“So I don’t want to play any of these games of like, ‘Oh, listen to Solomon Ray’s “Find Your Rest.” Can you believe this is A.I?’ Yeah, I can believe this is A.I. “Lord, I’m tired from all this stressing.” “How do you know that Solomon Ray is A.I.? When you listen to a song like this, what you’re actually listening for are the disruptions. You’re listening for the burr on the voice. You’re listening for the syllables where the singer just kind of yanks back or doubles down and hits the accelerator. What you get in this song, though, is something that’s incredibly smooth, incredibly flat, no emotional microvariations.” “I still hear your voice.” “It doesn’t surprise me that this first generation of A.I. hits is really focused on emotional manipulation. If you listen to this Solomon Ray song, you listen to Xania Monet’s “How Was I Supposed to Know.” If you listen to Breaking Rust’s “Walk My Walk.” These are all songs that appeal to the downtrodden, and I think for people looking for songs to validate those feelings, it might matter less if the performers of those songs are real or fake.” “Cast your cares on my shoulders, and I’ll give you rest.” “I imagine if you knew the prompts that generated this song, there’s something like Southern, churchy, gospel, soul — which is to say, Black music. When I hear this music, I think of a singer like Anthony Hamilton.” “Said I’ll promise I’ll be here.” “Gary Clark Jr.” “Run this whole thing down. No.” “You don’t know who’s training the A.I.s. You don’t know what material it’s being trained on. You don’t know whether in the creation of this ostensibly Black music, if any Black people are involved.” “You turned an idea into a ministry and a ministry into a movement.” “What hearing a lot of recent A.I.-generated music makes me think, is how far we’ve fallen in terms of the types of things that we tend to think of as original For years, vocals have been compressed, run through various technological filters and programs and plug-ins to remove some tiny, tiny texture of humanity from them, ostensibly, to make them a little bit more broadly palatable. To end up with A.I. essentially replicating these already filtered vocals says more to me about the vocals that we’ve been accepting as human than it does about the technology that we’re worried about ending humanity. “I’m tired, but I’m trusting.” “Thus far, most of the uses of A.I. in music have been creatively a little bit meh. Moving forward, as the technology improves, as the ethics improve, as the payments improve, what I’m optimistic about is in the hands of someone with real talent, real curiosity and real creativity, they’re going to find the poetry in the machine.”
