi the all new, fully electric Audi Q6E Tron is a huge leap forward featuring effortless power, serious acceleration, and the most advanced tech of any Audi ever. Experience technology that puts you center stage with a panoramic digital stage plus an optional screen for front seat passengers. The Q6E Tron is not just a new EV, it's it's a new way to experience driving. Learn more@audiusa.com always pay careful attention to the road and do not drive while distracted. This episode was brought to you by ServiceNow. We're for people doing the creative work they actually want to do. That's why this was written and read by a real person and not AI. You know what people don't want to do? Boring busywork. Now, with AI agents built into the ServiceNow platform, you can automate millions of repetitive tasks in every corner of your business, it, HR and more. So your people can focus on the work that they want to do. That's putting AI agents to work for people. It's your turn. Tap the banner to get started or visit servicenow.com AI agents 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 Luke Adoncic 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 Luca fan in your life. You might Tell the AI to spin up a weepy pop folk song about losing Luca in February to Los Angeles and within about 30 seconds you would get this.
- [03:04]
Derek Thompson
In February's cruel bite, Luca went away Whispered dreams to the wind.
- [03:16]
Mark Henry Phillips
To Los Angeles heat Stray left me with a shadow in the cold darkened.
- [03:26]
Derek Thompson
Morn My heart's aching echo Forever for long.
- [03:38]
Mark Henry Phillips
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. Street Clothes. Ladies and gentlemen, fair warning the following is extremely not safe for work Trading My whole heart from Mr. Straight Clothes, trading My Whole Heart and Jesus, it blows okay, so what do we make of these songs? They're impressive in their own way. They certainly resemble real songs. I think they're funny enough that I absolutely did send them to Dallas Mavericks fans in my life, but they're more impressive as a fancy parlor trick than as great music. They're a bit like an actor who's magnificent at impersonations, but far from virtuosic at actually acting like I'm not putting these songs on any sincere playlist. And so while I've been fascinated by these music AI tools, I wasn't sure I knew exactly what to say about them now. That was until several weeks ago, when I heard the film, TV and podcast composer Mark Henry Phillips describe his experience with AI music tools on WNYC's on the Media. Phillips explained how a sophisticated user of these tools could eliminate much of the composition work that professional musicians today rely on to make ends meet. What struck me as a funny game is, to Phillips, a dead serious matter the difference between work and disemployment. Mark is today's guest. We talk about the job of modern music composition, why some AI tools are eerily good at certain aspects of the job. We talk about copyright law and the ethics of creative ownership. But above all, Mark gets my brain worrying about the very nature of creativity, how great new ideas like songs come to be in the first place. The line between stealing and riffing and interpolating in artistic history has always been blurry. Picasso famously said, good artists copy, great artists steal. And this is not just a theoretical fact. Many of my favorite musicians Were famous borrowers. Some of Led Zeppelin's most famous songs, Dazed and Confused, Whole Lotta Love, were such obvious lifts that after years of court cases, the band agreed to add the plaintiff's name to the song credits. But analogies to music and art history 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. But what happens to music when that partner becomes a machine? Will it open up new horizons in songwriting and composition? Or in a funny way, will super intelligence make the future of music more average than ever? I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Mark Henry Phillips. Welcome to the show.
- [08:22]
Derek Thompson
Thanks for having me.
- [08:24]
Mark Henry Phillips
How'd you get into music? When did you first catch the bug?
- [08:28]
Derek Thompson
Wow. I mean, I guess it was. I think it was the summer between fifth and sixth grade. I made a Beatles mixtape and I was obsessed with it. I listened to it nonstop, doing gardening work for an entire summer, and then convinced my grandma to buy me a guitar. And I tried to learn every Beatles song I could. Then I was like, oh, wait, the piano songs, those are my favorite. So I started learning piano, convinced my grandma to get me a four track recorder, and then I experimented with layering stuff and. Yeah, and then it just became my favorite thing to do and kind of still is in some ways.
- [09:14]
Mark Henry Phillips
And these days, how do you explain your job to someone, say, at a party?
