- 6 weeks ago
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00:00Some of y'all look like y'all don't know what's going on, but it's all good. I'm here to guide you.
00:05I am your host this evening, or this afternoon, Rasu Jelani. Peace to y'all.
00:11So today we are going to get in a conversation about music and technology and AI.
00:18If you notice, Blacktopia, we have activations from AT&T, from tech and fashion.
00:26We have tech and meditation. We have gaming.
00:31And what we want to do is immerse you in a reality of the future, right?
00:36And these conversations are reflecting that future that we want to put ourselves into.
00:41So as Black people, how are we using our imagination to project ourselves into the future?
00:46What are the tools that we're using to do that?
00:48How do we use imagination as a sandbox to put ourselves in the future?
00:53And yesterday we had a conversation about art and tech, speculation and design.
01:00Today is going to be about music and tech.
01:03And then later we're going to have a conversation about community activism and solidarity.
01:08And so I just want to bring y'all into the conversation.
01:11Again, my name is Rasu Jelani.
01:13I'm from Brooklyn Arts Council.
01:15Thank you for having me here.
01:16And I'd like to pay homage and tribute to the ancestors, for the ancestors of this city and this place called Balbancha that we now call New Orleans.
01:26We also like to give thanks to all the people that sacrificed their blood, sweat, and tears and lives to create this land that we're here on.
01:34And pay homage to the technology that's going to bring us forward.
01:38All right.
01:38So with that said, I'm going to bring up a homie of mine.
01:41His name is Cavalier.
01:42This is his artwork back here.
01:44So before I bring Cavalier on, what I want to ask you is, in your own practice, how are you using technology?
01:52How is technology helping you bring your work to the public?
01:56If you're a musician, are you engaging in technology?
01:59How are you imagining AI with your music?
02:02Is it something you're considering or is it something out of the box for you?
02:07That's what we're going to get into.
02:08So Cav, come up to the stage, brother.
02:11How y'all doing?
02:13How you feeling, brother?
02:13Peace, peace, peace.
02:16So Cav, real quick, talk to us about your practice, what this is, and how you engage media and technology into your art as a musician.
02:24Well, first of all, thank you all for having me on this stage today.
02:27Super happy to be here.
02:29Although I am originally from Brooklyn, New York, I do reside in New Orleans.
02:33So this is a very special moment for me to be able to bring things back full circle home.
02:38I'm an emcee and recording artist, also a multimedia artist.
02:43The visuals that you see behind me go with my recordings and my music work, but I do write and produce all of the visual work that accompanies my music.
02:52So technology plays a big part in how I execute that.
02:56And then when you think about technology, what platforms and technology specifically do you incorporate into your work?
03:02Specifically, I use a combination of audio recording software, audio engineering software.
03:09And to engage this type of work, I use video editing software.
03:14And all of those worlds have now encroached where AI is becoming useful tools.
03:20Thank you for that.
03:21I'm going to throw it over to the crowd.
03:23How many of y'all use technology in the work that you do?
03:26Wait, first of all, before we go there, how many people in the audience are actually artists, that you consider yourself an artist?
03:33What's up, Aviva?
03:34Okay.
03:35So we have a few artists in the room.
03:37How many may consider yourself a musician?
03:40No musicians in the room?
03:42All good.
03:42So with that in mind, how many of you consume music?
03:46Music is one of your go-tos for solace or meditation or for entertainment.
03:52How many of you think about how that music is produced and gotten to you?
03:58Okay.
03:58So that's where we're going to go.
03:59All right?
04:00So now with technology, we're kind of shifting rapidly into this kind of web 3.5, as I call it.
04:08Right?
04:09And AI is the tool that many of us are using to generate new content.
04:14Yes.
04:14What are your thoughts about AI?
04:16I have complicated thoughts about AI.
04:19As an artist, it's important that, for me, integrity is maintained in the work that I create.
04:27I like to create from a sincere place, and I feel like that's a very human experience, and I want to have human-building experiences with everyone else.
04:35At the same time, AI is allowing us to have tools that we've never had before, perhaps to streamline some of our work.
04:44When you're an independent artist, there's so many things that you have to do on your own, whether it's creating media content or having to promote yourself.
04:52So I do see an opportunity where AI can help ease the work for independent artists.
04:57Give me the good, bad, and ugly with AI.
