“It’s like we’ve invented fire and the first thing we’ve thought to do with it is to burn down our house”: Lex Dromgoole thinks we shouldn’t jump to the worst conclusions with AI
“In the early stages of AI, some of the most interesting and inspiring parts of it were the bits it didn’t do right.”
Credit: Weiquan Lin/Getty Images
AVA London: Lex Dromgoole, CEO of Bronze.ai, thinks that on the whole, many people have assumed the worst about the rise of artificial intelligence.
Last month, MusicTech attended the Surviving The AI Apocalypse panel hosted by Declan McGlynn, Director of Communications at Voice-Swap at the AVA London 2024 conference. At the event, Dromgoole spoke optimistically about AI, stating that we shouldn’t jump to the worst conclusions on the implementation of the new technology in music.
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Speaking on the day was also David Boyle (director at Audience Strategies), Tom Kiehl (Interim CEO at UK Music) and Ruth Royall (a Bristol-based artist who works with Voice Swap).
“With the current way we are thinking about AI in music, it’s like we’ve invented fire and the first thing we’ve thought to do with it is to burn down our house,” said Dromgoole. “Why would the first thing we’d think to do with it be ‘oh, let’s just make loads of really terrible music’? It’s not the first thing that comes to my mind.”
Royall then weighed in about music being too clean in our modern day and the idea that music now “has to be perfect”. She argued that we’ve almost got so used to tech such as auto-tune, that a natural voice now almost sounds bad to some people. “We’re losing some of that emotion,” she said.
Dromgoole later added that the imperfections of AI are what makes it exciting at this stage: “In the early stages of AI, some of the most interesting and sort of inspiring parts of it were the bits it didn’t do right. And now weirdly, I’m becoming less and less engaged the better it gets. [Like] the more photorealistic images [that are coming out], I don’t care about that.”
On a similar note, Dromgoole also shared his belief that the tools we have been using to make music for the last 20-30 years have made tracks sound more machine-like, whereas AI may be able to help us “reevaluate what we can actually bring to the table as humans”.
“I would argue that the tools that we use now to create music have made us as humans act more like computers because of how technical they are,” he said. “From an artistic point of view, as well, it actually gives us the opportunity to reevaluate what we can bring to the table as humans, that these models can’t.”
Keep an eye on AVA Festival for details about AVA’s upcoming festival in Belfast, and check out Bronze.ai.