- [09:20]
Derek Thompson
Well, I usually freeze because I don't know exactly how to answer the question, but I. I'd probably say I'm a composer for films, commercials, and podcasts. I mean, the truth of it is, like a lot of musicians, I have to do a few different things to piece together a full income. So, you know, if they pry, I'll also say that I'm a podcast producer and editor, but a lot of times I just leave it as I'm a composer, probably because I think that sounds the coolest.
- [09:51]
Mark Henry Phillips
Tell me about the first time you discovered an example of AI music that made you feel like this might be the beginning of a professional existential crisis.
- [10:03]
Derek Thompson
I saw these large language models, and I think probably a lot like you and everyone. It was like, this is cool. This seems like a promise of things to come, but it's not mind blowing yet. It's just like, really cool. And then I was like, Holy shit. These models are going to be perfect for emulating music, for, you know, the input of music and the output of music is perfect for the way these models work. And so I was just kind of like, waiting and poking around thinking, like, one of these is going to come and it's going to be mind blowing. And so I, you know, kept Googling. And the spring of last year, I, you know, saw one, a new one that was kind of popping up online. And, you know, I went to, like, the Reddit forum for it, and I found someone posted a track, and it was basically a ripoff of Toots in the Middles, an early reggae star from Jamaica. And I love reggae. Old reggae girl, you know I'm loving you, why don't you love me? And I heard it, I was like, this is music. It's not like, oh, that's cool. Like, this is good music. It has some artifacts here and there, but it's amazing.
- [11:37]
Mark Henry Phillips
So for people who don't know toots, who don't know reggae outside of Bob Marley, what did we just listen to? As a musician, what made you stand up and go, this is a little bit spooky. This threatens my professional ego.
- [11:54]
Derek Thompson
I have been hired to make a reggae song that's supposed to sound like 1969 Jamaica. I can do a pretty good job of making something. It's certainly of the same spirit of it, but it doesn't feel like it was recorded on a hot Summer Night in 1969 in Studio One, which was Lee Scratch Perry's, like, original studio. And like, you know, with like, this brother duo on drums and bass. Like, it doesn't have the same vibe. And this one just. The vibe is like, it's good. It's like, really good. And it's like you kind of need a time machine to. To recreate something like that. And then the vocal performance, you know, yes, there are weird parts here and there, but by and large, the vocal performance is virtuosic, just like him.
- [12:53]
Mark Henry Phillips
You've said this technology has given you existential dread about your job. I want to provide a really clear apples to apples comparison of human work and AI work. So on the WNYC segment, you talked about scoring a scene where a couple is getting to know each other. And this is a cute, romantic, slightly goofy scene. Tell me what you did next.
- [13:20]
Derek Thompson
So, yeah, I guess I thought first, like, what's a good target? You know, what does this scene need? And, yeah, what came to mind was kind of like an indie drama comedy from the 90s. And I thought of John Bryan, who's a favorite composer of mine. And, you know, so I didn't go back and like, listen to his catalog because I was afraid if I do that I might do something too close to it. And I kind of just in my head was like, what's a John Bryan song sound like? And I just started playing it. So in a way, I was trying to rip off John Bryan, but I knew my memory is so bad that whatever I create right now is not going to be a direct ripoff of John Bryan. It's just going to have a similar vibe to it. And that's a Mellotron playing the main melody, which is kind of this. It's an instrument from the 60s that I think has a kind of like toyish feel to it. So, you know, it gives it like a cute flavor to it, but I think it's kind of a bittersweet melody and it just kind of has that, you know, end of a romantic comedy feel to it, you know.
- [14:45]
Mark Henry Phillips
And I Heart Huckabee vibes too.
- [14:47]
Derek Thompson
Exactly, is what I got from it.
- [14:49]
Mark Henry Phillips
There's a goofiness, there's a bit of irony in it. You know, it's not the most straightforwardly sincere sound, if that makes sense. But there's, there's, there's a cuteness to it and a knowing, winky cuteness to it is what I get from, from this soundtrack.
