Does the rise of AI really signal the death of music as we know it? One famous musician who fears the worst is Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry.
“It’s creepy,” Perry tells MusicRadar. “The whole thing that AI can do – if you think about it, it’s just really creepy.”
One has to wonder if years down the line we’ll be seeing a new ‘Aerosmith’ album created purely with AI.
“I don’t know,” Perry laughs. “There’s gotta be a way.”
Would it sound like the real thing?
“I think we’re gonna be able to tell,” he says. “I guess we’ll see.”
That idea is not so far-fetched, given that Kiss are working with Pophouse to create an AI show aimed at rock ‘n’ roll immortality.
Perry isn’t so sure that such a thing is on the cards for Aerosmith, let alone that it would become industry standard.
“It’s still in the early stages,” he says. “You read articles and stories, but basically what AI does is it takes a hundred songs, figures out how they became hits, and it makes it so it’s now a hit.”
Perry notes a similarity to how American multi-instrumentalist Edgar Winter operated in the ’70s.
“Edgar Winter did that back in the day with a pencil and paper,” Perry says. “He’d look at a hundred songs, figure out what key they were in, and why they were a hit.
“Edgar had a calculator, but with AI it's over-the-top!”
“I mean, Jesus!” he sighs. “You can take somebody else’s voice and AI will simulate that. It’s nuts, man!
“I don’t know. But to the average person, I guess if the music makes them feel good, then that’s where the rubber is gonna meet the road."
Whatever the future holds, Perry feels grateful to have made his reputation and built his career in an era when authenticity in music was prized above all else.
“To come up at that time, and then write songs, and play them in the studio, and have it played on the radio, and then take them, and play them live, it was great,” Perry says. “You had to see if you could get people off. But now, AI is way beyond anything we ever thought."
He concludes with a thin smile: "We’ll see what happens.”
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