This newsletter has slowly morphed into my musings on AI. It’s hard not to talk about it all the time because it’s literally the biggest change in tech since the internet. There are so many aspects of this movement that echo the dot com bubble that I can’t help but not write about. The more it creeps into the zeitgeist, the more relevant it becomes to the general public and how can we ignore that?
Back to Back
Some time ago, I wrote about The Beatle’s use of AI in their Grammy Award-winning single, Now and Then. I wrote that it “marked a turning point where a legacy artist not only used AI but embraced it.” I also referenced the ghostwritten AI viral track that featured the use of Drake and The Weeknd vocals in Heart on my sleeve. Obviously, there was outrage for the ghostwritten track because it was produced by a nobody of no name using voices they had no permission to use. Time passed, and AI music kinda took a backseat — until last week.
Some context. A couple of weeks ago, Future teamed up with producer, Metro Boomin, and released WE DON’T TRUST YOU, an album that featured a verse from Kendrick Lamar littered with shots at both Drake and J.Cole. Stay with me now. The verse ignited a decade-old beef between the rappers and kickstarted a rap war the fans (and I) have been waiting for. J. Cole responded with his own diss track… and later apologized (lol). Then number 1 himself responded with his own single titled Push Ups where he essentially aired out the entire team behind the album, with Kendrick being the main target. Unsatisfied with the lack of response from Kendrick, Drake decided to continue the trolling with an unreleased track titled Taylor Made Freestyle, which had featured verses from Tupac and Snoop Dog — except their voices were made with AI. It’s reported that Drake wrote the verses and then used AI voiceover to mimic the two artists. Needless to say, it caused quite an uproar.
It’s all annoying, but using AI vocals is even more disheartening. Just last week fans were annoyed with AI when we didn’t know if Drake or Kendrick disses were real, but now some are doing mental gymnastics to convince themselves that evoking other people in a beef, especially a dead person, is fair game.
Recently, over 200 artists signed a petition urging tech companies not to develop AI tools to replace human labor. Last year, UMG fought against AI platforms after a fake Drake and Weeknd song went viral. Drake thanked them for that stand by opening the door for other artists to roll out their phony features. Some may say “It’s not that serious,” but this is how it starts. A societal crisis is often self-inflicted; we’re prone to shrugging off problematic cultural innovations and engaging with them in progressively dangerous ways until we’re in a full-blown epidemic and wondering how things got this bad. The World Economic Forum decreed that “misinformation and disinformation is the most severe short-term risk the world faces.” That problem is fueled by the AI companies who roll out face filters, Lil Yachty festival memes, and quirky vocal filters to obscure the exploitative, obfuscating harm that AI represents. No one should be cosigning this technology, especially one of the world’s biggest artists. That’s why “Taylor Made Freestyle” Is not creative or clever, it’s dangerous. - Drake Mostly Made Himself Look Bad on His Latest Diss, The Rolling Stones
Whether the use of AI is tasteful or not is up to the fans to decide. I think it’s a bit ridiculous to reference The World Economic Forum when discussing Drake’s use of AI. Also, to call it dangerous is a classic tactic used by the old guard to simply protect their position. We’ve seen this everywhere and legacy media relishes in their disdain for “bad behavior”. The point is, Drake has validated AI and a lot of people are not happy. This is a good thing.
There’s still time
I will continue to shout this from the rooftops: the only way to “protect” ourselves from the misuse of AI is too embrace it. Colleges don’t want students using it, companies are weary of their employees using it, and traditional media are barring their own artists from using it — unless of course it’s by their standards.
We are a long way off from AI gaining sentience, or AGI, or whatever else that means. Even the Zuck believes we’re about to enter another AI winter:
I actually think before we hit that [AGI], you’re going to run into energy constraints. I don’t think anyone’s built a gigawatt single training cluster yet. You run into these things that just end up being slower in the world… I just think that there’s all these physical constraints that make that unlikely to happen. I just don’t really see that playing out. I think we’ll have time to acclimate a bit. - Mark Zuckerberg - Llama 3, $10B Models, Caesar Augustus, & 1 GW Datacenters, Dwarkesh Patel
What he means is that the amount of computational power required to continuously improve these models is turning out to be much more demanding than we thought. While Nvidia is currently the king in the hardware space, a lot of change needs to happen around both hardware and energy before we take the next leap. The key point there is time. While things seem to be moving very fast in this space, we’re still early. And with that time, it’s up to us as consumers to learn how we can use these tools to our advantage. If we let up and sit back, companies will figure out use in their favor while heading all sorts of warnings along the way.
For the moment, ChatGPT and other similar tools are just a tortured poet sitting in a cage awaiting instructions — and the possibilities are endless.
Thank you
I write this as META reports earnings, falling 16+% as it’s revealed that it will spend billions of dollars more than expected this year — fueled by investments in artificial intelligence. The Zuck is a seasoned exec at this point, so it makes sense that the story he’s peddling is one of patience. But we’ve seen this before when the stock tumbled even more 2 years ago as their pivot to the Metaverse was not looking so good. At that time, Zuck again asked for patience and kickstarted the ‘year of efficiency’ as major cuts were made. Whether you like him or not, Zuck seems to always know what he’s doing — and I’m willing to bet on that. As always, if you have any questions, want more explanations, or strongly disagree, comment below, follow me on Twitter (X), follow me on Instagram, or shoot me an email.
Disclaimer: These views are my own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organization with which I am affiliated with. This article is written with AI assistance.