HELLO FUTURE: The Future of Music in the Age of AI.

Speaker 1 (00:07):
I don't know if you saw this earlier this year,
when that Beatles song got a Grammy. It's called Now
and Then, and it was an artificial intelligence restored Beatles song,
and it sparked off this whole conversation about AI and
music and the future of music. So then me, I
can't sleep one night, so I'm on YouTube and I'm
searching for covers of like really weird things, like an
Ozzy Osbourne cover of Britney Spears has hit me. Maybe
one more time, artificial intelligence can now make that happen. Meanwhile,
Rolling Stone, the iconic Rolling Stone, got punked by an
AI band called The Velvet Sundown, which is essentially this
rock band that's an artificial intelligence rock band. But it
sounded like humans obvious, and they were doing a press tour.
It's like Millie Vanilli or whatever. I'm too young to
know the right name, but when they were lip syncing,
this is like that on steroids. Hello Future, it's me
keV and this is a dispatch from the Digital Frontier.
The planet is Earth. The year is twenty twenty five.
My name is Kevin Sirilli, and today I am talking
about the future of music. My guest today is someone
who is an all star when it comes to this.
I'm so excited to have her on the program. Her
name is doctor Maya Ackerman. She is the CEO of
Wave AI. She's also the author of an awesome new
book that you can get wherever you get your books
called Creative Machines, AI Art and Us. I guess us
is the humans. But she also has this awesome tool,
Lyrics Studio, which is really what piqued my interest for
this interview, which essentially I want to let her explain it. Maya,
I will get out of the way. Thank you for
joining us. How is AI and your tool Lyrics Studio
reshaping how we consume music?

Speaker 2 (02:01):
So AI is changing the way that things are created.
It used to only predict, and now it engages in creation.
You can divide AI tools into roughly two categories. Those
that create instead of you and you can kind of
feel when that's happening. You can kind of feel yourself
being out of the loop. And tools that make you better.
So Lyrics Studio is the gold standard AI assistant for
writing lyrics. We have our own models. Everything we've made
completely from scratch for this use case. And in the
middle of the screen, you find this empty textbox where
you write, and then you ask the AI for assistance
wherever you're stuck, whether it's in the beginning, whether it's
at every line, or maybe it's only once in a while.
Very often one line of lyrics studios lyrics will inspire
the entire song. And what makes lyrics Studio different is
that people say that they become better pen and paper
songwriters for using it.

Speaker 1 (03:01):
Okay, but Taylor Swift, who just came out with the
Life of the Showgirl record topping article, or Bono from
You two, or Bruce Springsteen, I mean, is it cheating
to use lyrics Studio to help write songs?

Speaker 2 (03:16):
I think to some degree this question is easier now
than it used to be, he love, because we're all
starting to.

Speaker 3 (03:22):
Rely on AI assistance. The question is how we do it.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
Do we essentially use tools or use the tools in
a way that replaces us. Do we just go to
chatgidit and say, write me some lyrics and then copy
paste them into Suno and then click one button and
have sooner writes a song for us, which I'm not
saying is not valid, but that's kind of a replacement model,
you know, or do we really try to give more
of ourselves and then the process makes something a lot
more original, make something that actually expresses what we feel,
which is a path to use AI in a way
that profoundly amplifies the human voice.

Speaker 3 (03:58):
And this distinction is really really key.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
So do you think that artificial intelligence like in the
journalism industry or in any industry. I don't even just
want to limit it to journalism, lawyers, teachers, everyone's wondering
is AI going to replace me? Do you think that
AI will ultimately replace songwriters?

Speaker 2 (04:17):
So, having been in the industry now for almost eight years,
what I have seen is since the rise of generative AI,
some of the most powerful investor are some of the
most powerful players in the space, saw the opportunity as
replacing musicians, and as a result, some of the tools
we have sort of lean in that direction. But the
good thing is that consumers are not buying it. Consumers
want tools that let them create instead of replace them.
And so it's essentially a battle that we have right now.