- [15:07]
Derek Thompson
Totally. And, you know, I didn't know I. Since, you know, when I was making the piece for on the media, I kind of went back and I was like, what is this? Like, I know this is close to a John Bryan thing. And I went through his scores and I was like, oh, it's I heart Huckabee. Like, that's definitely what it's closest to.
- [15:25]
Mark Henry Phillips
So in this case, you had a job and to do this job, you prompted yourself, come up with a John Bryan style soundtrack for a movie scene. And here's where things get weird. Let's imagine that you're not Mark Phillips, composer. You are Mark Phillips, movie producer, and you want to score a romantic comedy scene with a John Bryan vibe. But rather than hire a musician, you just tell the music AI to spin something up. Now, Mark, you've done this exercise. What is the AI's version of a John Bryan soundtrack?
- [16:03]
Derek Thompson
This is what it came up with. And like, those are real strings. Like, I would need to hire LA Session string players to have something that good. And there's a French horn. And it's not like what I use when I use A French horn. It's a real French horn or it sounds like a real French horn player. So in a way, I just can't compete with that. I can't. With the budgets of the projects I work on, I can't hire amazing session players in. In la.
- [17:10]
Mark Henry Phillips
So, Mark, I think people could debate whether your John Bryan riff was better or whether they prefer the AI version, but there are, in fact, much more impressive examples. In one job, you were asked to score a scene that had an Alfred Hitchcock vibe, and so you went to AI to see if it could cook something up that sounded like a Hitchcock film. So a classical orchestra playing something anxious and evocative for a thriller. What happened?
- [17:39]
Derek Thompson
Well, yeah, it produced a. Like, within, like an hour, I produced six tracks that were just unbelievable. Here's the first one that it produced.
- [18:15]
Mark Henry Phillips
So what I have to ask here, as I'm listening to, like, the trembling strings and other instruments just emerging to add little, like, pointillist spookiness in a way that just sounds quite human. Have you gone back to look at whether Bernard Herrmann has been totally ripped off here? Is this, to a certain extent, just playing something that exists as a fully completed soundtrack to a Hitchcock film? Or do you detect, do you know, that there's true originality here with, I guess, originality in heavy quotation marks?
- [19:00]
Derek Thompson
So my take is it is definitely, definitely stealing, quote, unquote, voices. That is the strings of a Bernard Herman recording. That is the. You know, there was a harp being plucked in the background and a trumpet. Like, those are the trump. Those are the instruments from real Bernard Herman recordings. I don't think the melody and the performances are stealing from an actual composition for very long. I think it probably only happens for like a microsecond, and then the AI kind of goes in a different direction than the original composition does. So I think it's stealing the voice, but it's just kind of randomly coming up with melodies, orchestrations, arrangements that are perfectly like Bernard Herrmann, but not the exact same thing he did on Psycho or whatever.
- [20:08]
Mark Henry Phillips
In your WNYC segment, you said that you're genuinely afraid that this technology could replace you. How would it replace you?
- [20:20]
Derek Thompson
I mean, yes, I think it could replace a lot of my work. You know, commercial stuff, film composing, podcast composing. You know, why would you hire someone who charges you, you know, a fair price for the time it takes and for sort of the licensing of the music when you could use one of these things, produce 10 tracks in an hour and conceivably use them for free? I Think you can use them without getting sued? So why would you hire someone when you don't even have to have that process in your workflow? If you're making a commercial and you want to have a song that sounds like, you know, the Rolling Stones, you could have a hundred songs that sound exactly like the Rolling Stones in an hour and your editor can start cutting to them. So I think it's going to happen. I think there will be some delays because people will be afraid of the legal consequences. But that'll happen in films, podcasts, commercials. It's going to happen in all these different realms.
