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Turning Points: Guest Essay
Approaching A.I. like we might any other art form — with a dose of skepticism and an eye toward what inspired it — might make its creations feel less threatening.
Mr. Bowers is an Academy Award- and Emmy-nominated composer and musician.
This feature is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page.
Lens is a close look at an emerging global trend or insight through creative narrative.
The year 2023 was full of complex emotions, thoughts and experiences. My daughter took her first steps and said her first words; film and television productions came to a halt as artists fought for new rights in an ever-changing industry and a somewhat unknowable future; and we grappled with the ethics of a new technology that might not be able to replicate my daughter’s first words, but that many see as an existential threat to everything that makes us human, including our artistic expression: artificial intelligence.
As a composer and pianist, my way of exploring, processing and expressing complex feelings is primarily through music. The arts have a way of taking the irreconcilable and translating it into something the gut and the heart understand. Even when words fail us, creating or experiencing art remains a deeply profound — and human — experience. But as we move into 2024, I’ve been struggling with the question of how we might navigate technology’s role in the arts, and A.I.’s nonfeeling, data-driven means of creation.
Let me be clear: I love technology. More and more, I feel woefully ignorant of how it works and how to wield it, and of how much the new technology in my life is learning from, listening to or tracking me. But I would not live without it. It is critical to my work as a composer, where I’m required to create an entirely digital representation of a film’s score before ever recording it with a real orchestra (it never compares to the real thing). And as a music and film nerd, I am constantly devouring every score, recording, movie and interview I can find on the internet. The fact that I can read an analysis of a Mahler symphony and learn what Timbaland sampled for part of the “Work It” beat all in the span of a five-minute Instagram break will never get old to me.
It’s this devouring of information, along with everything else I happen across and mentally download, that I recall when I write music. Naturally, I found my way to ChatGPT soon after its new version was released later last year to see what else it could help me learn and absorb. What I found was thrilling and scary all at once.
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