Ai

In December, I stumbled upon a new AI tool called Suno. The press release and a few fawning articles claimed that in under 30 seconds, it could a make a catchy, compelling song based on your prompt. It couldn’t.  Sure, it made songs, but they were uncomfortably awkward, the lyrics didn’t make any sense and you couldn’t listen to them without feeling deeply uncomfortable. I tried a country song about gay love, and it’s like a bad mirror of what a real song could be. I logged off Suno and didn’t think much about it again. But this month, Rolling Stone wrote a feature on the company and some of their sample songs using Suno’s new version 3 model sounded eerily real —  namely "Soul Of The Machine.

In 2012, Jeff Lynne released Mr Blue Sky: The Very Best of Electric Light Orchestra. Except it wasn’t. It was 11 new re-recordings of classic ELO songs – which isn’t the same thing at all. Lynne, bless him, believed that having gained more experience as a producer, he could now improve the songs that made him famous. ‘You know how to make it sound better than it did before,’ he said, ‘Because I have more knowledge… and technology.’ Sheesh. How wrong can one man be? Pop music is all about the definitivearticle. Not only the bold prefix attached to its greatest practitioners – Beatles, Byrds, Wailers, Temptations, Fall, et al – but the notion of a defining recording of a song. The stage is the place for revision: to jam, change the words, the rhythm, the feel.

At last, there is the Hollywood equivalent of white smoke in the Vatican. After nearly five months, the writers’ strike has at last — tentatively — been resolved, as the Writers’ Guild of America have agreed to terms with the studios, as represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The terms have not yet been publicly disclosed, but are said to be surprisingly generous, and favor the writers. It has been suggested that their major demands have all been met, including improved residual payments on streaming services, an increased number of writers employed on shows and, most importantly for many both financially and artistically, a curb on the way in which AI might be used to generate scripts and screenplays.

A little-known fact about the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, the first sampling synthesiser, introduced in 1979, is that it incorporated a psychotherapist called Liza. Stressed musicians could key in an emotional problem and Liza would begin the session with the soothing opening: ‘What is it that troubles you about x?’ She was flummoxed by a frivolous question from my husband, an early Fairlight owner, about a hole in her bucket but dealt expeditiously with my nine-year-old stepson. When he told her to get lost, she shut the system down.