There are still people who press the “2” button three times on their old mobile phone to actually type the letter “c” in a text message. However, the progress-orientated and competitive order in which we are living, turns the number pad followers into outsiders and everyone else into insiders. We can usually not afford to invest any more time than necessary. New ground-breaking technologies that save us time completing everyday tasks are therefore bound to fascinate us, yet they also make us a little nervous at the same time.
Creators are very familiar with the oscillation between fascination and trepidation about technological progress. Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, warned against the typewriter in 1882. He wrote (and ironically did so on his new typewriter): “Our writing instruments are also conducting our thoughts”. However, the scepticism towards the new never really prevailed, neither back then, nor in later times. In hindsight, that’s a good thing, because after all, the typewriter helped with writing books. And even after that, phonographs did not squeeze live concerts out of the market, nor did the cinema kill the theatre star.
Fascination and trepidation
The new phenomenon that we’re not so sure we should really be embracing is called “Generative Artificial Intelligence”, abbreviated: GenAI (or simply AI). It is fascinating that this technology can compose, arrange, produce, mix and master music within seconds. The trepidation among creators arises out of fear of their own expendability and the associated financial bottlenecks as well as the concern about the possible extinction of “real” music. Should they use this tool or not? Should art colleges even teach how to use GenAI? And where does that lead?
One fundamental difference between GenAI and earlier technical achievements needs to be considered more closely: Strictly speaking, GenAI does not work, but reacts. In other words, it does not do what it is instructed (“prompted”) to do, but what it most probably wanted to be instructed to do. For example, if you enter the letter “c” in the input field of a text-generating AI, the AI does not write “c”, but something like “Hey! You only entered a ‘c’ – was that by mistake or do you need help with something specific?” So, if you simply want the AI to write the letter “c”, you have to tell it “Write the letter ‘c’!”. To write a new book (yourself), you are better equipped with a typewriter (or even the number pad of an old mobile phone) as an “tool”. However, if you simply want to generate a new book, ChatGPT is probably the more efficient tool (regardless of the qualitative component).
Basically, making music is about carefully realising an idea; by controlling parameters, analysing the result, comparing the intermediate result with the underlying idea, realigning the parameters, and so on. Composing, producing and interpreting is therefore the actual interface between (inaudible) ideas and (audible) musical works. If this interface can now be completely automated, the audible can at best be referred to as music, but this music was not created, it was merely discovered. We still have to determine the cultural value of such music, but from a legal point of view the situation is clear: It is precisely not the discovered music that is eligible for copyright protection, but only the music that has been intellectually created.
How you handle the tool is crucial
Against this background, it would be misguided to conclude that making music is now everyone’s thing. However, this realisation will be of little consolation if at some point music-making can no longer be monetised because generating music with a click is much cheaper and faster. It will hardly be possible to counteract this on an artistic level, but rather on a regulatory level.
With regard to the artistic use of GenAI, it is to be hoped that this new technology will also be used to produce unimagined results in music. After all, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the fact that our writing instruments conduct our thoughts as long as there is still collaboration between man and machine. However, the design process that realises the idea should at best not be left entirely to chance or the inscrutable algorithm. A tool is only a tool that can be used as such, i.e. that can be operated in a specific manner. In this respect, the art, perhaps even in the literal sense, lies in using GenAI like a tool or an instrument: it should work, not react freely.
This text was first published in the Schweizer Musikzeitung issue 4-5 25 on page 36.