Speaker 4 (04:46):
We have really really powerful, wealthy people pushing towards the replacement,
and we have musicians and a lot of listeners who
want music to continue to be human. And what we
need in this space is not only people who just
turn off AI, is we need more investment, more builders,
more people putting energy into the direction of building tools
that profoundly elevate people, because that will counter balance the
AI by itself, because AI plus human is always going
to beat AI.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
Doctor Maya Ackerman is with us. She is really an
AI pioneer, especially in the arts space and music space,
and her new book is called Creative Machines, AI, Art
and Us and she tackles a lot of tough issues
in this including the hidden history and explosive growth of
AI generated creativity, as well as talking about its true
capabilities and really the framework for using it as a
tool to enhance rather than hinder humanness. Okay, Maya, so
specifically about the hidden history, this part piqued my interest.
So this has been going on a lot longer than
before we had chat. GPT is your argument in the book, right, Yeah?

Speaker 2 (05:54):
Absolutely. It was twenty fifteen when I had the pleasure of.

Speaker 3 (05:57):
Meeting Harold Coin and seeing you.

Speaker 1 (05:59):
Wow, what was that like?

Speaker 3 (06:03):
It was really surreal.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
I was getting frankly a little bored with foundational machine learning,
which is the focus of my PhD, and I remember
feeling really disconnected during that conference. And then there was
this little session three talk session called computational creativity. So
I was like, okay, I'll make sure.

Speaker 3 (06:20):
To go there. I walk in and there's this beautiful
art being flashed on the screen, and then.

Speaker 4 (06:24):
Suddenly I'm understanding that this art is actually made by machine.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
This is twenty fifteen. I've never heard of anything like
that at that point. And then the peak of it
is Harold onstage starts screaming, I swear to God, screaming
that other people are calling his system Aaron creative, but
really he's the only voice of reason saying that he's
a creative one for having made the system. And that said,
I was converted, switched my entire career to go.

Speaker 3 (06:53):
Into this direction.

Speaker 1 (06:54):
So it is really interesting because do you think that
humans will eventually get to that point. I feel like
you were there in twenty fifteen, which is why you're
on Hello Future, where you saw the artwork. I'm very
new to the futurism space, but everyone has that moment,
Like for me, I was at a conference in Florida.
I got to test an ar VR headset. Suddenly I
was looking at the path of a wildfire on a
map of Africa. If I made this decision, the fire
would go this way, and if I made that decision,
the fire would go that way. And you could see
it in your VR headset as if you were looking
at a globe like when you were in second grade,
and you could hold the globe in your hand. And
immediately I was like, I want to make sure every
doctor has this thing. I want to make sure pilots
are using this to trade, teachers have this, I want
kids taking field trips in this and I just kind
of got it, And during lockdowns with my oculus, I
started watching documentaries in VR, and for me, VR was
really that imagination moment where I could go to outer space.
I've always wanted to go to outer space. I'm not
an astronaut. I still want to go very very bad,
but it just kind of explored it. But what I
love about your research your book is for people like
me who studied more communications backgrounds. You're saying that the
same way that mathematicians have calculators musicians, whether it's yeah,
we mentioned Taylor Swift and Bono and Bruce Springsteen and
Frank Sinatra, but also like upstarts, smaller artists, whether they're
painters or creators, not content creators, I'm talking like actual songwriters,
that they might be able to use these tools to
help them and to create art that shows off their humanness.
That's very much not the message that the mainstream media
is pushing.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
You know, the great irony of it is not science fiction,
which is meant to expand our imagination, is actually what's
sort of shrinking the imagination of a lot of decision
makers here. Science fiction always presented AI as an all
knowing oracle, something that's going to replace us, something smarter
than us that ultimately takes over, and that's precisely what's
getting built. But if you look at what people want,
even from chat schipt right, the most successful AI products,
successful sas product we ever had, is they love the interaction,
They love the back and forth, they love the fact
that they can express themselves. That's one of the main
use cases of this tool. And so we need to
start shifting how we think about this technology. Just like
a person, a really really bright friend of yours might
come in and always steal the spotlight, a different friend
who is equally brilliant might apply that intelligence to make
people around them better. They know how to step back
and so it's.

Speaker 3 (09:34):
Not a hypothetical future. We've had millions of people use
the Lyrics Studio. We have top artists using it.

Speaker 1 (09:39):
There are some of the top artists that you can share.

Speaker 2 (09:42):
So I can't share some of the you know, when
they unless they publicly share.

Speaker 3 (09:46):
We never share.

Speaker 2 (09:47):
But for example, Curtis King had a number one hit
album with it. We have another person named Legend who
actually made a whole playlist showing how he riffs with
it in real time, using.