- [21:37]
Mark Henry Phillips
There are three layers here that are so interesting to me that I want to make sure we hit in this conversation. The first is the practical layer, which is should musicians use this technology? And if they use it, how should they use it? The second layer is moral or ethical. Is this technology legal? And even beyond legal, are these tools right to use? Do they rob us of something? Do they rob the original makers of music that's been fed into these generative AI systems of something? And then third, I think that these technologies raise really fascinating questions that exist at the realm of culture and even something that touches on philosophy. And I want to make sure that we save some time for those. Let's start with the practical. You had a come to Jesus moment with this technology that has, for now, salved at least some of your existential dread. What was it?
- [22:40]
Derek Thompson
Yeah, so it added a feature where you can upload your own music and then extend it. And that was. Yeah, it was a mind blowing experience because I uploaded just a little 12 second stinger I did for a commercial 10 years ago that I had totally forgotten about. And this is that it turned that into a full track. And here's where it switches to the AI version. It really feels like where I was imagining taking the track. And it did little things that I had envisioned but did not put into the prompt, like a little drum machine here or, you know, a synth here. And it's just really amazing. I mean, the other thing that is really cool about this to me as a musician is I can then take this and use it as a blueprint for, for where I take the song. So maybe I don't use the AI audio, but I could pull up some synths that sound exactly like this and play that part and maybe I put my own little spin on it while I'm playing it, or maybe I ignore this, this and this, but I do that part and that part. So it's like it's like, having. It could be like having a writing partner. And you can take some of the ideas, reject the others. And I think, like, for a musician, that's where it gets really exciting. It feels like you could use this to kind of never get stuck on the song again. And I think all musicians have the problem of where to go next. I'm stuck here. It's 50% done. It's 60% done. And this feels like a little thing that could get you over that. Humphrey.
- [24:50]
Mark Henry Phillips
Well, just to stay in the realm of the practical here, there is so much music that's written alone, right? It's somebody in the attic with a piano, in the basement with a guitar. They're just by themselves, staring at the wall without thinking, moving their fingers, moving their mouths, making sounds. They don't have a writing partner. And AI is not John Lennon. It's not 1 1000th of John Lennon. And certainly using it doesn't make you Paul McCartney. But it sounds to me like you're saying the existence of these tools that create a kind of sandwich, human to AI. Back to human, sandwich. As absurd as this might sound to some people, and frankly, it sounds a little absurd to me, too, it does create the possibility of a partnership where you write this little guitar riff, you write a little piano piece, you wonder, is this a thing? You record it, you feed it to the AI it adds other instrumentation, and something new pops out that then you can run with. Is this kind of how you see working with AI Now?
- [25:55]
Derek Thompson
Yeah, if I move forward with working with it, that's exactly what I'm going to do. And it's exactly how you write with another person. I mean, I was just texting with my buddy Graham yesterday, and he's an amazing guitarist. And the way we would collaborate sometimes is I would say, what would Steve Cropper do? What would George Harrison do? And he's listened to enough of the music that he gives sort of his spin on what they would do. And that's what the AI does. Yes, it's not John Lennon, but it kind of knows what John Lennon would do in this situation if he had reached this point in a song.
- [26:37]
Mark Henry Phillips
Before we get ahead of ourselves, let me just dribble some cold water on all of this. Do you have any sense that musicians actually want to work with these tools? Like, since your WNYC piece, did musicians write to you to say, sorry, dude, this is completely alien and messed up? Or were they interested in using AI as an extension of their creativity?
- [26:59]
Derek Thompson
I will say since my on the Media piece, I would say 30 to 50 musicians have reached out to me, sort of very excited about the prospect of using it this way. And you know, some, you know, one was a famous electronic musician who like is I've listened to for a long time and you know, it was like really interesting to see how excited musicians were by it. But they all had this exact same it feels different. You know, this isn't like a new piece of technology, like a new keyboard or a new, you know, plugin, a digital plugin. It's something different. And so everyone is excited by it. And I think musicians are inherently, ooh, there's a new tool that can make good music. I want it. I want to play with it.
- [27:57]
Mark Henry Phillips
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- [32:13]
Derek Thompson
Sa.
- [32:45]
Mark Henry Phillips
Mark, what did we just hear?
