The growing use of artificial intelligence in the creative industries has been described as an existential threat to jobs and artistic integrity. Earlier this year artists including Billie Eilish and Katy Perry signed an open letter urging tech companies not to “sabotage creativity”, while Nick Cave has called lyrics written by ChatGPT “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human”. But according to the musician Daniel Bedingfield, AI is music’s future, and anyone who fights against it faces being left behind.
“AI is now here for ever,” he told the Guardian. “And so I think that there will be two paths: there’ll be the neo-luddite path, and then there’ll be everyone else, most of the planet, who thinks the music’s really good and enjoys it.”
The singer came to prominence in 2001 with his hit song Gotta Get Thru This, which earned him a Grammy nomination, and the album of the same title was nominated for a Brit award and sold more than 4m copies.
He has been an early adopter of AI for making music and is an avid user of Udio, a music generator that builds songs around the music it is fed. The startup that developed the software is on the receiving end of a lawsuit, filed in June, over the use of musicians’ catalogues to train the app’s algorithm.
The musician has compiled a new album of AI-generated songs and has developed his own app, Hooks, which pairs submitted music with AI-generated videos.
Bedingfield said anyone should be able to make music and that a lack of ability should not get in the way of someone being able to create art, or profit from it. “It will be possible to continue without AI. But the question will be, why would you? Why fight it when you can have a whole gospel choir singing your chorus in two days’ time?”
He also argued that the same principle could be applied to the writing of lyrics. “It might have been very romantic to create my own bricks before I build a wall. It’s not necessary any more, so I buy a bunch of bricks.”
Stevie Wonder was 12 years old when he recorded Fingertips, which reached No 1 in the US, making him the youngest ever solo artist to top the charts, but Bedingfield thinks AI can help children write pop hits in half that time.
“I want a six-year-old to make a masterpiece,” he said, adding that he wished he had had access to AI technology as a child. “I could sing really well when I was six; I feel that my voice was as good at nine as it is now. I would have loved the chance to have made an album back then, without having to spend decades learning to play the instruments. That was the hard part, the brutal part.”
Bedingfield’s enthusiasm for AI-created music seems to be driven in part by his disdain for the music industry, which he described as “a system full of sharks and people who don’t know what they’re doing”.
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“Go ahead, see if you can join the music industry without getting your soul destroyed. See if you can change it from the inside. I think it’s better to create parallel systems.” Those parallel systems, he hoped, would lead to artists being paid more fairly. “Most side artists are getting ripped off,” he said, claiming he was never paid anything beyond the upfront fee for his debut record.
Bedingfield did acknowledge that giving individuals and companies the power to create music without the involvement of musicians would lead to a lot of misery.
“Right now I’m grieving in my heart for 10,000 musicians, the pain that’s coming in the next 10 years, the depression, the homelessness. I think that’s coming,” he said. But his conclusion was clear: “We have to adapt or die.”
