Nile Rodgers has chimed in on the increasingly heated debate surrounding art and artificial intelligence. In conversation with The Daily Star, the acclaimed producer and artist showed up in defense of the controversial new tool. He shared his belief in the potential the technology has, explaining that AI could be a “wonderful” thing and policing its use could have an adverse effect.
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Despite the concerns surrounding the technology—a loss of jobs, a blurring of ethics—Rodgers stated his belief in creatives to decide what’s right and wrong for them.
“Right now we have to let the cards fall where they may because you can’t tell an artist, ‘You can’t paint with that color,’” he shared. “You just can’t do that. You have to let artists figure out what’s right and I believe that we all inherently know right from wrong and we will figure it out—this is right, this wrong.”
Rodgers added, “In a weird way I think it’s a big deal out of nothing, but it may be something wonderful.” He suggested AI-created art be viewed as a sub-genre. “Just like at the Academy Awards there is animation and there is real-life, there’s documentaries,” he said.
He drew a valid comparison in the interview, saying the recent panic surrounding AI was not unlike the collective feelings towards the shift to synthetic instruments only decades ago. “I hear people talking about fake stuff,” he shared. “That sounds like noise to me. That sounds like the noise we’ve been hearing all our lives. The drum machine and sequencer have been wonderful tools. There are bands that could never have had a record if it wasn’t for a sequencer.”
He added that the real conversation lies in compensation for songwriters, saying, “If we want to have a really relevant conversation, let’s talk about songwriters getting paid.”
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