- [32:48]
Derek Thompson
Yeah, I think we heard it doing what it does great. Which is it hears what you were doing, it hears the sound of it, and it just continues it. And it doesn't need much to see kind of what the piece is. It still feels like it grew out of the piece you wrote. And I will say that kind of one of the limitations of where it went was that, you know, you recorded that with your iPhone, I'm assuming, and it's a pretty like, rough mono recording. So, like, it can't. It's not gonna go to, you know, a full orchestra because there aren't any recordings that sort of start with iPhone demo and then go to like, you know, the New York Philharmonics. But if you had started with a good recording of your piece, it would have gone in a different direction. It probably would have been. Become even more lush and, you know, well produced. So, you know, it's limited by what you put in. But I think, like, from a musical standpoint, it took. Made something that feels like it but, you know, much more complex and intricate and amazing.
- [34:05]
Mark Henry Phillips
When I think about this song and the degree to which I wrote it, I feel very weirdly like two things are true. One is that I did not write this. I didn't come up with the inspiration of the original arpeggio. I certainly didn't finish the track that you just played. But that sits alongside this very strange other thing that when I sent this audio file to my wife and my wife said she liked it, I reflexively felt a little bit proud. I felt proud about something that I'm not entirely sure I even did. I wonder, A, whether that makes any sense, and B, whether it touches on the emotional, legal, moral, artistic messiness of.
- [35:01]
Derek Thompson
Creating art with AI Yeah, I think that's it exactly. And, yeah, I think, like, an even grayer area would be, what if you took that piece and then tried to learn it and you learned bits from it? You know, you probably. I couldn't play that myself. And so you would probably play, like, a more simplified version of it. And then you might make a little tweak. Oh, it goes to an A minor here, but I want to go to the F, you know, and so then what's that? Is that yours? It feels a lot more yours than that piece, but it's not entirely yours. And I think that that point right there is where music is going to be in five years. I think all musicians. Well, let me take that back. I think a lot of musicians are gonna start using it. I think it's gonna start getting baked into Pro Tools, Ableton Logic. And, you know, it's gonna be this spell check y thing. But it's a lot different than spellcheck when it's helping you come up with a bridge or helping you come up with a melody. But I think it's gonna be just in the water very soon because it's so good. And why, like, how could musicians not use this tool that could make unbelievable music and help them make better music than they could without?
- [36:33]
Mark Henry Phillips
So there's a practical question. If people use this technology, how should they use it? And I think our humble examples show how AI can essentially amplify the little brain seeds of musicians. But there's a very important and very distinct question, which is, should people use it? Is there something morally or spiritually or creatively corrupting about the use of these tools?
- [36:59]
Derek Thompson
Some people will hold out, A lot of people will. And I think we should as a society. But it's just like it's there. And I think people are going to start using it. And yeah, I don't think there will be, you know, top, you know, I don't think there will be number one hits that are just purely AI generation, someone typing in a prompt and what the AI spits out. But I do think that people will use it like a writing partner and it's going to produce amazing results. And like, that's the thing that's so scary is I, I know a lot of musicians who are like, fuck this, this is bullshit, it's theft, it's awful, I hate it. And a part of me feels that way too. But what's blowing my mind is just how good it is. And so like you have to respect it at the same time that you scare, you're, that you fear it. And if I think of a 15 year old today who is an amazing musician, who's, you know, the next, you know, Tame Impala, the next, you know, Paul McCartney, and they have this tool in their arsenal, I think this would probably make them even better and could make them produce a million times more. And I don't know, I think they'll just grow up using it and it's going to be just a part of music very, very soon.
- [38:31]
Mark Henry Phillips
You're touching on aspects of culture and philosophy that I really do want to hold until the end. So before we do that, let's talk about the law. The state of play in AI music is that the major labels have filed lawsuits against several of the major AI startups in this space. Those lawsuits are ongoing and from my reporting, it is not 100% clear how the courts will ultimately come down on this issue of fair use and copyright in generative AI. So in the absence of any hard and fast ruling here, I think we should just talk about it. Do you think these tools are legal?
