Obsessed By Music

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AI and ChatGPT is changing our world and it’s creeping into creative art forms such as music. Maybe it’ll potentially benefit some artists, but there is a fear that it could impact both artists and creative industries negatively as well.

Take this instance for example, someone has made a fake episode of the the Joe Rogan Experience podcast using AI technology! Things are getting out of control and I'm asking the question ‘what the heck are we doing?’ This type of action raises huge questions of legality, ownership of copyright and the world of the creative arts as a whole.

AI technology is already capable of using voice recognition to create voice duplication. This allows it to reproduce the voice of your favourite singers. Pieces of music are being generated with artificial voices singing lyrics that were generated by a computer. Some of these AI voices sound scarily close to the voices that you know and love, like Taylor Swift, Arianna Grande, Adele, Ed Sheeran, Frank Ocean or Bruno Mars.

I'm arguing that this is wrong. It’s the wrong way to be utilising this technology. It’s also blatantly disrespect and in poor taste to mimic other people’s voices, other people’s work, in such an egregious way.

But the cat is out of the bag and its opened up a bag (or can) of worms. This is the biggest technological change in society since the advent of the internet. And from a creative arts perspective, this is arguably the biggest technological change ever.

This is going to change the trajectory of not only us as a species but also of our creative endeavours. From now on, there will be the pre-AI period and the post-AI period.

When considering the history of music, we can draw a line in the sand and say that basically everything created up to the year 2023 was made by people without the overarching influence and impact of AI. So that means that all the music we've had until now is irrefutably human, in the sense that it'll always exist as an entirely human creation. It'll always be there and those original recordings will always exist.

The future will be different - it will likely be an amalgam of our human creative intelligence combined with some sort of an artificial kind. Utimately, there'll be music made of an entirely artifical nature and I find that concept both unfortunate and abhorrent.

But one thing is for sure, our human-created music up to this point is now set in stone and it will last as our enduring human legacy forever.

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This epsiode is about the idea of people listening to music that they may not truly enjoy. That is, pretending to like particular artists and albums because doing so seems like the right thing to do.

Surely not everyone in the world loves Sgt. Peppers and feels it is the greatest album of all time, right?

Choosing music that you want to listen to is not a popularity contest!

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Rob Esse sits down to listen to the new Fleet Foxes record 'Crack-Up', 6 years since they last released an album. Was the wait worth it?

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Rob Esse pays tribute to the music and sounds of ex-Jamiroquai keyboardist/songwriter Toby Smith, who sadly passed away recently. Toby's impact on funk and electro-soul music in the 1990s and early 2000s cannot be understated, they'll be listening to you for light years Toby - RIP.

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