Two metal veterans, the same question, opposite conclusions. Where KAMELOT's Thomas Youngblood hopes generative A.I. simply burns itself out, FLOTSAM AND JETSAM's Eric "A.K." Knutson thinks that hope is wasted energy.
"You can either fight A.I. or you can learn how to use it. There's no other way to go about it," he told Tomasz Michalski of Poland's MetalSide. "And I don't think A.I. is gonna go away. So it's learn how to use it, and learn how to use it to where it doesn't take the creativity out of it."
He confirmed the band has already used it, and was specific about where. "The A.I. spots we used in the videos, they were ideas that we already had or that [video director] Lance [Gergar] already had, and it's either spend a bunch of money and film those ideas or just throw them in A.I. and see what it can do. So, A.I. just came up with a few seconds of stuff here and there that fulfilled our ideas that we had that we wanted to do anyway." Crucially: "We didn't use any on the actual recordings or the record."
Where he draws a hard line is songwriting, and his reasoning is practical rather than philosophical. "They're gonna get themselves in some trouble. You have to be able to recreate that stuff live. So if you're doing something in A.I. or you're writing songs in A.I., if you don't understand the song structure and why and how you got there, you're gonna be in trouble when you have to go write songs without it."
He is also unusually willing to concede the quality argument. "I've heard some A.I. songs that were written very, very well. A.I. combines some of the best songwriters on the planet and puts them all together into one song. How can you go wrong? But if you have to recreate that or you have to write it yourself and you want it to be just as good as A.I., who uses everybody, you can get yourself into some trouble that way."
And his forecast is bleak. "Right now the only thing A.I. can't do is live performance, but eventually holograms will be good enough to where A.I. can do that also, and then we'll all be out of jobs."
FLOTSAM AND JETSAM release "Rats In The Temple" on August 28 via Napalm Records — the same day as KAMELOT's "Dark Asylum" — in a year that marks 40 years since "Doomsday For The Deceiver", one of the only albums ever to receive a 6K rating from Kerrang!. The current lineup pairs Knutson and co-founder Michael Gilbert with guitarist Steve Conley, drummer Ken Mary (ALICE COOPER, ACCEPT) and bassist Bill Bodily.
Source: blabbermouth.net