- [39:09]
Derek Thompson
No, nowhere even close. I mean, I think clearly there is. Clearly they have sucked in basically all the music ever recorded and that's how they've created this model. Their argument is that their model just listened to music. Just like you or I listen to music and then create a, a piano piece. But I think it's entirely different. And I think you can look at the license of the music. You know, when you buy a piece of music, you're allowed to listen to it, but you're not allowed to put it in your commercial or your movie. You have to pay a separate license for that. And there is certainly no license when you put your piece of music on Spotify that you're granting some company to create an AI model off of it. So I, I just think it's, it's pretty clear cut that they do not have the right to do this. But you know, that's being litigated right now. I think the RIAA is suing the, the two big companies and trying to, you know, stop them. But I don't think it's going to stop the AI music generators from existing because honestly, I think the music labels are going to create their own or least do some sort of partnership with the pre existing ones.
- [40:35]
Mark Henry Phillips
The YouTuber Cleo Abram, who's covered this space, has a lovely way of formalizing this question of legal responsibility in music. She has this two by two box of copy versus inspiration, pay versus not pay. And there's two squares of this box that are obvious to practically everybody. Everybody acknowledges that if you copy something to produce a paid product, you pay the person you're copying. That is practically universally recognized as what you should do or what is legal under copyright law. It's also generally understood that if you're merely inspired by somebody, you don't have to pay them. If you interview modern artists, if you interview Kendrick Lamar or Taylor Swift and you say, who's inspired you? And they give an answer, you're not going to immediately say, oh, why haven't you cut them a check for the fact of their inspiration? Nobody thinks like that. AI does scramble this in an interesting way because it creates this black box where inspiration and outright theft are intertwined. And a point that you made that I think is really important is that if I use a Spotify link in my commercial, that is if I make commercial use of a song, I have to pay the person who owns the song. But these AI companies are in a weird way making commercial use of music not by copying it, but rather by putting it into this weird black box where inspiration and theft and synthesis is all mixed up and jumbled. So how do you think these questions ought to be resolved?
- [42:22]
Derek Thompson
I think you're exactly right. It's on the input. We can't look at the output and say, litigate every song. Oh, this sounds too much like that. And as an aside, I think that part is kind of haywire currently with real live music. I mean, without getting too deep into it, the whole Marvin Gaye blurred lines decision. I think every musician is baffled by that and terrified of that. And for the listeners who aren't familiar, there was a Robin Thicke song produced by Pharrell that was clearly inspired by Marvin Gaye. But if you listen to it, it's not the same melody. It's not the same chord progression. It's not the same beat. There is no sampling going on. If you played the two songs on your keyboard and drums at home, they would not be the same song. But there was a legal decision that basically said, this is too close because we heard that they were inspired by this Marvin Gaye track. And it's just so dumb as a musician because, like, what is the blues? I mean, it's literally the same chord progression. And there are a million blues songs that are in E or in A. And you know, if you, you know, whole genres basically are impossible to play. If. If you're saying, oh, this is too close to that, you know. Yes. If you are literally the exact same melody with the exact same chord progressions with the exact same lyrics, yeah, that's stealing. But all we can do is look at the input and say, do they have the right to suck in every song ever into their model? Is that the same as you and I listening to every song? And I think it's just so clearly not. It's not a person, it's not listening. It's. I don't know what you call it, but it's like sucking it in and absorbing it and putting it onto its neural network somewhere. And that's a different thing.
- [44:28]
Mark Henry Phillips
I want to hold in this image of a black box in your radio segment, you had a very beautiful yet strange insight. You said people don't know how their favorite songs were made. But musicians also don't know how the process of writing music works. Musicians aren't conscious of what they're doing. They mess around, they discover the song at their fingertips, at the tip of their tongue. They're just sort of guessing what the next note is. Those are your words. They're guessing what the next note is. You must have been aware when you said that how close to the bone that description of creativity is to generative AI, which is often described as prediction. Next token prediction. And it raises a really interesting question about creativity, about. I don't even know if there's a psychology of true psychology of creativity yet, but certainly the philosophy of creativity. As a musician who uses AI, do you see a profound similarity between your creation process of listening, remembering, creating, and the creation process of artificial intelligence, which is pre trained, has a memory of sorts and synthesizes that memory in response to prompts?
