AI music mimics human expression: 'Something is lost' - Kavisha Pillay, Campaign on Digital Ethics

CapeTalk's John Maytham speaks to Kavisha Pillay, a social justice activist and founding director of the Campaign on Digital Ethics (CODE).

Listen below: 

While AI tools can help us craft perfect emails, they can also make music.

This begs questions around digital ethics.

Pillay has written papers about music made using AI, in which she asks questions such as:

• Is artificial intelligence reshaping creativity?
• What’s at stake when authenticity itself becomes a casualty of technology?
• When can AI imitate the soul?
• Should we have boundaries in terms of using art in relation to creativity?

Pillay explores these questions in her article published in the Daily Maverick titled: "When machines sing — can AI imitate the human soul?"

Pillay says AI-produced music can be moving and stir emotions because it mimics human expression really well, but it's artificial. 

Human experiences typically lead to the creation of art, with the human element removed from AI; something is lost, she says.

Pillay argues there should be restrictions on using AI in art to preserve the human elements often attached to it because it helps us relate to each other.

"We know the technology is helping and it's making us more efficient and helping us do jobs better, but when it comes to art and creativity, that should be strictly within our domain because it is driven by human experience."

- Kavisha Pillay, Founding Director - CODE

"Art should be preserved spaces for pure human connection... It's what helps us to relate to one another, it's what helps us to communicate about current experiences, be it about struggle, love, the pursuit of justice, inequality, grief, or spirituality... really important from a language perspective..."

- Kavisha Pillay, Founding Director - CODE

"Unfortunately, it's so easy now to produce hits based on training data on the greatest hits of musicians of our time, and it goes into broader questions about digital ethics... You have AI models that are being trained on the data of artists and in their likeness, but they don't get compensated for it, nor are they acknowledged for it." 

- Kavisha Pillay, Founding Director - CODE

"... you have new AI bands coming about where it's becoming much more difficult for us as an audience to tell whether something is real or synthetic. You're then able to create quite a bit of money off the likeness and intellectual property of those artists who did grapple with those feelings, who did a lot of work in terms of producing that music... so there are a lot of issues that need to be dealt with around intellectual property..."

- Kavisha Pillay, Founding Director - CODE

"As audiences, I think we deserve the right to know whether or not this is something that's real, that came from a real person or band or whether this is something that was synthetic."

- Kavisha Pillay, Founding Director - CODE

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