If videos touting its promise prompting boos from SXSW attendees last week was any indication, wariness about artificial intelligence (AI) in art remains — except for maybe from a guy whose biggest hit repeats the words "you're beautiful" a lot.
While potentially still more concerned than Tyler, the Creator, James Blunt has come forward with some newfound AI-generated self-awareness, admitting that the technology has "totally humiliated" him (which he knows a thing or two about, having once given himself scurvy by eating a meat-only diet solely to piss off the vegan women in his life) and taught him to "do better" as a songwriter.
On yesterday's (March 19) episode of the I Never Thought It Would Happen podcast hosted by Chris Difford of Squeeze, Blunt was obviously asked about the rise of that one hot-button topic across creative industries and what he thinks about a new generation of songwriters turning to AI to "write" lyrics for them.
"Every single one of us must have, having heard of it, typed in and then written, 'Give me a verse based on this, in the style of,' in my case, 'a James Blunt lyric,'" the musician said of his fellow lyricists and chatbots, pseudo-reminiscent of Nick Cave's reaction when a fan sent him some ChatGPT-generated Nick Cave lyrics.
"The truth is, either AI comes up with something very, very generic or my lyrics are just absolutely mundane," he continued. "So AI has totally humiliated me whenever I've gone and asked it to impersonate myself. It's taught me, if anything, not to use AI and [that I] must do better."
Blunt concluded:
The thing about songwriting and music generally is, it is your flaws and your failings and your mistakes which make it have character. Character is something that is not formulaic or generic and even if I have written something before and I say "Let me write it in the style of me again," it will be boring to myself, I need to go out and test myself and push myself to do something different. And some of those things I would make by mistake and I don't think AI can do that yet. I don't think it can bring in true character flaws and mistakes at this stage.
It's time to face the truth, indeed. Listen to the full interview below.