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<\/p>\nTheir creative partnership resulted in some of the finest rock\u2019n\u2019roll of the 20th century but the Who\u2019s Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend are no strangers to disagreement, even the odd fist fight.<\/p>\n
The pair\u2019s latest argument, however, has taken them into the most un-rock\u2019n\u2019roll of topics: artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
Daltrey, the band\u2019s lead vocalist, thinks the technology could destroy music, but Townshend, the guitarist, disagrees and wants to use AI to finish his unreleased work.<\/p>\n
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Roger Daltrey and Townshend during the Desert Trip festival at the Empire Polo Club in California in 2016<\/p>\n
KEVIN MAZUR\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n
Townshend, the Who\u2019s main songwriter, last week told Stephen Colbert, the US talk show host, that he has between 350 and 450 pieces of unfinished music lying around and is tempted to put them into the AI platform Suno to see if it can help him generate some hits.<\/p>\n
It has prompted several in the music industry to urge him to think twice. Townshend told Colbert that some of the music in his vault is \u201cprobably terrible\u201d and he has \u201conly managed to wade through about half of it\u201d.<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cI don\u2019t know what to do with it \u2026 I\u2019m also quite interested in AI. I\u2019m quite interested in getting some of my old songs that didn\u2019t quite work because I didn\u2019t get them right the first time round and put them up on to Suno or something, some AI music machine, and seeing what it can make of it. It might be some hits.\u201d<\/p>\n
Daltrey said earlier this year that AI was \u201cgoing to destroy the music industry if we\u2019re not careful \u2026 music is a different language, and we shouldn\u2019t let AI control that\u201d.<\/p>\n
Suno is an AI platform where people can create music by putting in text prompts. It was developed by scraping songs from the internet to develop the software. The company is being sued by the US recording industry for copyright infringement. Suno believes that what it has done is allowed under US law. The start-up said this week it was valued at $2.45 billion after raising $250 million in its latest funding round.<\/p>\n
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The Velvet Sundown, a band created with artificial intelligence<\/p>\n
Ed Newton-Rex, a composer and chief executive of Fairly Trained, a non-profit organisation that certifies AI companies that pay for copyrighted works, said: \u201cSuno is built using other musicians\u2019 work without permission. If Pete Townshend is going to use AI to rework his songs, I\u2019d hope he would use tools that didn\u2019t exploit other musicians\u2019 work in this way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Michael Price, an Emmy-winning composer of the soundtracks for Sherlock, Dracula and Unforgotten, also urged Townshend to steer clear of Suno: \u201cAt 80, I\u2019m sure Pete Townshend doesn\u2019t need my opinion, but how much better would it be if he hired a new young producer, like Dave Gilmour did with Charlie Andrew, rather than feeding his back catalogue into a meat grinder of plagiarism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gilmour, of Pink Floyd, recently teamed up with Andrew, who worked with the group Alt-J, for a solo album.<\/p>\n
Jen Jacobsen, the executive director of the Artist Rights Alliance, a US organisation that advocates for musicians\u2019 rights, said: \u201cPete Townshend is obviously a legend and amazing, and I think that he should be able to do whatever he wants with his music.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, of his potential use of Suno, she added: \u201cIt depends on what he\u2019s saying about Suno and how he\u2019s using it. Suno is a platform that, as I understand it, does not offer artists the amount of control, consent and choice about how their work is used [that they should have].<\/p>\n
\u2022 No one need worry about a hit AI band \u2014 except Justin Bieber<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been trained on work that\u2019s been stolen. And so the platform itself is not friendly to artists. It doesn\u2019t respect artists\u2019 rights. If Pete Townshend were to endorse this platform, regardless of how it treats artists, that would be a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n
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