AI Music Generator Technology: A Complicated Double-Edged Sword

Interview with David Rovics, an internationally known songwriter, musician, writer and podcaster, conducted by Scott Harris

AI Tsumo Army of Robots

David Rovics, self-described protest singer/songwriter, talks about his latest album of songs, “Ai Tsuno’s Army of Robots,” created with artificial intelligence. He explores the controversy, skepticism and fear surrounding this new powerful technology regarding job displacement, privacy and the potential for abuse and misinformation. But Rovics shares his positive experience collaborating with the AI music production platform Suno that created his new album.

SCOTT HARRIS: Right now, I’m very happy to welcome to our program our good friend David Rovics, an internationally known songwriter, musician, writer and podcaster. David just released a new album of songs titled “Ai Tsuno’s Army of Robots” created in collaboration with artificial intelligence. We’ve got lots to talk about with David. But first of all, David, thank you for making time to join us tonight. And I know you just finished a Northeast tour including a concert locally here in the New Haven area. How did it go? How was the tour?
DAVID ROVICS: It was really a lot of fun, actually. A lot of great gigs and saw a lot of people that I hadn’t seen in 20 or 25 years and it all unfortunately coincided with the death of my mother in Boston.
SCOTT HARRIS: I’m sorry to hear that.
DAVID ROVICS: A lot more of a complicated phenomenon than I had planned on. But we still had a lot of great gigs in the midst of everything.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. I’m sorry to hear about the death of your mom, really …
DAVID ROVICS: Stella Martel? Yes.

SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah.
DAVID ROVICS: It’s life and death.
SCOTT HARRIS: I did want to ask you about another disturbing a piece of news that you sent me just a couple of days ago. YouTube, that huge monstrous company, YouTube deleted your entire discography, as you said, and before we get to this new album, which is a brighter side of things, I did want to ask you about the YouTube thing.
DAVID ROVICS: Yeah, I got an email from somebody I had never heard from before who just described themselves as a fan with a YouTube music account and basically they looked at their YouTube music collection. YouTube music, for those who don’t know, is like the second biggest streaming platform. It’s probably the biggest YouTube overall, the biggest platform in the world where people listen to and find music with Spotify probably being the second. But it’s a massive, massive platform.
But yeah, and they just last January, they permanently demonetized my channel for my supposed support for criminal organizations. But they didn’t delete the channel or delete the content. They deleted certain songs along the way. They frequently delete certain songs because they violate their rules for supporting criminal organizations. But what they just did last Wednesday was deleted my entire discography from YouTube music.

But for anybody listening who checks and you’ll go to YouTube and you’ll notice there’s still lots of me on YouTube. So it’s a little confusing because YouTube music is the sort of part of YouTube that’s the music streaming platform, and if you look for that YouTube music specifically, then search for my name and then look for albums, you’ll find nothing other than one album I did with a hiphop artist named Mike Crenshaw.

But everything else, all my solo artists, solo albums, they’re all disappeared.

SCOTT HARRIS: That’s more than tragic. I mean, I would assume there’s some way to monetize this, as you said, and being a full-time musician, singer-songwriter, your livelihood depends on outlets like that and platforms like that, right?

DAVID ROVICS: Yep. That is, I mean, streaming revenue in terms of money you’re talking about maybe, I dunno if it’s altogether, $600 a month is, I don’t mind just being open about these numbers. I’m in the top 3 percent of artists on these platforms in terms of, which is, there’s a lot of people who have a heck of a lot more viewers and listeners than I do. But I’m still in this area where when you’re in the top three or 4 percent of artists and terms of who’s listening, what that means is about $600 a month in revenue from streaming and probably a little less than half of that comes from YouTube, maybe significantly less than half. I’m not sure exactly, but it’s a big one.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, I want to get to the new album, but one last question here on this. Are you able to appeal this and just to make it clear to our listeners, the music that was identified as violating some kind of ethics rule or whatever that YouTube says—a user agreement, was that because of the song’s content in terms of Palestinian rights? I’m assuming that’s what happened.
DAVID ROVICS: That’s right. Yeah. It’s specifically my “Song for the Houthi Army” and my song, “I Support Palestine Action.” Both of those songs get taken down and I think they actually get removed from the platform because they violate British law. They violate the U.K. Terrorism Act of 2000, which makes it illegal to say anything supportive of proscribed organizations, which include now Palestine action and also of course the Houthis, the Ansar Allah, both of which I’m guilty of saying nice things about. But so they remove them because they violate British law.

