I feel like it was inevitable that I would be at some point writing about artificial intelligence. I’m sure that you’ve definitely heard plenty about it at this point, but I do think it’s still a significant topic of discussion. I’m in the camp that is primarily against using AI to make or contribute to art, but I can’t deny the fact that I still find it interesting, if a little terrifying as well. I recently got access to Google’s AI Test Kitchen after being on a waitlist, and I tried it out for the first time yesterday. The only thing they have available to play with is MusicLM, which is a program that takes a written prompt that you provide and turns it into a short clip of music, based on the prompt. It’s still in a trial phase, hence the test kitchen, but I will admit, it’s pretty fun to give it different prompts to see what it comes up with. I put in the prompt “drum and bass track that would play during a video game boss fight”, and this is what the machine spat out for me:

Clearly lacking a melody, but it did well with the drum and bass part! I am generally against using this type of stuff to make actual music though. Have you seen the videos making the rounds on social media of AI singer voices, like Drake and Kanye? They’re really freaky, in my opinion. The art pop artist Grimes (from Vancouver!) has been encouraging the use of her voice with AI, which is an interesting move, but she’s been all-in with the AI stuff since day one. 

I’m really not a fan of using stuff like DALL-E and Midjourney to make “art”. I won’t get too into it, but it’s not an ethical way of making art because the engines just pull a bunch of art made by real artists without giving any kind of credit to the original artists.

And then, of course, there’s ChatGPT, which is quite the hot topic. I’ve played with it a little bit when it was first a thing, but haven’t really touched it since. I don’t know if there’s something wrong with my brain, but I’ve never really been able to make it produce anything of actual quality. 

I would say that while I do find AI stuff interesting, I am still kinda scared of it, for the most part. When I was doing news for Evolution, I reported on a story that claimed that almost a quarter of all jobs will be impacted by AI in some way in the coming years. To me, that’s some scary stuff. How do you feel about AI being used to make “art”?