- [45:53]
Derek Thompson
Totally. Yeah. I think it's about sucking in as many references as possible, knowing the appropriate references in the moment, and then just doing something that has the vibe. And yeah, there's a guessing process in music that is way different than photography or, you know, art or writing. You know, when you're writing an article, you're not going word by word, just, you know, what word comes next. You have an idea. You have an idea for a paragraph, a section. Music, I think, is a lot different. I think you really just on a certain level, are guessing what the next note is. And I think there's degrees of that. Free jazz takes that to an extreme. But any songwriting process, yes, you have your limitations. You have the key you're in, you have the genre of music you're playing. But ultimately you have to kind of take a leap and guess the next note, whether that's, you know, with a pen to paper or just while you're fooling around. So I think it's. It lines up perfectly with the AI process. And that's why I think the V1 of AI music is so much better than the V1 of the chatbots or the image generators. I do think those other mediums will catch up, but I think that, to me, music is a year, three years ahead of these other ones. And so I think I'm having the existential crisis that basically everyone is going to be having in, let's say, two years.
- [47:37]
Mark Henry Phillips
How do you think this is going to change the process of the experience of making music? It seems to me like in a world where you don't have these kind of automatic feedback loops from an AI independent, alone. Music writers are living inside their head, waiting for something to happen, waiting to hear it. And that feedback loop is entirely internal. Right. They have an instinct. The instinct is represented by a sound of the piano or the guitar or voice. Then they have taste, they judge the sound, and then they adopt or they change or they keep going. But it seems like the world that you're describing is a world in which writing music is more like being an editor, more like being a manager, because you are creating something that then you're feeding into a system that you can evaluate at a distance, evaluate almost as if it's someone else's work, which is so interesting to do, and then incorporate the output from that AI partnership to pull back into your own work. Do you see this as changing in some real good, bad, meaningful ways the process of writing music?
- [48:51]
Derek Thompson
Yes, I think it's definitely going to change it if people start using it. And I will say, depending on the genre, the type of musician, so many musicians are going to say, I will never touch AI generators, and I don't know if I'm really going to Incorporate this into my workflow. I'm just sort of exploring it more out of curiosity. And just because I'm impressed with how good it is, that doesn't mean I want to use it moving forward. And again, the thing that is so tantalizing for me is I have hundreds and hundreds of songs that are just sitting on hard drives half finished. And I know there is a dozen songs on there that are really good. And if AI could help me finish it, that's really appealing to me because, like, a song spending, you know, a song sitting on a hard drive from now into eternity and never being listened to again, that's worth nothing. And so if AI turns it into something and it's something different, something a little weird, because it. The process involves A.I. yes, that's weird, but at least it's something. But I think the gray area becomes like, if that just becomes your process. And I think there is a huge difference if it's for commercial purposes. You know, if someone hires me to do, you know, what's called in the industry a sound alike, you know, hey, we want an MGMT song for this commercial, but we don't want to pay mgmt. Come up with something. I don't know, using one of these to generate some starting points, that's really appealing because they'll be able to come up with something that isn't too close but still has the right feel, and I could build off of it. So that's really tantalizing because to try and come up with something with the right vibe purely on my own would just take much, much longer. And a lot of those jobs, it's like, hey, we need something tomorrow. You know, a fully produced track that fits this commercial. And so, yeah, it's really hard to imagine if the tools exist and they're legal to use, just not using them.
