I was invited to share my thoughts with Vox about recent developments in the entertainment industry revolving around FKA twigs, Scarlett Johansson and the looming dawn of audio deepfakes.
The piece centers around FKA twigs’ desire to off-load the growing burden of content creation to an AI version of herself, an idea that I am confident many other artists would get behind. Yet, my take was that right now, applications of deepfakes are about 95 percent bad and 5 percent good. Beyond nonconsensual pornography and identity fraud, there’s the fundamental erosion of democracy by creating disinformation- and while AI FKA twigs presents an interesting positive use case, I fear that it only adds a hypothetical 1 percent to that 5 percent good.
Overall I enjoyed a very thought provoking discussion about the upsides, downsides and ramifications of AI for the music industry. And a special shout out to the writer, Celia Ford, good friend and brilliant teacher.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/353664/fka-twigs-ai-deepfakes-musicians-senate
Image credit: Shannon Finney/Getty Images for RIAA