With the increasing number of streaming platforms now insisting that AI-generated work is clearly marked – and popular culture’s refusal to treat prompt-created tracks as serious art – it’s starting to feel like that fear of AI’s inevitable blanket takeover has been allayed… for now.
Regardless of how it’s been used to date (and the rather dubious ethics underpinning generative music) the abilities of AI music platforms are undeniably an incredible innovation.
One of music’s premiere trailblazers – and all-round innovation enthusiast – David Bowie would almost certainly have things to say about it.
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Although Bowie, sadly, wasn’t around to witness the rise of AI, we know that he was already anticipating a future where, triggered by the internet, the very notions of ‘art’ and ‘medium’ would become fully blurred.
“The actual context and the state of content is going to be so different to anything that we can really envisage at the moment,” Bowie said to the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman in a hugely prescient interview from 1999. “The interplay between the user and the provider will be so in sympatico – it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.”
But, would Bowie – keen advocate of democratised online communities and pioneer of the concept of music downloads – have truck with today’s generative AI platforms? particularly the kind that has been trained on the work of real artists?
It’s a question we put to Bowie’s longest serving producer and creative confidante Tony Visconti in an interview we conducted in March of this year. Although Tony avoided speculating on what David’s own perspective would be, he shared in no uncertain terms his own views on AI;
“I don’t really know [on David Bowie’s AI views]. It would be speculation. I am not a fan of AI. I am a fan of ‘I’, in other words, ‘intelligence’, something humans have used for a million years. Artists who use AI should step to the side and let real artists do their thing. There is too much amateur music being released that clogs the arteries of the music business.”
Elsewhere in that same interview, Visconti recalled how Bowie – whom he’d first met in 1967 and worked with on-and-off right up until his final 2016 opus, Blackstar, would tend to leave most of the studio heavy lifting to him.
“David left most of the production decisions to me – he had confidence in me. During the mixing he left most of it to me, and he would show up at my NYC studio after I was at least two hours into the current mix. He said, ‘What am I going to do, tell you what EQs to use? That’s your territory.’”
You can read our full in-depth interview with Tony Visconti here
