Name: AI & Creativity | Dialogues on Technology and Society | Ep. 9 | will.i.am and James Manyika
Uploaded: 2024-08-02T02:02:45.000Z
Duration: 19 min 11 s
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While many people are familiar with Will.i.am's prolific career in music,

I've always been inspired by his optimistic and innovative vision for artificial intelligence. He was also ahead of the curve. He has shown me a video of him and the Black Eyed Peas from 2010 where they're discussing the possibilities of AI for music and creativity. It blew my mind. And whether we're comparing notes on the possibilities of AI for creativity or demoing early versions of our tech,

Will's insights have helped to shape how the AI tools we're developing can push creative boundaries and empower the imaginations of artists everywhere. Thank you for coming to Hangout here at Google. I have to ask this question. When did you get interested in AI?

There's a guy by the name of Alan Hearthstone.

And Alan Hearthstone is a computer scientist and he had a company.

He says, hey, you wanted to go to MIT to the Media Lab?

Think you're really going to get a kick out of it. But the place that I really was intrigued was the AI department led by Professor Patrick

Winston. Yeah. Rest in peace. When I met Professor

Patrick Winston, I was just blown away by the field.

What blew you away? The way he interfaced with AI, because I told him I make music because of computers.

Like a computer is my instrument. I'm not a saxophonist,

I'm not a flutist, I'm not a guitarist, I'm not a pianist. I can barely play chords.

I'm not a drummer. I can barely keep time. But I program the computer to make music.

When he started asking me questions about like my entry point into music and I told him it was computers, he told me about AI.

He was like, this is the promise of what AI is going to do.

This was 2004. I'm like, wow. So you mean to tell me as these computers continue to get more advanced, that eventually I'll be able to speak songs to existence?

By the time 2009 came around, I was like, yo, Professor Patrick Winston, check out this video. And he was the person I showed like AI intro to our song. Check this out. You know I always come with that next. What is that? This right here is the future. I input my voice, high notes, my low notes, then the whole English vocabulary. What you're able to do with that because of this artificial intelligence, like when it's time to make a new song, I just type in the lyrics and then this thing sings it, says it, raps it, talks it. This is it. Wait, that means I don't gotta like rap anymore or something? I mean, you're still rapping, but... Like, I mean me physically like in a vocal booth.

No, this is what's going to take the P's into 3008. This is the future right here. I have to tell you that was breathtaking because I remember a few months ago when you and I were playing with some of these technologies, you said, watch this video. I had wishes of what I would like a music experience to be like. This is the Black Eyed Peas future right here. This is what's going to take us to 3008.

That song and that video and what you just described, that was like a full 13, 14 years ago. So what is it that gave you the intuition to look that far ahead and imagine those possibilities? You know, Pro Tools is not a composition, you know, digital audio workstation. It's just a recording. Right. It was meant for recording vocals, recording music into it. As far as programming,

Pro Tools wasn't made for programming. I started using Pro Tools as a software. And then like making beats by just dragging audio files and started using it differently than what it was intended on.

Seeing how that particular software started to evolve,

I would always say, well, instead of having plugins, what if you had the same type of technology that, you know, when you open up the computer and it would say, welcome, or AOL would be like, welcome, you got mail. Or you open up a laptop and be like, hello. Like, imagine if you had that same type of thing as a plugin or a VST.

You could type in what you want and instead of just saying words, did a bunch of things. Like, I would always think, like, this thing is not there yet. It's cool for now, but this is not what we're going to have 10 years from now.

What I want to do is I want to take this.

I want to say, ignore these three. Yeah. Add to that.

Base it on this. Yeah. Add to that. Yeah. I need to then grab this here and drag that on this. And then build on that. And here's the new lyrics, but in that style. Exactly. You can actually grab the pointer and just like draw lines across the song.

Yeah. And so, yeah, you should be able to go. Given that we're now in this moment with what's now possible, give me a sense. Are you excited about where we are with AI?

What has blown you away? What has impressed you?

How do you think about this moment where we are now with what's now possible?

Like other moments, I see what's not here yet. I know that there's something. I have my phone here, but it's not mine.

Like this OS does not know me. I don't have a relationship with it. I just use it. I have access to information, but do I have access to the information to really truly better my life?

Not like I'm going to have in 2033. And when you have something that helps you aspirationally, conceptually, and understands you and gives you this feeling that it cares about you, you have something totally different.

