Given his broad-minded and inventive approach to composing and arranging, you’d expect Jacob Collier to have a view on the use of AI in music-making, and indeed he does.
Speaking to Rags Martel, Collier says: “I think an AI can learn skills but it can't learn a perspective or a sense of humour or an attitude. It's almost too perfect to be interesting.”
Of course, critics of Collier's music might argue that it can sometimes come off as technically proficient but difficult to connect to, but he says that he's actually been trying to ‘break’ AI in a bid to bend it to his creative will.
“I think a person needs, like, an imperfect wiggly person to relate to,” he argues. “That’s my theory. And so I've spent a lot of time sort of trying to bully AI into being interesting because it's quite hard to do, creatively.”
We don’t learn what kind of hi-tech wrangling Collier has been doing, but his view is that, at this stage, it’s better to get involved with AI than it is to pretend that it doesn’t exist.
“You can't sit outside of something and criticise it or be afraid of it,” he says. “You have to just muck in.”
Collier was speaking in support of the release of The Light For Days, his new album, which was created using just his voice and 5-string acoustic guitar and produced in just four days. It features six original Collier compositions alongside covers of songs by the likes of James Taylor, John Martyn, The Beatles and The Beach Boys.
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