Artificial intelligence tools for musicians are getting eerily good, very fast. Their work can be maddening, funny, ethically dubious, and downright fascinating all at the same time. TV and podcast composer Mark Henry Phillips joins to describe his experience working with them. We talk about the job of modern music composition; why he's worried AI might eventually do much of his current job; the morass of AI copyright law; and the ethics of creative ownership. But above all, Mark gets my brain whirring about the nature of creativity—how great new ideas, like songs, come to be in the first place. The line between stealing and inspiration in artistic history has always been blurry. Picasso famously said: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” And that is not just a memorable quote. Many of my favorite musicians were famous borrowers, to put it lightly. Some of Led Zeppelin's most famous songs—such as "Whole Lotta Love"—were such obvious lifts that, after years of court cases, the band agreed to add the plaintiff to the song credits. But analogies to music and art history also fall short to capture the weirdness of this moment. Neither Picasso nor Jimmy Page had access to an external technology whose deliberate function was to slurp up musical elements from millions of songs, store their essence in silicon memory, and serve them up in a kind of synthetic stir fry on an order-by-order basis. Musicians have been writing music with partners for decades, even centuries. What happens to music when that partner is a machine: Will it open up new horizons in songwriting and composition? Or in a sad way, will super-intelligence make the future of music more average than ever? Links: WNYC: "How AI and Algorithms Are Transforming Music" "In February's Cruel Light (Goodbye Luka)" Full AI song "L.A. Luka (I Wanna Puke-uh)" Full AI song P.S. Derek wrote a new book! It’s called 'Abundance,' and it’s about an optimistic vision for politics, science, and technology that gets America building again. Buy it here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Abundance/Ezra-Klein/9781668023488 Plus: If you live in Seattle, Atlanta, or the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, Derek is coming your way in March! See him live at book events in your city. Tickets here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/p/abundance-tour Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: How is AI transforming the music industry?
Today, AI, music, and the future of creativity. In the last few years, several generative AI platforms for music have caught my attention. One of them is Suno, which allows you to request a song by typing in a simple prompt. You specify the style, the lyrics, the mood that you want, and the AI will interpret those inputs and produce a musical composition.
So let's start with an extremely stupid example. I have several friends from Texas who were distraught by the trade that sent basketball phenom Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers. Now, if you're listening along, you're not a basketball fan.
The only thing to know here is that this was probably the most shocking trade in NBA history, shipping off one of the league's best players at the 11th hour with no warning. So let's say you wanted to console or troll the Luka fan in your life. You might tell the AI to spin up a weepy pop folk song about losing Luka in February to Los Angeles. And within about 30 seconds, You would get this.
In February's cruel bite Luca went away Whispered dreams to the wind To Los Angeles he'd stray Left me with a shadow in the cold Darkened morn
Now, maybe you're impressed by this. Maybe you're not impressed by it. Or maybe your reaction is, the mood is all wrong. Dallas fans should be screaming angry about the Luka trade. After all, they lost Luka Doncic for a player, Anthony Davis, who is injured so often that his nickname is Street Clothes.
Well, in that case, you can instruct the AI to try out an angry 1990s-style pop-punk screamo song with some punchy lyrics about losing Luca for Mr. Streetclothes. Ladies and gentlemen, fair warning, the following is extremely not safe for work.
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Chapter 2: Can AI create emotionally resonant music?
Treating my whole heart for Mr. Streetclothes Treating my whole heart and Jesus it blows
Okay, so what do we make of these songs? They're impressive in their own way. They certainly resemble real songs. I think they're funny enough that I absolutely did send them to Dallas Mavericks fans in my life. But they're more impressive as a fancy parlor trick than as great music. They're a bit like an actor who's magnificent at impersonations, but far from virtuosic at actually acting.
Like I'm not putting these songs on any sincere playlist. And so while I've been fascinated by these music AI tools, I wasn't sure I knew exactly what to say about them. Now that was until several weeks ago when I heard the film, TV, and podcast composer Mark Henry Phillips describe his experience with AI music tools on WNYC's On the Media.
