What Does New AI Technology Mean for Artists? Songwriting faculty member Ben Camp talks ChatGPT and GPT-4, confronting the creative potential and creeping dread of artificial intelligence.
By
Julia Perry
April 10, 2023
Image generated with AI assistance, using the prompt: 3D rendering of jazz instruments transforming into computer circuitry.
Our culture has been fascinated with the idea of artificial intelligence (AI) for ages. It's a phrase that, depending on how much you already know about it, might evoke chrome-plated images of a science fiction future, robo-dogs and cyborg overlords... But all preconceptions aside, a new wave of AI products is having a huge moment right now, and the implications could be game-changing.
Simply put, AI is the new frontier of technology. Last year, the internet began to flood with AI-generated images of anything and everything people could imagine. And ever since the public received access to OpenAI's ChatGPT program in November, what appears to be the entirety of uploaded human consciousness is now at our fingertips. Type in a question, or a prompt of any kind, and ChatGPT responds instantly, clearly and casually.
With multiple companies working on AI, and technology only getting faster, cheaper, and better, I can only imagine AI will get more powerful, and with great power comes great responsibility.
- Ben Camp, Associate Professor of Songwriting
The potential here looks as limitless as language itself. Not only is this AI program being used to assist in research, education, healthcare, and marketing, but it can also write poems and intricate, conceptual lyrics, and can give thoughtful, adaptive advice. It can even do your psych homework while diagnosing your withering houseplants. Now, as we sit on the precipice of an artificially intelligent future, many of us are overwhelmed.
If you're an artist, you might be feeling especially unsteady in the face of what's to come. What do we do now? Drop some ChatGPT bars into Ableton? Strike?
Fortunately, some among us have been thinking deeply about the questions AI poses, specifically for artists. Ben Camp, an associate professor in Berklee's Songwriting Department, is an aficionado of all things cutting-edge. They've got an outstanding analytical mind for art and language, and a true passion for this technology. Yet their teaching emphasizes how we all must write the songs only you can write. Philosophically, Camp's thinking occupies the ideal Venn diagram position to shed some light on this subject for curious artists, and they were generous enough to answer a few questions about the concerns-and creative potential-of this new generation of AI technology.
What is OpenAI, and what is ChatGPT? Could you explain how this program actually works?
Ben Camp
Image by Kelly Davidson
OpenAI one of several organizations developing artificial intelligence. AI is a technology that can do many things, like understanding language, analyzing X-rays, creating art and music, reasoning about the world, and making decisions.
ChatGPT is OpenAIs large language model (LLM). An LLM is a program that understands language well enough that it can answer questions, write poems, summarize text, or provide translations. It is called large because it's been trained on a massive corpus of text.
How does it work? The nitty gritty is way above my paygrade, but in simple terms it was fed a lot of text (articles, books, blogs, etc.), and learned what words are statistically likely to be found near other groups words.
One part of the training process involves playing fill in the blank. It's training corpus might include the sentence: The sun was shining, it was a beautiful day. ChatGPT would then challenge itself by masking part of the sentence:
The [ ] was shining, it was a beautiful day.
It would then guess a word to fill in the blank, and compare its result to the original sentence. If the guess was correct, the model gains a point; if it was incorrect, the model loses a point. This win-a-point/lose-a-point analogy is oversimplified, but, roughly speaking, ChatGPT learns to guess better and better as it trains.
So when you ask it a question like, Who is the 21st president of the USA? it starts constructing its answer, one word at a time, with this guessing game. For example, it might generate an answer starting with The, then guess 21st, then president, and so on. It doesn't know the answer in the traditional sense, but it can, word-by-word, guess an answer that has a decent likelihood of being correct. As of the date of this interview, GPT-4 has passed the SAT, several AP exams, and law and medical exams.
And with multiple companies working on AI, and technology only getting faster, cheaper, and better, I can only imagine AI will get more powerful, and with great power comes great responsibility. We need to make sure we get this right and minimize the harm it can do. Nuclear power unlocked massive amounts of energy, as well as the dangers of nuclear weapons. The internet made global communication cheap and easy, but some of those communications are harmful, and invasive to our privacy. Along with AI's massive improvements come both ethical and safety concerns. AI is exactly as biased as its training data, and in the hands of a bad actor, any power can be wielded for harmful purposes.
How do you imagine artists and creatives will use this new technology in their own work? Artists and creatives are using AI to generate, augment, revise, or workshop their creations. GPT-4 processes visual images, and can turn a hand-drawn napkin sketch into a fully functioning website. AI tools such as Soundful and AIVA can reference musical genres or example songs, and generate new instrumentals. ChatGPT has written and directed a short film.
From the creator's notes:
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What Does New AI Technology Mean for Artists? Songwriting faculty member Ben Camp talks ChatGPT and GPT-4, confronting the creative potential and creeping dread of artificial intelligence.
