New music
The Serbian summer heat stifles the air as Will.i.am lays out development and future plans for his latest venture. In conjunction with EXIT Festival, a five-day nocturnal foray in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second largest city, it’s an unusual landscape in which to witness the Black Eyed Peas frontman waxing lyrical about the merits of Artificial Intelligence and its anticipated groundbreaking potential.
It’s an intimate setting, a “fireside chat”, which certainly feels it with the suffocating humidity constantly drumming at the surface or your skin. Will.i.am extensively explores the product and project of FYI before breaking off into interviews for deeper questioning. It’s no secret that the integration of AI is filtering into everyday life – Chat GPT and open AI is available at our fingertips. But, at what cost? In its early stages of life, discussions arise far and wide about the validity of AI in society and the potential detrimental consequences – and what these uncharted waters might mean for our creative futures.
The industry faces its own challenges which arise from the complications of tech and digital space. Formatting and sending large files and communicating with other creatives can often fall into unstreamlined territory; files can require enormous storage to send, various platforms are complicated to navigate and encryption threats loom. Synchronicity is without doubt a challenge and projects often rely on multiple platforms and programs for completion.
To solve this issue and streamline creative workflow, Will.i.am, founding Black Eyed Peas producer and singer songwriter, hopes for stratospheric success with his AI software – FYI. A menagerie of AI radio features, encrypted messaging and file transfer as well as others, the program aims to utilise AI to restore power, safety and security to the world of creativity.
For the arts, AI comes alongside equal excitement and concern, with questions raised in both negative and positive light. How far could this stretch? What is its potential for growth? Will jobs cease in importance? What could be the benefits and consequences for creatives? Is creativity at risk of erasure?
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Since the late 90s and early 2000s, the Black Eyed Peas have integrated futuristic imagery into their videos, as well as the music itself. Has it always been an interest?
Around that time, in 2007 and 2008 I invested in a small company out of San Jose [California] – that was the first electric vehicle. The two founders got bought out by Elon Musk and which is now Tesla.
So, I started working and investing in tech super early and that same AI interest has taken me to investing in companies like Open AI, Anthropic Runway and Odio in their early stages.
That’s exactly what we meant by, “We’re so 3008/You’re so 2008” in ‘Boom Boom Pow’, that was thinking ahead on what that album was about. So if you look at that video, it’s all about digital avatars, about us interfacing in a virtual, digital space. The green face on ‘The End’ is all of our data points aligned to create that face – this is an AI avatar of the Black Eyed Peas.
When did the idea of FYI first come about?
During COVID is when I came up with the idea for FYI, because I noticed that creatives are working on Whatsapp, more so than email. Or any messenger, whether its signal or telegram. To work off of messenger you need Dropbox, and if you use big files you need WeTransfer, but we have a huge problem in that you can’t open up that huge file in messenger.
So, you’ve then got to open it up on your laptop, with a zip file – and then send that file…but you can’t do that because it’s too big. You have to then send it in a file over email and then talk about why you couldn’t send it on messenger, on messenger! It’s horrible to be working from five different products, meanwhile, my conversations are all over the place. What if there was a messenger that was also a digital assets manager?
AI is becoming ever-prevalent in mainstream music. Referencing a live example, let’s take the K Pop industry and in particular the group Seventeen. They’ve received a lot of criticism recently for incorporating AI into their videos. There’s a lot of debate surrounding ‘authenticity’ and AI contributing to the detriment of that value.
This strikes me as slightly ironic, as the nature of K-Pop gravitates towards highly-stylised, meticulously-manufactured pop to appeal to the masses, to hit genre tags, targets and trends.
What I’d ask first is, is this real or seeded, manufactured chatter?
There’s a book called, ‘Attention Is All You Need’.
[Will.i.am pauses to ask FYI for further explanation of the research]
Attention Is All You Need is a 2017 landmark research paper authored by eight scientists working at Google, that introduced a new deep learning architecture known as the transformer based on attention mechanisms. A reference to the song ‘All You Need Is Love’ by the Beatles, it is considered to be a founding paper for modern artificial intelligence, as transformers became the main architecture of large language models like those based on GPT. The research’s focus was to improve techniques for machine translation, but revealed potential for other tasks like question answering for multimodal Generative AI.
So you think this attention may be seeded?
So, in a world where everyone’s attention is all over the place… it can also be spirit. Based on hype, fear, gossip. You have to question – what actually is seeded? And what actually is real?
‘Cause I think you could seed something to grow based on hype, like “Oh AI is a hype thing. What if our marketing plan is to get everybody to be against the fact that we’re using AI in our music?”
All it’s going to do is make people think, “Let me hear this AI song”. And then as for the Attention Is All You Need theory, it is going to amplify. I’m then thinking, okay, who [instigated] it? Because, are we a part of the mechanism to amplify it more? So my answer is, who seeded it, and are we mechanisms for their seeding? Because, attention is all you need”.
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Words: Maddy Smith
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