I'm going to be empowered. People are going to be empowered with their own data right around the corner. What you're describing is a sense of a personal AI system that understands you, empathizes with you, has known you, but also I'm curious if you think about that as an artist, as a creative, as somebody who has all these ideas, but as somebody who's creative in that way, what would it mean to understand you beyond just, you know, knowing you as a in a relational sense, but what would it mean? Is it understanding your archive or the ideas you've ever had or the thoughts or the creative connections?

Okay, I'm sitting right here talking to you.

As you speak, I'm having these thoughts and the thoughts that I have happen faster than I'm explaining what I'm thinking now.

And that's the difference between like somebody that's super creative, hyper intelligent, is how they convey what they're thinking at the speed of what they're thinking. If you were to go on a system and say, give me a song like Black Eyed Peas, that system was trained by the 600 some odd songs that I have out there in the world. And it's going to make sense of that and give you something pretty accurate. From what I saw, wow, that's pretty awesome.

I need to be able to come into this? I think you're just composing.

That would be incredible, right? And so you want to actually tell it also where the first beat of the lyric should come in, because at the moment it's just deciding arbitrarily, right? I want to come in here.

I need to be able to rewind this. That would be amazing.

Yeah, and then you go in there and you then you type in the lyric and you say match the lyric to this. Then creators will be like, oh my fucking gosh, bro, this is the best fucking tool in the fucking world. But imagine it had my hard drive that's like thousands and thousands of pathways that got me to I Got A Feeling.

Not just the one I Got A Feeling, but the errors of I Got A Feeling, the mistakes, the song I wrote the day before I

Got A Feeling that kind of felt like I Got A Feeling.

And the one I wrote last month, the month before that, that kind of was like that. That gives you all the different branches.

And so you want to be this new rule, this new umbrella, this new school, this new league for creatives to come here to a tool like this, train it. It's awesome without you, but it's even better with you. What is it for?

Does it fit into yesterday's industry, or is it a new industry? Because in my head, this is its own industry. One of the things I'm reminded of, there's a, probably not quite quoted correctly, a quote from Marshall McLuhan, who basically said, with every new medium, technological medium, the first content of that technological medium is always the previous content of the previous medium. So that's why when film first came out, it was all plays. People thought, oh, let's take what's begun on the stage, put it onto film. So my question for you is, if we try to break that, this idea of always being constrained by the previous format, what do you imagine music to be in the age of AI? Could this technology actually liberate art? I mean, I'm always struck, I'm a photographer, I'm not a musician like you, but I like to take pictures.

And I'm always reminded of how, when photography first showed up, there was a sense of, oh, this is going to kill art, because art at that time was so concerned with just accurately reproducing images of people. But it actually, I think, liberated art, because we then went to impressionism, all these different forms of art, and photography itself became its own art form, in addition to liberating art. So I'm just wondering, could it be that AI kind of liberates creativity here, whether it's in music and film and all these different mediums? Let's take a redemption song by Bob Marley, or Bob Marley's music in general. Bob Marley was making like religious songs, and there were social conversations about issues about love, unity, they're pretty deep. And if Bob Marley was creating in the age of AI, then a song is not just a song you listen to, a song is also a conversation.

I want to be able to stop it right there and be like, what do you mean by that?

I want to be able to pause it, have a discussion about that lyric, have a conversation, explore it. So now a song is not just like verse-lyric, I mean, verse-chorus, verse-chorus, breakdown.

It's like verse, and this line here, discussion.

Discussion. And this line here, insert memory, because I'm talking about my childhood. Insert images, insert film.

How do you think about this from an artist's point of view? Because I think one of the debates, and you hear all the time, is this idea that, will this replace the artist, or will this enable the artist? It's the ultimate way to express your ideas, manifest at speed. If you have ideas, you don't have to worry about like drowning your friends with like, ring, ring, ring. Yo, what up bro? Hey yo, I got this idea. Yo bro, it's like four o'clock in the morning, man, like we just got off the phone, like I need to go to sleep. Yo, yo, but wait, but wait. Do you know how exhausting hyper creatives are to their freaking entourage and their crews? So you mean to tell me I have this patient agent that is there all the time to help me freaking fine-tune and materialize? If you have ideas, you have ideas. Now, if it's maybe able to threaten artists, is it going to threaten ideators?

