The story of FN Meka — a fictional character billed as the first music artist partially powered by artificial intelligence to be signed by a major record label — might seem like an odd one-off. In August, Capitol Records dropped his FN Meka. FN Meka’s looks, outlaw persona, and thought-provoking lyrics were inspired by real-life music stars like Travis Scott, 6ix9ine, and Lil Pump, prompting criticism that the project trafficked stereotypes. was.
But for observers familiar with the debates over technology and cultural appropriation in pop music, the rise and fall of this so-called robot rapper raises the key issue that humans are actually writing songs and voicing them. I am filing.
Last month alone, an AI artwork won an award in Colorado and a computer program improvised a classical music solo in real time in New York City. From DALL-E 2, technology that creates visual art on command, to Hatsune Miku, Japanese software that does the same with music, the art world is on the verge of a major shift in how its products are created. There is a possibility.
And young people are increasingly feeling comfortable consuming culture through digital avatars like FN Meka.It’s Already Happening In Hip-Hop: A Hologram Of Rapper Tupac Shakur, Who Died In 1996 2012 music festival; Travis Scott gave a concert Via his avatar in the video game Fortnite in 2020. And Snoop Dogg and Eminem rapped as digital selfies and boring ape avatars in last month’s Metaverse performance at the MTV Video Music Awards.
In this brave new world, do fake characters based on real people amount to ugly borrowing, stealing, or the kind of homage that has always defined pop music? But should the humans behind it be responsible for machine-generated lyrics? How do the rules of cultural appropriation work when it’s a fictitious identity backed by an ethnic group?
“Many of our moral intuitions and codes as humans may have evolved in the presence of discrete human actors,” says Ph.D. Ziv Epstein. He is an MIT Media Lab student who studies the intersection of humans and technology. “We need new legal frameworks and research to understand how we think about these emerging technologies.”
For critics of FN mecha, the large presence of blacks and people of color in the rooms in which the characters were conceived, designed, and promoted helped prevent the negative stereotypes they say it fostered. Industry Blackout, a non-profit advocacy group, said FN Meka “insulted” black culture and stole the sounds, looks and life experiences of real black artists. The Capitol seemed to agree when it apologized for its “insensitivity” in a statement.
For critics, FN Meka’s (exaggerated) debt to AI and its exclusive digital presence had the effect of absolving those who were actually calling the shots. , said: “This he could harm various marginalized groups if he separates the two.
“My concern about the world of Avatar is that we are in a situation where people can benefit from creating the ethnicity they represent, even if they are not part of that ethnicity,” she added. I was.
The culture most likely to be exploited in pop music in general, and hip-hop in particular, is black culture, says Imani Mosley, a professor of musicology at the University of Florida.
“Many people do not necessarily realize that there is a lot of overlap between digital culture and Gen Z culture and Black culture, and that much of what Gen Z says is drawn from the language of African Americans. not so much,” she said. “To interact with that culture, to be part of its discourse, is to use certain digital and cultural markers. is to hide… one’s ethnicity behind the Internet curtain.”
For some, however, defaming the creators of FN Meka gave rise to the specter of artistic censorship.
James O. Young, a professor of philosophy at the University of Victoria who studies cultural appropriation in art, acknowledged that music has a long tradition of emphasizing the life experiences of artists. Young quoted jazz legend Charlie Parker’s famous words:
Recently, however, the consensus has moved toward sanctioning only art born of lived experience, undermining both art and political solidarity, Young argued. Pointed to an episode five years ago in which a white artist was put in a pillory for painting Till’s corpse.
“One of the claims is, ‘This is digital blackface,'” Young said of FN Meka. “Maybe so.” But he advocated a balanced review over a quick response. “You have to be very careful. I don’t want to claim that all representations of black people are in some way morally offensive.”
A broader poverty highlighted by both sides of this argument is the lack of language and concepts for discussing art that is not or wholly not made by man.
Epstein of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab cited the idea of Adobe Research scientist Aaron Hertzman.in a paper called “Can computers make art?” Hertzmann argued that at present, only humans who can socially interact with other humans can make art.In this understanding, machine learning is a tool. The artist behind the drawings created by DALL-E or similar program Midjourney is the person who gave it instructions, not the software.
However, Hertzmann concedes, “Someday, better AI may come to be seen as true social agents.”
On the other hand, as culture becomes increasingly mediated through the digital realm, the problem of how to account for all the other people who have been directly or indirectly exposed to that art grows and becomes indivisible. The conventional artist’s concept of expressing a point of view is undermined.
According to Epstein, some art is now the result of “complex and diffuse systems in which many human actors and computational processes interact.” “If you were to produce a DALL-E 2 image, would it be your artwork?” he added. “Can you be its social agent or are you being scaffolded by another human being?”
The final question is deceptively profound: does it matter who or what composed the song, painted the picture, or wrote the book? Metaverse avatars and AI programs are inherently derivative. All of them are almost guaranteed to be riffs from existing artists and their work.
Anthony Martini, co-founder of Factory New, the virtual music company that created FN Meka, is firmly on one side of that debate. Why not get mad about the lyrical content in general?