In the U.S. they don’t violate the U.S. law in terms of, as far as I know, in terms of the content. What violates U.S. law is me making many money from supporting proscribed organizations. So I think that’s why YouTube demonetized my entire channel. And I think that’s why they also deleted all the albums because somehow or another, it took them 11 months to figure out that if they demonetize my channel, they’re going to have to also get rid of all those albums because that’s another source of income.

SCOTT HARRIS: So right of appeal. Do you have a right to appeal this or how’s this going to pan out for you?

DAVID ROVICS: I mean, you’re trying to take on the richest corporations in the world with this kind of thing and this—it’s totally opaque and it seems like they have all the rights to do whatever they want with their corporate platforms as far as what content they decide violates their rules. And as far as I understand, there’s very little option for appeal and anybody that tries usually fails to get anywhere.

SCOTT HARRIS: Well, I’m sorry to hear about that. If there’s anything our listeners can do, maybe we’ll leave some information. They can contact you before we have to say goodnight, which is in just a little while.

DAVID ROVICS: One thing they can do is if anybody has ever heard of another artist having YouTube music completely delete their entire discography, I would love to know about it. I spent the morning trying to find out if this has ever happened to anybody else and as far as I can tell, it’s happened to a lot of people who are not artists. But I don’t know. I couldn’t find any artists that this has happened to. I mean, there’s a lot of outrageous cases, like Chris Hedges, for example. I just was reading also about sex therapist Susan Block, she had all her content deleted and for ridiculous reasons. It’s crazy what happens. But I’m the first musician that I know of this happened to.

SCOTT HARRIS: Well, if people have this, people might…
DAVID ROVICS: I figure it’s copyright issues or something, because this could happen for copyright issues, but this is not a copyright thing.
SCOTT HARRIS: Right.

DAVID ROVICS: It has nothing to do with copyright.

SCOTT HARRIS: Freedom of speech is what this is. But David, what’s an email address or other ways to contact you that you’d like to leave with listeners? Let’s do that right now so we don’t lose track of that.
DAVID ROVICS: Oh, sure. DavidRovics.com. Then click contact and there’s various ways to get in touch.

SCOTT HARRIS: Okay. Well, onto some better news. Your recent collaboration with artificial intelligence to write and produce an album of songs is fascinating and at the same time frightening to many. In your essay titled, “The Joy of Suno,” you discussed the fears as well as some of the amazing technological opportunities for musicians in this moment of transition of moving society towards artificial intelligence.

First, there’s a lot of fears about AI growing, about massive loss of jobs, intellectual property theft, it being a platform for destructive disinformation and misinformation. It can manipulate the economy and politics. And then of course the marginalization of human creativity. All those things may or may not come to pass, but I wondered if you just initially, before we get to the album, share with our audience your thoughts on the legitimate concerns about AI.

DAVID ROVICS: There’s so many huge concerns about AI and we could easily spend days and days talking about them. And I think a lot of people who listen to BBC, Al Jazeera and NPR and whatever else are hearing a lot about these concerns about the environmental impact. The incredible amount of money and resources going into this and the possibility of artificial general intelligence getting out of control and taking over the world, which is something a hell of a lot of very intelligent people are very concerned about out.

I mean, we could continue talking about the problems with AI forever and I wish that none of this technology existed for a whole lot of different reasons. And I also, for that matter wish that the internal combustion engine had never been invented. I also wish that radio and television didn’t exist, that all of these technologies have been extremely destructive for society and humanity—and certainly the invention of radio and television was devastating for live performers and for theater, for the circus, for the whole vaudeville circuit, which nobody’s ever even heard of now.

