Kevin Surace demonstrated AI composing a complete musical theatre song in five minutes to performing arts professors. Half the audience walked out, furious that the AI-generated song lacked soul and stole creativity. Surace argues the backlash comes from fear and jealousy of the technology.
A room full of musicians watched this man create a complete song in 5 minutes. Half of them walked out furious. Here's why he says they're wrong.
I recently spoke to a group of performing arts professors, basically a big group, and I took them through a journey of how I would create the I Want song for a musical based on an already written script for the musical, but I don't know who should sing it and where it should go and all of that.
So I took them through the whole process of eventually getting to notes on a page that allow musicians to actually play it.
So here's your demo and here's the notes on a page. Okay. And half that room was so angry at me. They're all musicians, right? They're so angry. And this is when I knew you couldn't tell the difference, because it has no soul, it has no heart, it stole from everyone. Because when I would do that 2 years ago, they'd go, it kind of sucks, doesn't it? I said, yeah, it kind of sucks, but you can see where it's going. Yeah. And now there's visceral anger. How dare you be able to make a song in 5 minutes that to get to a demo would have taken a musician maybe weeks or months to get to this level of a demo, right? And here I had it in front of them in a few minutes. And that's horrifying only if you're jealous of technology. You should never be jealous of AI. You're lose that battle.
