From concepting to production, can AI really replicate the humanity of music? Kevin Godley, Creative Partner at Group Of Humans

Tell us a bit about your background and how you got into the music industry…

I have no idea how it actually happened. I’ve always had artistic tendencies and so went to art college to study graphic design along with Lol Creme. It was the sixties and everyone was going nuts for The Beatles, who’d just released Sergeant Pepper, and it made us think, “wow, we can do anything we want”. So we joined a few bands, started writing songs and recording them and after a few years, one became quite successful. We were called 10cc.?

Later in the late eighties, long after Lol and I had left 10cc, came the birth of the MTV generation and with it, music videos. We decided to have a go, shot our first in one day and learned a lot. And again, over time we became quite successful at it.

I think that’s because there weren’t many other people doing it. I mean, who was directing that actually came from the music world? No one. Everyone was a director of commercials or documentaries and they didn’t know how to talk to, interpret or even understand musicians. But we did. Turned out, that made a hell of a difference and we became very good at it. I’m still directing videos to this day.

How did technology change the creative process, and is AI the natural next step?

Video making has changed dramatically. In the early eighties, editing meant physically splicing the physical film together, which meant you really had to use your brain to make decisions. Because once the film was cut, you couldn’t undo it. When video editing came along it put a lot of people’s noses out of joint as that physical creative process was changing.?

Then that analogue video editing evolved into digital non-linear editing, which gave us loads more options as we could try stuff and then go back if we didn’t like it. But it also put some of the musician’s creative control in the hands of the person at the editing desk – and that meant the original connection was lost, replaced by technology.?

Then came along the piece of technology that I think created the biggest single change in how people make music: the LinnDrum machine. All it did was put sound samples from drum kits into an electronic device that anyone could use to recreate playing drums. It worried a lot of people who thought it was killing authenticity, but it was very popular and created a seismic shift in the industry’s use of technology.?

And now AI is doing the same – people are using ChatGPT to write songs, Midjourney to design album covers and soon create entire music videos too. So you could argue like Nick Cave does that AI is killing the creative ‘Human Experience’, which I do agree with, but that’s not actually what worries me about it.

So what does worry you about the effect AI is having on the creative process?

Bad actors and deep fakes. At the moment everyone’s having lots of fun with the fake side; you know, the Pope in his puffer jacket and so on. But once the bad actors really get to grips with it, that will change. AI has the potential to morph into something really bad, really unpleasant if we don’t work out how to identify and warn people about it.?

I’m not about pulling the plug on the technology, I’m about finding something like that to help identify the right and the wrong, though I recognise it’ll take a fucking long time to get done!

I’m coming at it from a cynical perspective because I think that humanity, civilised humanity anyway, loves to flirt with dystopia and technology is often the enabler of that. So the danger with AI is that creative people may get dialled out of creating things that we have expertise in by non-creative people with technology. And the big, BIG problem with this is that it’s not about making something better, it’s about being more efficient and getting things done more quickly, more cost effectively.?

Suddenly the creative process is secondary to making money rather than making something truly great and unique. And that’s going to be a big driver in its future development.

But can AI benefit the music industry as well?

Of course. Certainly for me. I’m a drummer and singer and don’t play other instruments. So if I was composing something and needed to work with some kind of chord or musical sequence, a programme like ChatGPT could help create that for me. That would be very useful.?

But on the downside, the AI isn’t actually creating anything new, it’s just combining existing sequences. So it may take some Nina Simone and some Thom Yorke and after ten minutes of playing around there’s a new combination that I love. But where’s my creative ownership in that and what would Nina’s estate or Thom get out of it? That’s an area of massive concern – plagiarism, and the legality and morality of it.?

Today if I use a sample from someone’s work, that can be really beneficial to that artist. If they’re smart and doing it right, they’ll get royalties every time the record is played and that could earn them money. But in the AI world, how do you trace it? What sources of information can you gather and how do you prove them? So the whole notion of collage, of fair collaboration, of the human role in creativity is being challenged.

Do you regard that as an evolution of the creative process or an infringement on it?

I think it could be both. It’s inevitable the process will change, and that will be both positive and detrimental. The concern is that instead of just expanding the process, helping the human to create in new ways, it has the potential to replace the person at the controls.?

Let’s take the example of storyboarding. So I can ask Midjourney to draw anything – say, a picture of Shirley Temple as a snake – and it will do that for me in its own way. That’s nothing I couldn’t do, albeit slower. Now I want to go deeper, so I ask what it looks like if Snake Shirley Temple is being eaten by a crocodile on Mars. It can do that too, but if I keep adding detail, at some point it will lose focus on the original concept and I won’t have what I want. Whereas if I was doing it, there is no stopping point.?

So the AI isn’t expanding my creativity, it’s just convenient and fast.?

And that’s the heart of it, because the process, the struggle, is the fun. It’s the mistakes you make that create unique and great music, or art or whatever. Creativity has always been as much about the process as the end result, because that’s where the magic lives – from the personality, the character, the tenacity of the person making it. That’s why not everyone makes music – democratising something to make it for everyone isn’t always a good thing.

The anticipation of what you might end up with is often more rewarding than the final product. The risk with AI is that it’s only about the final product.

Are you using it in your music videos, or do you intend to??

I want to try it, although I don’t know exactly how yet. But I think creatively it may be very similar to how Alex Smith described it in your recent chat. I would potentially use it for concepting and storyboarding, for early stage work.

I want to see what it offers and find out if there’s something in the process I can distil and find useful to apply to how I work. It would be unprofessional of me to not at least investigate what might be possible with it. Now if a client in the end buys into a concept I’ve grown using AI, then great. But if it’s the technology rather than the idea they’re buying into then I’ll probably pass.?

It’s the same with the Group Of Humans – we’re already embracing and using AI, but at a foundational level. For creatives it’s just another tool and we’re finding out quickly which aspects of it are useful or not.?

I actually wrote a song about AI a few years ago before it really came to the fore, called ‘One Day’. The notion behind it is that one day there will be no new music – it will all be derived from stuff that’s already out there, scraped together by AI.

You should check it out ...

“One day, musicians as we know them will cease to exist because

One day, there will be no need for them

One day, you will take their place

And I can't wait

One day, can you?”

Take a listen on Spotify or watch on YouTube