If there’s one thing that has characterized Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, the legendary musician popularly known as Sting, from the beginning of his career in the late 1970s to the present, it’s that he’s never held anything back. to express an opinion in an interview. For this reason, when in a television exclusive granted to the BBC he was asked what he thought about the use of artificial intelligence in musical composition, who always prefers to define himself as a singer-songwriter, he burst out, a fact that indicated that he was a topic that bothered him a lot: “Musicians will face a battle to defend their work in front of songs that are composed by artificial intelligence”, he said, then clarified: “The blocks to build music us they belong to us, to human beings”.
In an article from the editorial division of the BBC, two recent cases of the use of artificial intelligence in the creation of music are mentioned, which surely angered the creator of tracks such as All this time and Fields of gold . A TikTok user claimed to have artificially generated the voices of The Weeknd and Drake to create a version of Larry’s Heart on my sleeve that quickly went viral, reaching two million views of visits, and which can be found on YouTube under the colorful pseudonym of Ghostwriter. The result was so efficient that, if the anonymous author had not clarified that it was a creation of artificial intelligence, only the singers who were imitated would have noticed. The track, which was initially also available on platforms, was pulled by Universal Music Group, the same company that distributes Sting’s music, but they have not been able to prevent it from continuing to be heard on the internet.
In January Nick Cave reported that many songs had been created by Chat GPT imitating his peculiar style. The Australian singer went so far as to say that one of these was “a grotesque imitation of what it is to be human”.
However, it is not always the users who use it to try new things. In February, DJ David Guetta used the technology to add Eminem’s voice to one of his tracks. And Neil Tennant, lead singer of the Pet Shop Boys, told the Radio Times that the group managed to finish a song that was stuck in time due to a creative block. “In 2003 we wrote a chorus for a song and we couldn’t finish it because I couldn’t think of the lyrics. But when I gave what I had to the AI, it only took one push of a button for what was missing to appear. We may rewrite it, but certainly artificial intelligence helped us as a tool”, he pointed out.
When the explanation given by Tennant, the ex-leader of the group The Police, was mentioned to Sting, he maintained his skepticism: “The tools are always useful, but we are the ones who have to use them. What we cannot do is allow the machines to take over. We have to be very careful”, he said. Sting (71) later stated that what happened to him with music created with artificial intelligence is similar to what a film generates for him with CGI: “It’s something that has never impressed me. When I see a computer generated image I immediately get bored. I think I’ll feel the same way when I hear a song created with AI,” said the winner of 17 Grammys, a Golden Globe and an Emmy, as well as being nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song four times
Sting admitted that artificial intelligence could work for electronic music, although he was tentative: “To express emotion through songs, I don’t think I’ll be moved by what this technology produces.”
Two months ago Sting collected the prestigious Ivor Novello award in London, which has been awarded since 1956 to the best songwriters and has previously received Elton John, Paul McCartney, Adele, Annie Lennox, John Lennon and Amy Winehouse, among others .
In his speech, the author of songs such as Every breath you take, Roxanne or Englishman in New York assured: “Of all the awards in the world of music, the Ivors are the most prestigious for me. Songwriting is a craft that requires talent, and The Ivors Academy represents the guild. That’s why I’m delighted and I feel very honored that I’ve been invited to be part of it, to join this extraordinary group of fellow composers, and those who preceded us”.
