AI To Help, Not Replace Creativity

Image by Dall-E 2, with my prompt: ”like the cover of ‘yellow submarine’ album with an AI-copilot helping write new songs, digital music, songwriting, musical notation, no text”

“Yellow Submarine” and AI assistants

In my recent adventure writing a cover version of “Yellow Submarine” (the Beatles), I stumbled into some musings (realizations?) on the use of AI and the genius of Microsoft’s new Copilot tools. Yeah … I geeked out on it a bit. This is the first of a couple articles on what I found.

If you aren’t familiar with Copilot, check out this brief intro: Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot

These new capabilities are centered on “information workers” and their context (writing, organizing, calculating, presenting and so on using tools like Word, Excel, Outlook, etc.).  So how is this relevant to music composition and, more broadly, any application of human intelligence and creativity where it is helpful (or essential) to collaborate with another intelligence?

Let’s start with Copilot:

In my view, the fundamental mojo of Copilot is its grounding in this key idea:

AI Should Augment Human Intelligence, Not Replace It

In other words: Don’t drive the car for me. Help me be a better driver.

Secondly, the mojo amplifies because Copilots work in the context of the tool I’m using. Copilot in Word understands writing. Copilot in Excel understands spreadsheets. Copilot in Power BI understands data visualization. I don’t need to cut/paste or upload/download to an external service.  My AI-assistant “sees” what I’m up to and can deliver its results right where I am.

Back to the car:  How useful would it be if GPS made you pull over to a kiosk for directions? Not very. Vocalized directions as you drive — that’s helpful. Requiring you to get out of context is disruptive (proven by research). Copilots keep you in context.

Now applied briefly to my music composition efforts:

Merging the Harvard article above (AI should argument, not replace human intelligence), and a favorite scene from the Pixar movie “Soul”, where the pre-earth-bound spirit discovers the exhilaration of driving a car and exults: “Driving is Fun!”

Songwriting is Fun!  So fun!  I love using my human creativity and my years of investment in music know-how to compose music, write lyrics, play with sounds, chords, melodies, signal processing geek-gear:  all of it.  It’s a blast.

So … creatively speaking, I don’t want a self-driving car.  I don’t want an AI-generated song. I want to write and produce the songs as a human, with AI as an assist.

Let me say that again:  I WANT TO DRIVE THE CAR. I want to enjoy the human experience of being creative.

But man … I sure could use a good co-writer!  As Sting said in a cameo on the show Only Murders in the Building: “hmmm.  songwriting is hard.”  Yes, Sting, it is. And in the absence of being able to co-write with Sting, I would be more than happy to collaborate with an AI-based songwriting assistant — something like the Microsoft M365 Copilot, but completely dialed in to music creation, riding along side me in the computer-based tools I use (in my case, mainly LogicPro).

Does such a tool exist? No.

Or rather:  not yet.

We’ll look at what does exist in a future post, with ample snarky and insightful commentary.

OK. Enough for now, but … just “one last thing” (reference: “Sultans of Swing” by Dire Straits) — here is a link to my cover song sketch of “Yellow Submarine”.  Heads up: it’s not great. It did not fulfill my “creative vision” (ha!).  I’m leaving it rough, as an object lesson as to where a musical co-pilot would have been helpful (I’ll get specific in next article).

Geoff’s Cover Sketch of “Yellow Submarine”

NEXT: PART 2 - The market for a general purpose music composition tool. What I expect to see develop.