04:58When you're meditating about the work that you do, give me the good, bad, and ugly with AI for you.
05:04The good would be all access for tools for people of all levels.
05:11Right now, the software, a lot of the AI software is accessible, so it's something that you can learn about and explore right now virtually for free.
05:20So that would be the good.
05:21The bad, I would say, is that it's a complete free-for-all.
05:27We're still learning about it as it's rolling out, so we really don't understand how to use it appropriately, and we don't know all the scope of its potential.
05:35The ugly would be that, without it being regulated, I'm uncertain on how much we control what is authentic, what is meaningful, and what is in touch with our souls as creators.
05:49That's really the ugly part for me.
05:51I'll give a quick example.
05:53Recently, a South African artist named Ricky Rick, who did kill himself, unfortunately, a couple years ago, his family, through a foundation, released a song that was AI generated.
06:05It was produced with his collaborators, and they used text from his social media posts and tweets to comprise the lyrics of the song.
06:15But the song is completely AI generated.
06:18It is an AI replication of his voice.
06:22I have complicated feelings about that.
06:24Obviously, his family did it in memory of him and in celebration with his fans.
06:28They did it to support the organization that they have that is about mental health and awareness.
06:33At the same time, he's no longer with us.
06:37So, it is complicated.
06:39Yeah, we see that in pop culture as well.
06:41So, I'm going to pause that, and I want to go into the audience.
06:43So, this is a town hall, meaning that I'm going to come to you and ask you some questions.
06:48If anyone has any reflections, questions, or follow-up to what Cav just mentioned, raise your hand, I'll come to you.
06:54I'll bring the mic to you.
06:55So, one of the things that we're thinking about with AI and music is this complication.
07:00There's a lot we don't know yet.
07:02And oftentimes with technology, there's early adopters and there's early consumers.
07:07And we consume without really thinking about the consequences of giving up our rights, our liberties with technology, but also what is on the flip side is what's possible with the technology.
07:18What can we create?
07:19How can we design new authorship with technology?
07:22So, this idea with Ricky Rick, and I'm looking out for hands if you have any questions.
07:26The idea with Ricky Rick, I think about recently I heard AI-generated Biggie Smalls rhyming Nas's New York State of Mind lyrics.
07:37As a New Yorker, that shit is blasphemous.
07:40Biggie Smalls rhyming Nas lyrics is crazy.
07:42And on top of that, as an emcee, outside of ghostwriting, rhyming someone else's lyrics is just like foul play, right?
07:50So, when you have this situation where you're co-opting someone's voice and using someone else's lyrics, I think about plagiarism, right?
08:01I think about IP situations, right?
08:04And the law hasn't caught up to the complications of AI.
08:09Do you have any worries about technology and law, technology and creative process, creative technology and production?
08:17So, given that specific example with like Biggie Smalls and Nas, right?
08:21Yeah.
08:22And then even Timbaland talking about coming out with a whole album.
08:24Well, I can comment on Timbaland, the famous producer from Virginia, Grammy award-winning producer, did make an announcement where he put out a song using Biggie Smalls lyrics.
08:36He was really excited about it, but the music community and his peers were not.
08:40You know, Guru, the famous engineer, he said that that was blasphemous as well.
08:43Yeah, he did a whole blog post.
08:45Yeah, and I think the issue is we're making decisions posthumously for artists that we don't know that they would have made.
08:52We have them collaborating with people we don't know they would have collaborated with or maybe would have put their heart behind.
08:57We have them saying things and generating lyrics that they may not have been behind or they may not have thought or wanted to support.
09:03So, that is dangerous to me.
09:05There are artists who are embracing this, who are giving fans the opportunity to maybe co-create with them through access with these tools.
09:14But, you know, I kind of think of like, you know, The Little Mermaid and Ursula.
09:18I don't want my voice stolen.
09:19You know, it's mine.
09:20In my opinion, I feel like it was given to me by my creator and my ancestors, and it's my duty to properly use that gift.
09:29But at the same time, it remains to be seen.
09:31Indeed.
09:32So, I want to, I see a brother right here, but I also want to throw the question to the audience.
09:36What are your feelings about hearing AI-generated music?
09:40Just an impulse.
09:42What are your feelings about it?
09:43Have you engaged in it?
09:45Do you have feelings about it?