Phillips explained how a sophisticated user of these tools could eliminate much of the composition work that professional musicians today rely on to make ends meet. What struck me as a funny game is to Phillips a dead serious matter. the difference between work and disemployment. Mark is today's guest.
Chapter 3: What are the challenges of using AI in music composition?
We talk about the job of modern music composition, why some AI tools are eerily good at certain aspects of the job. We talk about copyright law and the ethics of creative ownership. But above all, Mark gets my brain worrying about the very nature of creativity, how great new ideas like songs come to be in the first place.
The line between stealing and riffing and interpolating in artistic history has always been blurry. Picasso famously said, good artists copy, great artists steal. And this is not just a theoretical fact. Many of my favorite musicians were famous borrowers.
Some of Led Zeppelin's most famous songs, Days and Confused, Whole Lotta Love, were such obvious lifts that after years of court cases, the band agreed to add the plaintiff's name to the song credits. But analogies to music and art history fall short to capture the weirdness of this moment.
Neither Picasso nor Jimmy Page had access to an external technology whose deliberate function was to slurp up musical elements from millions of songs, store their essence in silicon memory, and serve them up in a kind of synthetic stir fry on an order-by-order basis. Musicians have been writing music with partners for decades, even centuries.
But what happens to music when that partner becomes a machine? Will it open up new horizons in songwriting and composition? Or in a funny way, will superintelligence make the future of music more average than ever? I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. Mark Henry Phillips, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
How'd you get into music?
When did you first catch the bug? Wow. I mean, I guess it was, I think it was the summer between fifth and sixth grade, I made a Beatles mixtape and I became, I was obsessed with it. I like listened to it nonstop doing gardening work for an entire summer and then convinced my grandma to buy me a guitar. And I tried to learn every Beatles song I could.
Then I was like, oh wait, the piano songs, those are my favorite. So I started learning piano. Convinced my grandma to get me a four-track recorder. And then, you know, I experimented with layering stuff. And yeah, and then, you know, it just became like my favorite thing to do and kind of still is in some ways.
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Chapter 4: How does AI music compare to human compositions?
And so I, you know, kept Googling and the spring of last year, I, you know, saw one, a new one that was kind of popping up online. And, you know, I went to like the Reddit forum for it and I found this, Someone posted a track and it was basically a ripoff of Toots and the Maidles, an early reggae star from Jamaica. And I love reggae, old reggae. And I heard it, and I was like, this is music.
It's not like, oh, that's cool. Like, this is good music. It has some artifacts here and there, but it's amazing.
So for people who don't know Toots, who don't know reggae outside of Bob Marley, what did we just listen to as a musician? What made you stand up and go... This is a little bit spooky. This threatens my professional ego.
I have been hired to make a reggae song that's supposed to sound like 1969 Jamaica. I can do a pretty good job of making something. It's certainly of the same spirit of it, but it doesn't feel right. Like it was recorded on a hot summer night in 1969 in studio one, which was Lee scratch Perry's like original studio.
And like, you know, with like this brother duo on, on drums and bass, like it doesn't have the same vibe. And this one, just the vibe is like, it's,
good it's like really good and it's like you kind of need a time machine to to recreate something like that and then the vocal performance um you know yes there are weird parts here and there but by and large the vocal performance is virtuosic like just like him
You've said this technology has given you existential dread about your job. I want to provide a really clear apples to apples comparison of human work and AI work. So on the WNYC segment, you talked about scoring a scene where a couple is getting to know each other. And this is a cute, romantic, slightly goofy scene. Tell me what you did next.
So yeah, I guess I thought first, what's a good target? What does this scene need? And yeah, what came to mind was kind of like an indie drama comedy from the 90s. And I thought of John Bryan, who's a favorite composer of mine. And so I didn't go back and listen to his catalog because I was afraid if I do that, I might do something too close to it. And I kind of just in my head was like,
what's a John Bryan song sound like? And I just started playing it. So in a way, I was trying to rip off John Bryan, but I knew my memory is so bad that whatever I create right now is not going to be a direct ripoff of John Bryan. It's just gonna have a similar vibe to it.
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Chapter 5: What are the ethical and legal implications of AI in music?
