A previously unheard music collaboration between Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur – legendary rivals whose initial friendship “broke to new mutiny” and ended in their respective deaths – is a powerful thing. That the two men’s distinctive voices – Biggie’s languid drawl and Tupac’s spiky growl – are delivering a song released fifteen years after they departed the Earth, both victims of gunmen’s bullets, is remarkable. Where the original version of Ni**as In Paris was a collaboration between Kanye West and Jay-Z, someone has used AI to remake it with the same beats and samples but Smalls and Shakur rapping the lyrics. It sounds as if the song was always theirs. I swipe onwards on TikTok and in a few videos’ time, I’m greeted by a Kanye West rendition of Just the Two of Us by Bill Withers and Grover Washington Jr; West never recorded that song, but for the purposes of the listener, he has now.
The biggest lawsuits in the history of recorded music have begun. The lawfare that greeted the peer-to-peer downloading revolution popularised by Napster in the late-’90s will look like a mere skirmish in the face of the record industry arming up to defend the voice and image rights of its artists (dead and alive). The conclusion is likely to be similar: the new technology will be licensed and exploited. The industry that gave the world Colonel Tom Parker, the brutish Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant, the murderous – who once shepherded Tupac’s career but is now in jail for life – and Sharon Osborne’s father Don Arden (whose business practices included dangling rivals out of windows and kidnapping an accountant who displeased him) is no less ruthless today.
AI will change our worlds in all kinds of foreseeable and unforeseeable ways (Donald Rumsfeld was on to something with his infamous “unknown unknowns”) but we do not have to accept the future sold to us. There are options; there are choices to be made. A bleak vision featuring huge corporate AI systems that control decisions in our lives, via black boxes that we fear but can never get our heads around, is not inevitable. I see another opportunity: a life where our personal AI is in our control and built to our specifications with algorithms that are simple for us to explain and alter. An artificial Jeeves in every home; employed on your terms and designed to help you specifically!
AI as a personal tool, an extension of our own minds, could be incredible
In Iron Man, Tony Stark builds his own AI assistant called Jarvis – named after his father’s butler/body man but also backronymed to mean Just A Rather Very Intelligent System – which exists as a constant presence in his home but also as the voice in his head and his ear when he’s in the Iron Man suit. Jarvis is funny, clever, and capable; “he” – AI is genderless but even now with basic voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, we can’t help but giving it names and personalities – is more than a tool for Stark, he’s a companion and, in some respects, a friend.
AI as a personal tool, an extension of our own minds, could be incredible. It could act as our assistant and confidante; the data it uses and the outputs it produces owned and controlled by us and not Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, OpenAI or any future company making money from our thoughts and needs. Our own personal Jarvis – sing that to the tune of Depeche Mode – “Somebody” to hear (and respond to) our requirements but not somebody who cares. Perhaps though, somebody to offer the impression of caring, which for most of us is enough.
We already anthropomorphise many objects in our lives and our AI Jeeves or Personal Jarvis would give us more reason to feel a personal connection. We would talk to it and it would talk back; we would ask it to remember and it would. In time, it would build a library of the things we care about and the things we need; it could anticipate needs like any good bodyman and warn us of things coming down the track (both the good: birthdays not forgotten, and the bad: potential health issues indicated by changes in our behaviour).
As I write this column, I’m waiting to have a test to see if, like my father who also developed it in his 30s, I have type 1 diabetes. If there were an AI Jeeves in my life already, it might have spotted the signs before I collapsed. It could also keep track of my bloods for me and remind me of things I need to do as well as caution me about things I should not.
Most of the columns on AI written now are hyperbolically positive or ludicrously and childishly doomish. We do not need to live through a dystopian AI future; Terminator is not prophecy – whatever John Connor might tell you – nor is Ex Machina, Blade Runner, or going back further, Metropolis. Science fiction explores our dark imaginings but it can also offer utopian images to inspire us. In Iain M Banks’ Culture series, the Minds – advanced AIs that control huge ships, among other things – lead to a post-scarcity society. Banks saw no need to write vulture-like venture capitalists into his vision, nor to assume that AI would mean suffering. A better future is possible, but we may have to fight for it.
Mic Wright is a journalist based in London. He writes about technology, culture and politics
