What was the first pop song written by AI?
The end is nigh. At least some people think so; others are not so sure. Artificial intelligence has been a technical development on the tips of people’s tongues for decades, inspiring sci-fi films, books and constant debates. The difference is that AI is no longer on the tips of our tongues; it’s at our fingertips, and there is no stopping it.
AI has already been used in multiple aspects of everyday life; it can be used for gaming reasons so that bots people play against can be more challenging, it helps with organising calendars and checklists, and it is also used on websites as a personal assistant to communicate with you. These means are all relatively harmless, but in the past few years, the true potential of AI has properly come to fruition, and whilst some look at it wide-eyed and excited, others build bunkers.
A constant debate in the creative world is whether AI will replace the need for human input in producing art. This past year, it has made several headlines for its ability to create copy, conjure up images and contribute towards music. The Beatles released ‘Now and Then’, a track created with the assistance of AI to extrapolate the vocals of John Lennon. There has also been the rise of Anna Indiana, the first pop star to allegedly exist solely with AI.
Should we be worried? It’s hard to tell, but maybe, especially looking at the progress made since the first time AI was used to make music compared to now. In 2016, researchers at Sony were working on AI-generated music and made the first-ever AI-created pop song. It’s called ‘Daddy’s Car’ and is pretty good.
When you read further into the 2016 track, though AI influenced its creation, it still relied heavily on human touch, which could contribute to why it sounds good. The system, called FlowMachines, was used to analyse a database of songs and then create a similar composition by following a specific musical style. While it did that, the track relied on French composer Benoît Carré, who arranged the song and wrote the lyrics.
For some, this seemed like a fun little way to use technology to assist with escaping writer’s block like some musicians will google “What rhymes with X” or rip off a guitar solo. However, others saw it as the beginning of the end.
“It’s very reasonable for people to be intimidated by the power of new technologies,” said Yihao Chen, founder of ITOKA, a music company creating AI-generated songs, “and there might be some arguments or adversaries towards the adoption of the new technologies. But you already know that The Beatles successfully adopted the synthesiser at the very, very beginning, using Yamaha synthesisers in a lot of their famous songs, and it was a hit!”
He went on to assure that “the goal of this AI technology is not to replace human creativity but to expand the territory or the boundaries of human creativity. In music, it looks at providing efficiencies.”
This seems to be a familiar mantra thrown out by tech-geeks all the time as they try to reassure the art world that human intervention will still be necessary, yet with every development made in the world of artificial intelligence, human intervention is becoming less and less needed. Comparing ‘Daddy’s Car’ in 2016 to what is being released now by AI popstars is terrifying. In the space of 7 years, the human touch has had its fingerprints wiped, and the world of music as we know it lies in a technology-induced purgatory.
AI will not stop developing, firstly because it is written into its existence to always be learning, but also because of the genuine practical benefits it can have. However, with those developments come infringements on art that leave people hesitant to embrace its use further, and the jump from the first AI pop song to what is being made now only reinforces that trepidation.
