A Tiered Ecosystem

What new AI music teaches me

A friend sent me this Vernon Reid clip discussing new AI music:

The King Crimson and the Pink Floyd analogies are both on-point: both progressive rock bands went through significant exploration and stylistic evolution in their early years - such as from The Piper At The Gates of Dawn (1967) to Dark Side of the Moon (1973) or In The Court of the Crimson King (1969) to Red (1974).

As one example - King Crimson’s mellotron drenched track:

Which is used very well in the 2006 dystopian film Children of Men:

When you begin to identify Reid’s samples as cultural memes this opens up a way to track cultural evolution over time as a creative practice. One example is the Beach Boys’ vocal harmonies from 1960s California:

Which the emo band Brand New used as a model for its own vocal harmonies on the song Millstone:

Reid identifies a tiered ecosystem in the music industry between superstar musicians who can afford the expensive legal fees to clear popular samples versus the underground experimentalists who cannot. The same tiered ecosystem now exists in digital publishing where major publishers take the majority of the long tail revenues from independent writers who rely on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing system. In both music and digital publishing cases the respective commoditised industries are being disrupted by new artificial intelligence tools. like OpenAI’s GPT-4/ChatGPT. It feels like the Dotcom era of Napster all over again.

How will this tiered industry dynamic affect academic publishing and the superstar economy in academia? Already on Twitter, AI influencers have emerged to spruik new AI platforms. Some academics are using GPT-4 and other new AI tools to draft journal article outlines; to craft literature reviews; and to identify the 3-to-5 research teams globally who are examining similar research questions but who are perhaps using different epistemological stances and methodologies to you.

As the cyberpunk novelist William Gibson observed: the future is already here but it is not evenly distributed. For now the academic debate about GPT-4 is primarily about the likely impacts of generative AI on teaching. The implications for generative research and for the impact on research career trajectories is yet to be codified. We are still in an emergent, observational period. Economic and social stratification will be the result. Carpe diem!

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