Timbaland's AI music project is a ghost in a misguided machine
This super-producer is known for pushing the boundaries of mainstream music with their innovative beats. Now, they are focused on the rise of digital superstars and changing the traditional artistic process. Their work continues to challenge the norms of the music industry. This artist is at the forefront of a new musical revolution. Their impact on popular music is undeniable.
The Rise of AI in the Music Industry
In 2018, the late avant-garde pop star and producer SOPHIE conducted her first-ever filmed interview. Her conversation partner, courtesy of Dazed magazine's "Age of AI" campaign, was Sophia, a speaking, articulating robot created by the Hong Kong company Hanson Robotics. The series was devoted to pursuing answers about AI's impending influence on artistic fields, and SOPHIE took the opportunity to ask Sophia about the technology's relationship to creativity and its impact on making music.
"I believe we should be teaching AI to be creative, just as humans do for their children," the robot replied. "The best artificial intelligences in creative fields will probably be under partnerships with humans. ... We don't truly understand the inner workings of the human mind, so I don't expect such a beautiful thing as creativity to be perfectly replicated. Just simulated."
The Emergence of A-Pop
In 2025, Sophia's vision is starting to come into focus. Many operators have been working tirelessly in recent years to bring some kind of AI model to the pop sphere, and at the front of the pack this year is the rap producer Timbaland. One of turn-of-the-millennium pop's big thinkers, Timbaland has co-launched a new AI-focused entertainment company called Stage Zero, which recently announced its first AI-generated "artist," TaTa.
"Ultimately what Tim's here to do is to pioneer a new genre of music — A-pop, artificial pop," one of Stage Zero's co-founders, Rocky Mudaliar, told Rolling Stone. Their proposal conjures a kind of metaversal music — an omnigenre with no real roots, which can nonetheless interact with the real world. Timbaland in particular has been heralding the invention of a ground-up digital superstar.
The Role of Suno in AI Music Creation
The music for TaTa and fellow AI "artists" will be created using the music platform Suno, an AI music creation program positioned as a ChatGPT for song-makers. Like other forms of generative AI, Suno is designed to drum up new content based on what it has absorbed from existing media — inputting human-made works in bulk, then pulling from that massive data cache to fashion its output.
Precedents for this tech have been stacking up lately: Recent digital tools can generate audio deepfakes that clone a singer's voice, and projects like Flow Machines have built AI tools for the automated composition of musical elements from a database, with dozens of presets for different genres. Suno is the next major step in that progression, transforming text prompts into fully realized songs, dubbed "generations," in under a minute.
The Controversy and Backlash
The tension surrounding AI's integration into artistic creation is driven by clashing interpretations of its application, where the utopian and dystopian visions can often feel overlaid on the same screen. In a perfect world, AI music platforms would allow for limitless exploration, expanding the existing capabilities of an imaginative person. That's the case that more intentional artists — such as the composer Holly Herndon, who branched out into new vocal techniques via a machine learning model she trained on her own voice — have made for and with their work.
In theory, that should be the logical HONESTAI ANALYSIS of the Timbaland vision, too. But so far, his execution lacks foresight. Days after the TaTa announcement, attention swarmed around a TikTok demo of his Suno process, in which he fed a beat produced by the artist K Fresh Music into the platform and turned around a flagrant facsimile of the original, all without permission from the creator. Everything promised by his new venture suggests a breakthrough in the most cynical sense: an advancement prioritizing ease of use, designed to make the old way extinct in its pursuit of maximum efficiency.
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