Speaker 3 (09:58):
The tool in a way we would have never imagined.

Speaker 2 (10:01):
So there are a whole bunch of people, you know,
kind of moving away from sort of fame and number
one hit. So there's a whole bunch of people who
tell me that that's the first time they could write music.
They have a lot of musical skills, but they're always
struggled with lyrics. But my favorite is that people become
better lyricists from it. The tool doesn't become useless when
you become a better lyricist. It can have It can
help even experts, but it really is about helping people
express themselves and it's an experience that you recognize you
as you use a tool very very quickly, because it's
designed to follow you, it's designed to inspire you. It's
not designed to take over, and it's it's really time
for the entire industry to start looking into this direction
as well.

Speaker 1 (10:46):
Would we recognize some of the names? I know you
can't say which ones, but would we recognize some of
the musical artists who are using your platform to help
with lyrics writing.

Speaker 2 (10:55):
I'm trying to be very careful here to protect their privacy,
but we have people who are signed with some of
the biggest labels in the world.

Speaker 1 (11:01):
So it's interesting because like in the in my old world,
in my old world Maya before I broke free from
political journalism and I got out, But in like the
political memoir writing world, they all use political ghostwriters. Sorry, folks,
Kamala Harris and I don't care if she's a Democrat
or if you're a Republican fan. They're not sitting up
like Ernest Hemingway at four am in the morning and
they're quaint little pond writing their stuff. They have they
have a ghostwriter, and candidly, thankfully so many of them
because they also have speech writers, like we don't we
don't chastise our politicians for having a speech writer. And
by the way, what do you think the speech writers
are using, which is what all the European governments are
getting dinged for right now. I don't know if you've
seen any of these headlines. You're like, this politician uses
AI and chat GPT policy and I'm like, and you're not, like,
we're all using it. So I do think it is
interesting because but I just kind of had an Aha moment,
is that creatives are held to a different standard right
now in twenty twenty five. But to your point, how
quickly that can evolve, because schools are really struggling with this,
like what is appropriate to use artificial intelligence for kids
to be able to use. But the point that you're
making is right now and there seems to be an
apprehension for it's kind of like autotone. Remember that whole
debate when artists were using autotone, and when I was
in college was like, oh, they're using autotone, like they
must not have a good voice, and it's like, actually,
if you listen to that guy who sings, buy you
a drink, tea paint t pain is a beautiful voice
if you go on YouTube, but he was one of
the first pioneers for autotone. Do you think there's some
similarities and what I'm trying to whether it's speechwriters or
ghost writers for books in the world of music and
lyricism that you're talking about, and do you think people's
attitudes eventually will shift. I think they are in the
next couple of months.

Speaker 2 (12:57):
I think you're right on here. It's a question of
what exactly does a collaboration look like. I think what
the listeners don't want is we don't want to listen
to what robots experience.

Speaker 3 (13:10):
You know, that's not interesting for us. We want to
listen to what other human beings the experience. So just
like with a political.

Speaker 2 (13:15):
Writer, you know, I'm sure that our politicians engage with
their political writers to make sure that it's at least
to some degree alignmans. But who want to say, right,
So it's not it's not a one and done. With songwriters.
You have ghostwriters for songwriters as well, and some of
the most famous musicians use ghostwriters too, which is you know,
we don't like to talk about.

Speaker 1 (13:39):
That writers or co writers as well.

Speaker 3 (13:44):
And co writers.

Speaker 2 (13:44):
Yeah, so it's really about that process, and we we
tend to assume that AI writer does work instead of us,
which is why we get mad. But once we start
understanding more of the nuance and the fact that it's
co creating and leaning towards tools that let you give
as much of your yourself as you want, it's a
different world.

Speaker 1 (14:02):
Awesome, Well doctr Maya Ackerman. Thank you so much for
showing up to meet the future and to come on
hell with future. And do you think in five years
that it will just be commonplace for artists to be
using AI as co writers on their songs.

Speaker 3 (14:17):
I think the shift is going to be that they're going.

Speaker 2 (14:19):
To be able to be honest about that's awesome, that's
really really cool.

Speaker 1 (14:24):
I don't really have a problem with it. I'm just
gonna come out and say it. Even Picasso would would
have you know. That's all I got to say. All Right,
thank you so much having your day.

Speaker 3 (14:32):
Thank you