Cerebral Valley: Alex Pall (Mantis VC), Emily Warren, Meng Kuok (BandLab), and Ed Newton-Rex

The second session of the day, on AI in music, featured songwriter Emily Warren, musician-investor Alex Pall, music startup founder Meng Ru Kuok, and composer and music technologist Ed Newton-Rex discussing the opportunities and dangers posed by AI.

Warren said that AI had not felt very threatening thus far, but that was in part because “accessibility has already ruined music.” The revolution in audio tools in recent years has led to an extreme glut of mediocre music, the panelists agreed, and AI is likely to make it worse: Warren conjured an unhappy world where we are all “capitalism robots putting out as many songs as possible.”

A big theme was the fine—or perhaps non-existent—line between tools that can help creators be their best and tools that will replace them altogether. Meng made a good case about how AI can augment creative expression, help people build connection, and make musical training more accessible to more people. But there was plenty of nervousness about well-earned skills suddenly being available to anyone. And all agreed that working out copyright and fair use issues will be crucial for protecting musicians; Newton-Rex, in fact, revealed on stage that he had recently left his job as head of music at Stability AI because he wasn’t comfortable with its approach to copyright.

For music, Newton-Rex said, his team was “passionate about training models consensually; otherwise it's exploitative.” Stable Audio, he said, was trained on licensed data and based on shared royalties—but that wasn’t the company’s approach on other products. “Stability argues fair use,” he noted, and though he acknowledges that “sensible people disagree” on the issue, for his own part he doesn’t see scraping songs for training data as fair use.