09:46I'd like to hear about that.
09:47Brother right here.
09:48State your name.
09:49Question or statement?
09:50I'm Terrence Jackson from South Carolina.
09:56Do you have any thoughts on the correlation between AI and what's happening now with sampling and royalties and clearances?
10:05In my head, I think it's clear that if there was any level of control, that the artist that is being, I guess, AI-generated for something, I guess, forward or future, that they would have to get the permission from that particular artist.
10:21And having either label or whatever is representing that particular artist to maybe say, okay, well, if you want to do this, then it's under these particular guidelines.
10:31Now, if someone has already passed as a creative and an artist, then whoever is representing their estate.
10:39Yes.
10:39Because, you know, so do you have any correlation in your mind or your thoughts on that to try to make that clearly defined to kind of cut it down in the middle?
10:49Because if not, then, I mean, I kind of grew up in like Napster and Bear Share and, you know, all of those other things.
10:57But through the years, there were legal definitions that kind of stripped that away.
11:03Yes, yes, yes.
11:04Well, in response to that, I think that that's the gray area where things haven't caught up that Rasul was talking about.
11:11There's an artist that's living whose likeness and voice was used in one of these AI technologies, and they created a digital rapper based off of that, and he didn't really have any ownership on that anymore.
11:23There's also the idea of digital blackface.
11:25There are people who are not representing us, who use avatars, voices, and likenesses of people of color to make creations.
11:34It's going to be a bit of a tug of war as we engage this and then we put it out into society.
11:41When you mentioned Napster and Bear Share, those were controversial.
11:44The law wasn't set up yet for that new technology, and that's exactly what's happening here.
11:49Indeed, and to add on to that is that's one of my biggest complexities.
11:55And I see you, Shango.
11:56I see one of my biggest complexities is we know, even in a place like Essence Fest, how much black culture is on the market, but behind the puppeteering is white dollars or corporatocracy or white imagination of a black experience that they have no relationship to.
12:15So when you start thinking about AI, and AI is generated by data and query, what kind of data are they scraping from?
12:23Right.
12:23Right?
12:24What are the questions being asked?
12:26And if the questions are not coming from an authentic point of view, then we're going to be in a very problematic space.
12:32Shango?
12:35How y'all doing?
12:36Yeah, with this whole AI and songs being created, it's a very interesting time, right?
12:46From my understanding of the law, voices currently are not something that can be trademarked or protected.
12:53Right.
12:53But then now you have songs taking place, like, all right, I ain't listened to Drake's past two projects.
13:00I listened to like three Drake AI albums, right?
13:04I'm banging them.
13:05I'm like, okay, this is hot.
13:06But they wouldn't be hot without the blood, sweat, and tears that Drake put in to get voice recognition and kind of mental ownership of his voice in our brains, right?
13:18And so that needs to get, like, it's technology moving faster than the rules of society.
13:27And so I think, you know, even with our own voices and now potentially scammers being able to scrape your voice, create an AI model, and then use that to, and this is like, you know, the fear side,
13:42but use that to surpass bank voice recognition, you know, there's just a lot of stuff that we need to, in our daily lives, kind of bang on governmental doors and say,
13:57hey, y'all need to update these things and to protect us.
14:02I mean, key point, the law doesn't move as quick as society does.
14:07So it's constantly playing catch up.
14:09And then law is always going to think about boundaries, right?
14:11So one of the things that we have to consider is, one, is the law representing a fair share for the creative process, right?
14:19So there is a lot of lawyers starting to give their pro bono hours to creatives to kind of really consider what are the structures for creative process and creative intellectual property.
14:30Heard that.
14:31Any other questions or comments before I move on?
14:36I have a question for a friend that I see here who's a fashion icon.
14:39But one of the things I have for you, Amina, I'm calling you out, is I'm going to shift it from AI in music to AI in fashion.
14:47You know, we have a lot of fashion companies and designers using models who are not real models, right?
14:55Using AI-generated models.
14:57And I think about that in representation.
14:59There's already a low representation of black models, brown models.
15:06And then if I can just generate some blackface and put my clothes on it, I'm good money.
15:11What are your feelings about that?
15:12Have you thought about that at all in your practice?
15:17Hi, Rasu.
15:21Yeah, I think about it a lot.