So my take is... It is definitely, definitely stealing quote-unquote voices. That is the strings of a Bernard Herrmann recording. That is the, you know, there was a harp being plucked in the background and a trumpet. Like, those are the instruments from real Bernard Herrmann recordings. I don't think the melody and the performances are stealing from an actual composition for very long.
I think it probably only happens for like a microsecond, and then the AI kind of goes in a different direction than the original composition does. So I think it's stealing But it's just kind of randomly coming up with melodies, orchestrations, arrangements that are perfectly like Bernard Herrmann, but not the exact same thing he did on Psycho or, you know, whatever.
In your WNYC segment, you said that you're genuinely afraid that this technology could replace you. How would it replace you?
I mean, yes, I think it could replace a lot of my work. Commercial stuff, film composing, podcast composing. Why would you hire someone who charges you a fair price for the time it takes and for sort of the licensing of the music when you could use one of these things produce 10 tracks in an hour and conceivably use them for free. I think you can use them without getting sued.
So why would you hire someone when you don't even have to have that process in your workflow? If you're making a commercial and you wanna have a song that sounds like the Rolling Stones, you could have a hundred songs that sound exactly like the Rolling Stones in an hour and your editor can start cutting to them. So I think it's gonna happen. I think there will be...
Some delays because people will be afraid of the legal consequences, but that'll happen in films, podcasts, commercials. It's going to happen in all these different realms.
There are three layers here that are so interesting to me that I want to make sure we hit in this conversation. The first is the practical layer, which is should musicians use this technology? And if they use it, how should they use it? The second layer is moral or ethical. Is this technology legal? And even beyond legal, are these tools right to use? Do they rob us of something?
Do they rob the original makers of music that's been fed into these generative AI systems of something? And then third, I think that these technologies raise really fascinating questions that exist at the realm of culture and even something that touches on philosophy. And I want to make sure that we save some time for those. Let's start with the practical.
You had a come to Jesus moment with this technology that has for now salved at least some of your existential dread. What was it?
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Chapter 6: How can musicians collaborate with AI?
Yeah, if I move forward with working with it, that's exactly what I'm going to do. And it's exactly how you write with another person. I mean, I was just texting with my buddy Graham yesterday, and he's an amazing guitarist. And the way we would collaborate sometimes is I would say, you know, what would... Steve Cropper do? What would George Harrison do?
And, you know, he's listened to enough of the music that he gives sort of his spin on what they would do. And that's what the AI does. Yes, it's not John Lennon, but it kind of knows what John Lennon would do in this situation if he had reached this point in a song.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, let me just dribble some cold water on all of this. Do you have any sense that musicians actually want to work with these tools? Like since your WNYC piece, did musicians write to you to say, sorry, dude, this is completely alien and messed up? Or were they interested in using AI as an extension of their creativity?
I will say since my On The Media piece, I would say 30 to 50 musicians have reached out to me sort of very excited about the prospect of using it this way. And one was a famous electronic musician who I've listened to for a long time. And it was like really interesting to see how excited musicians were by it, but they all had this exact same, it feels different.
This isn't like a new piece of technology, like a new keyboard or a new digital plugin. It's something different. And so everyone is excited by it. And I think musicians are inherently, ooh, there's a new tool that can make good music. I want it. I wanna play with it.
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So when you and I were emailing back and forth about doing this show, you proposed what I initially considered a pretty weird experiment. You said, Derek, if you want to make a little piece of music and send it to me, I can use my AI tools to build something out of it. So... I dabble on the piano a little bit. I don't play anything very good, but I can sort of play triads.
I can hunt and peck little melodies. And last week, I happened to be at a recording studio finishing the second half of the audiobook of Abundance. So I'm in the studio. They have beautiful pianos there. I sat down and I played something that I'd come up with.
And this is like a little interpolation, a little riff on one of my favorite pieces of classical music, a concerto by Shostakovich, who is a 20th century Russian composer that I like. So I recorded it. I emailed it to you. And I said, I imagined it could serve as the basis of a Danny Elfman style, Tim Burton fantasy or a Pixar fantasy tale theme. And here's how it goes.
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