Caitlin Yeo, who has been composing music for the screen for over 20 years, has some concerns about generative AI.Artificial Intelligence has become part of our digital lives; our social media accounts, our messaging services and now our search engines.Computer assisted composition has been around since the 1970s, spearheaded by influential musicians such as Pierre Boulez, one of the early leaders in the electronic music field.
When Cope used computers to generate new music in the 1980s, he had a limited set of musical data to pull from, mainly his own music and that of composers who have been dead for decades.But there are some crucial differences between Cope's early experiments and today's generative AI models. Yeo's film score New Gold Mountain, a story about racial tensions between Chinese and European communities during Ballarat's gold rush, subverted audience expectations by using Western instruments for scenes told from the Chinese perspective and vice versa." AI doesn't have the ability to discern between irony and fact," she says, adding that without oversight, AI has the potential to make a "cultural soup" or even misrepresenting cultural information altogether.
" need to make sure that their contractual agreements don't mean that whoever owns the music has the ability to reuse the music to train AI to make whole new scores," she says. Nicholas is currently researching ways to use composition to support the wellbeing of people who are neurodivergent. But there's a difference in using AI to support someone's wellbeing journey and using it for commercial purposes.