15:22I teach a class at Parsons called AI, the Metaverse, and the Future of Fashion.
15:28There's an actual, there's a model that's one of the most famous AI-generated models that's South African, but she's black.
15:34She exhibits all the most beautiful features of a dark-skinned African woman, but she's generated by a person who is non-black.
15:43And she's making a lot of money, and she's rising to the top really quickly.
15:47I think it's something that we're going to have to really consider, and I think a lot of it has to do with education.
15:52Because learning how to have the tools and also how to decipher the difference, and coming back to legislation and figuring out who do we want to identify with and where do we see that,
16:03it's going to require a lot of critical thinking.
16:05But I think it requires these conversations and taking time to figure out, like you said at the beginning, where do you position yourself in that space?
16:14You know, like, I think it's important to really think about seeing yourself in that space.
16:19So we develop those universes, we develop those metaverses, we develop those fashion shows and those virtual realities.
16:26So those avatars, we can then create all those features we're talking about that have spirit and soul, and everything you said at the beginning when you thanked the ancestors.
16:38That was my plant.
16:39I put it here to say all of that, just so y'all know.
16:41You have to have one plant in every conversation.
16:44Shango, you already spoke.
16:44You want to speak again, brother?
16:46All right, all right, all right, all right.
16:47That did just make me think that in where we're going, we need to be super mindful of the source of any kind of AI-generated images or music that we get, right?
17:01Because as a people, we just tend to like great stuff.
17:05If it's great, if it's beautiful, if it's dope, we'll support it.
17:08But we've been taking advantage of in that sense, right?
17:14And so, like, we just need to be mindful that let me check out who this digital model is or who's behind that before we just completely co-sign them, put them on our channels, put them on our socials, and help them go viral.
17:32Like, we just really have to be mindful that, you know, the system wasn't built for us.
17:37We're stepping into it and changing that and making those changes, but it's still going to try to do what it does.
17:44And so let's, you know, we have the education, so let's just be on it.
17:48And there's a paradigm shift, so the system is not created for us.
17:52We have to step into it, but these new technologies allow us to design the system that we want.
17:57So that's why I'm having this conversation that we're in the position of authorship and design and putting ourselves at the center of creating the realities that we want.
18:06Any responses to what you heard, Kavalit?
18:08Oh, a few.
18:09I do first want to remind everyone that we're talking about industries that historically have not made room to consider us as the creators and the force that drives them to be successful.
18:21Fashion, film, music, these are things that historically have kind of treated us in this way.
18:26As scary as AI and this technology may be, I do recognize an opportunity here.
18:32This is kind of the first time in our society that we've had free access to powerful tools like this.
18:38So as creative as we are, like Shango mentioned, in embracing them and making them popular, we need to be mindful about how we can take the reins and dictate how they're used.
18:47I also want to suggest that this is not the first time that we've dealt with these issues.
18:54AI is not the first time that we've dealt with artists and their works and their representations being used posthumously in ways that we would not have thought.
19:04You know, I remember Puff Daddy put out a Biggie Duets album, right?
19:09And we had Notorious B.I.G. with songs with Bob Marley.
19:13I don't know if Bob Marley would have did a song with Biggie Smalls, you know?
19:16He probably wouldn't have.
19:19Those ideas are something that are not new to us, and the industry saw an opportunity in profiting off of that.
19:26So they will continue to do so because that's simply their job.
19:29What Shango mentioned was so important is that's us always being attentive to what's authentic and being mindful about how it's introduced to us.
19:36That's right.
19:37And I also think about the Machiavelli albums post-Tupac's death.
19:40Tupac got a song with everybody.
19:42Yeah, exactly.
19:42Tupac is the most prolific collaborator of all time, right?
19:45And he wasn't even here when he was collaborating with everyone.
19:48So we're going to wrap this up.
19:49Thank you for being in our living room, having this conversation.
19:53Thank you for exploring imagination with us.
19:55If you haven't thought about AI technology and your creative process, hopefully you are now.
20:00If you haven't thought about it, and when I say AI, I mean artificial intelligence.
20:04I'm unpacking these acronyms that we throw around, right?
20:07So how are you thinking about technology?
20:09How are you consuming it?
20:10How are we playing in it?
20:12It's really important.
20:12And if you haven't thought about it before, hopefully you start thinking about it now.
20:16Peace to y'all.
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