Will.i.am, the Black Eyed Peas frontman and tech entrepreneur, said he’s more “worried about human greed” than about musicians being replaced by robots.
“Right now is the time for the dreamer, not the regurgitator of yesterday’s imaginations — new imagination because AI is not doing imagination yet, and so we have the chance to dream up new things,” he told Variety’s co-president and co-editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh at Cannes Lions during the Variety Brand Visionaries Happy Hour presented by Google TV.
Will.i.am, who has been a songwriter and producer for the likes of Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga and launched his app FYI.AI back in 2020, said he isn’t concerned about AI taking the spotlight from artists. “Yes, it’s gonna create better songs or the same type of songs or sometimes shitty songs. Just like I sometimes write shitty songs that I think are good … Anyways, whatever. It’s all subjective — what is good, what is bad.”
The limit of AI, he said, is that “there’s a whole lot of bad shit that it gobbled up. It don’t know what it’s making, it’s just regurgitating the shit that we made.”
The path going forward for music artists, he said, is to “unearth the next industry on this tech — not just publishing industry, not touring industry, not recording industry — a new fucking industry.”