No. This is their time. So this would be like a muse for you. So one of the things that happened, and I see this at Google all the time, there's something called pair programming, where programmers and software designers are incredibly productive when they're working alongside another computer scientist, another programmer, and they have this thing going. But you can imagine, and we're starting to see them, you know, work alongside an AI system to do programming.

So could this be the equivalent for you as an ideator, as a creative, to have almost this muse, or this companion, or this collaborator?

I like the word muse because this word muse is the definition of creativity and inspiration. And so muse is an amazing way to describe AI and ideators. So instead of going to the studio to record a song, I want to go to the studio to train my model. Like, hey, what are we doing this month? Yo, we're going to Brazil. We're doing samba music because our model needs to be a little bit more rich when it comes to samba, all right? So what are we doing this month? Yo, we're going to study haikus and crazy different types of poetry and literature because we need to train our model.

Yeah, let me go to a slightly different direction because I know these are things that you care passionately about, and we've talked about quite a bit. Describe what you're doing in LA, in the place where you grew up, because you're trying to do some extraordinary things for kids at the intersection of technology and, quite frankly, everything. So I made an effort back in 2008 to go and adopt a junior high school that had 65 students.

I was like, well, let me go back to my neighborhood and see if my hunch is right to prepare this small group of kids, 65 students, with computer science and robotic skill sets while they get prepped to go to college so that when they graduate college, they just don't graduate with debt and a diploma.

They have the skill sets to fill jobs and create jobs, and now that work has turned into 15,000 students. We send kids to Dartmouth, to

Brown, to Stanford, to Georgetown, USC, UCLA.

A lot of our kids have been reaching to go to MIT, but one of our kids were like, I tried to go to MIT, but I ended up at

Brown. I was like, yo, that sentence is amazing.

Right? That sentence is awesome. You felt at the time that the crux of it around technology and computer science was critical, because you could have picked any field, but you focused on computer science, robotics, those kinds of technologies.

Why? So yeah, why tech and not music? Seeing that I got out the hood through music. In 2008, we were working on the record

The End, and I started noticing that all these record stores were closing, and we went from physical stores to digital music. I started seeing this shift in how much money we used to make versus how much money we make now, and projecting out, I'm like, wow, this is probably going to get worse, and entertainment should not be the only path out of the hood, and the success that we've been having is like, you know, 100% of our kids graduate every single year, 70% of which go to school for a STEM skill set, and I'm really proud of the students, because they're picking a path that wasn't cool in 2008, 9, 10, 11, 12, and now it's a cool subject.

One of the things that is consistently remarkable to me, and every time you and

I talk, it's just even this conversation is a good example of this, is how you're always ahead. 10 years ahead, you're anticipating what's going to happen, what's going to be important, what's going to be profound. How do we as society get this right?

Because it's one thing for the inventors and the creators of the technology to do certain things, but how does society get it right? Because we've got all these questions about harnessing the technology for good, for useful purposes, for people, for society.

At the same time, we've got all the risks, like, you know, bias and misuse, and all these things. How do we as society, how do we get it right? Companies need to ensure that there's a computer science and robotics and an AI department in every single high school. More inclusiveness, more effort by these tech giants to rapidly educate, prepare, and inspire folks for this tomorrow. Because if you guys did that, me saying, yeah, my philanthropy is focused on robotics and computer science, that wouldn't be the thing I needed to do, because I do it because there's a gap. I fill a void that's there because it's been neglected. I know you're a very optimistic and hopeful person. What gives you hope about the future that we're talking about? You have technology, AI, and humanity. What gives you hope? Well,

I'm an optimist. I'm an optimist by nature. To get out of the community that I got out of took optimism. I believe in people.

I collaborate for a living. I know that if I apply myself to teams and working with small teams or big teams,

I can help solve problems. And because of that, my contributions, my creativity, my imagination, I cannot not be hopeful.

And the moment that light starts to dim as far as like my imagination and creativity, that's when there's going to be some problems.

That enthusiasm and optimism you have is infectious. Every time I spend time with you, I'm inspired. I'm excited. We have fun. I learn a lot. And just your ideas and ideations are just boundless. I mean, you cross so many different areas, topics, fields, concerns, many that we didn't even get to. Because I know you care about the world. You care about progress on things like the SDGs. And there's just so much that seems to inspire you. And by implication, inspires me, inspires us. So thank you. Oh, thank you.