- [51:15]
Mark Henry Phillips
What I really like about that answer is that you're holding on the table two possibilities for the future that really pull us in different directions. One is that these tools are simply too weird for artists to feel comfortable using that, as you said, writing music is not like writing paragraphs. Nobody thinks today, certainly that spellcheck intrudes on the authenticity of essay writing. Nobody thinks that. But working with AI to write music does, in a small or maybe even enormous way, feel like an unwelcome intrusion to some people, an unwelcome intrusion into a process of creativity that feels to the artist like it's meant to be in the space of four humans only. I think that is absolutely a possible future. But there's another possible future where these tools, because they're so good at the small tasks that you've specified at finishing incomplete work, at filling out unfilled out ideas, will be ingrained in the music writing habits of young people today. And we'll see AI move into the world of music not because a bunch of 40 and 50 year olds suddenly adopt it, but rather because they'll be demographically replaced by musicians who today are only 15 or even 5 years old. And that's where I want to close, is taking that possibility seriously. I'm very persuaded by this idea that is sometimes called stuck culture theory, which says that something's happened in the last few decades in film, in celebrity, maybe to a certain extent in music, where cultural progress feels more frozen than it used to be. The one factoid that I always go back to lean on here is that in 1996, almost all of the top 10 films in America were an original screenplay. And today, really, for the last 10 years, practically very few of the biggest blockbusters are original screenplays. It's sequels, adaptations and reboots as far as the eye can see. And stuck culture theory can extend to TV as well. The idea that Gen Z is still watching the Office and Friends, and there really aren't a lot of shows made in the last 10, five years that have achieved that sort of pantheon status. I wonder if AI will make music more stuck as well. Because if AI is essentially training the future of musical creativity on a perfect understanding of music's past, we might get stuck in the grooves of perpetual refinement in a way that keeps music from evolving the way it's historically evolved. And I wonder how much stock you put into that sort of cultural story.
- [54:23]
Derek Thompson
Yeah, I think about that a lot. You know, the image is a snake eating its own tail. I mean, it's like if AI is going to be in the music that we create and then, you know, and then that will be fed back into the AI and then, you know, will be worked back into the music that's created. After that, it's just going to be a feedback loop of. Of AI And I don't know if it's ever going to be 100% feedback, but I think it'll grow, you know, maybe five years from now. AI is, you know, let's say, responsible for 5% of kind of coming up with new things in the song. Like it's sort of the writing partner model. I think that will only increase, and I think it will increase at an exponential level because of this process. So that really scares me because, yeah, I think humans will have less and less of a role in the writing at the same time. Yeah, I mean, maybe people use it in really creative ways and it's not. It actually creates a really new cool product that wouldn't have happened just with human evolution. But this is where I get sort of a little gooey, where I'm like, it's just not pure anymore. You know, from like the dawn of time up until last year, music evolved by like humans listening to other humans and making music together. And it feels like now there is going to be this algorithmic element into it. And that's really scary to me. I don't know, maybe, yeah, maybe it makes better music. But there's still something icky about that to me.
- [56:23]
Mark Henry Phillips
Mark Henry Phillips, thank you very much.
- [56:26]
Derek Thompson
Thank you.
- [56:28]
Mark Henry Phillips
Many thanks to Mark Phillips. I think my main takeaway from this interview is the distinction between inputs and outputs with AI. I think a lot of people that consider themselves or present themselves as AI skeptics tend to be very critical of the outputs of artificial intelligence. They'll say, look at this piece of writing, it's so wooden, or listen to this song, it's such a cliche. But where I see AI being sneakily effective and ultimately potentially transformative is as an input. It's the way that it allows software programmers to accelerate their coding. It's the way that it allows white collar workers or writers to accelerate their research. And it's the way that it allows musicians or composers potentially to work on something a little ditty, send it out to some artificial AI assistant, and then get something back that's just a little bit better or even just a little bit different than the thing that they deliver to the AI. That's AI as an effective input as maybe we'll see in a few years, a kind of universal input to the creative economy across white collar work and writing and music and all sorts of idea generation. AI as the all purpose input, I think is a really interesting idea to play with and I'm very grateful that Mark helped me concretize it. We'll talk to you Friday. SA.