I mean, destroyed all of that. It was so destructive to community. It has been devastating to traditional societies all over the world. When they get radio, the live music stops and people start listening to the professionals. It’s totally a terrible thing for society. All of these technologies and AI worst among them.

But none of them are going away. They’re all here now and AI is definitely here now here to stay. It’s amazing. It’s incredible. It’s incredibly powerful. I have an AI band. Working with this band that’s just like working with a band in a recording studio. That’s an experience that a tiny fraction of society ever has had a chance to have and far fewer will ever have that opportunity in the future.

But for those of us who have frequently done that, it’s so familiar. It’s like working with a band and you keep on working out what you’re trying to say and how you’re trying to phrase things and the style of music you’re trying to get out of the band and you work at that a couple hours. And then you have an amazing rendition of a song. And I’m definitely into music, but I’m even more into lyrics and working with AI, writing lyrics, and then working with AI to come up with these songs. People just have to hear it. They shouldn’t just take my word for it.

SCOTT HARRIS: Well, you know what …

DAVID ROVICS: The people …

SCOTT HARRIS: I just wanted to go to one of the cuts, because we’re quickly running out of time. We cut off exactly at 9:30, so we go just a few minutes. Let me go to a cut here, and you can describe it afterwards. Just a few measures of it. Hold them.
AI TSUNO: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Give me a minute. I’ll give you the important point of view. They came from Europe and said, Fine. We’ll just take Palestine, the turn of the 20th century. It became a penitentiary, and at home or far away, you can hear them say “From the river to the sea. Palestine will be free.”
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, David, we only have a couple minutes here, but so talk about that. That’s a powerful song. The lyrics make it powerful, but the production quality is amazing.

DAVID ROVICS: Right? I mean, the lyrics, and of course, what people may or may not realize is how much input comes from the human artist into the style of the delivery. I’m giving a lot of strange commands that only a musician would think of. Not to toot my own horn too much, but it’s just like if you’re a serious artist and you’re working with this technology, you can get much more out of it than you can if you don’t know what you’re doing. But it’s amazing, and yeah, I mean, I love that these are songs that are, they are emotionally impactful. The delivery, the arrangement is really catchy stuff. The production values are amazing. The voice, you’d never know it’s not human 90 percent of the time, at least.
SCOTT HARRIS: And because you’re a veteran songwriter with skills most people don’t have, the average person couldn’t just walk into these AI platforms and create something like that. They have to know about music and have that experience to make it work like we’ve just heard the example of, so that’s important to know.
DAVID ROVICS: The thing is, with every one of these songs, at least in the case of Ai Tsuno albums, usually you’re hearing the 40th or 50th or 60th version of the song before it actually comes up with a version that works.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well. I want to make sure we, right now, before we’re cut off, tell our listeners how they can get in touch with you and find out more about this latest album, The Joy of Tsuno or The Robots.
DAVID ROVICS: Robots, yeah, Ai Tsuno. Yeah. My latest is now Class War Zone, Gaza Riviera. I’m doing an album every week or so with Ai Tsuno. But yes, people go to davidrovics.com. They can click on Ai Tsuno for more info about all that and we’re on all the streaming platforms too. Even YouTube music, they haven’t kicked her off.
SCOTT HARRIS: David, thank you for being here. This has been great. I appreciate you spending time with us talking about the travails in terms of YouTube, as well as this brand new album and the double-edged sword of artificial intelligence, so thank you for all you’re doing.
DAVID ROVICS: Thanks so much.
SCOTT HARRIS: We’ll have you back when we have a little more time and we can actually get into a little bit more detail about this discussion.
DAVID ROVICS: Anytime.

SCOTT HARRIS: Just so important, we’ve been speaking with David Rovics, an internationally known songwriter, musician, writer and podcaster, talking about his newest album that he’s created in collaboration with artificial intelligence. This is Counterpoint. We’ll be back with another edition of the program next Monday evening, 8 to 9:30 p.m. We hope you’ll tune in then. Stay tuned to listener-supported WPKN in Bridgeport.

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