WIRED/2023/Interview/2

C, better known as Grimes, talks with us on Have a Nice Future about everything from AI-generated music and art to education and politics—and about the idea of “traditional masculinity.”
By Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode
Business
Aug 9, 2023 7:00 AM
ON THIS WEEK’S episode of Have a Nice Future, Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode are joined by c, or as she is more widely known, Grimes. Earlier this year, she launched Elf.tech, a website where her fans can use AI to build their own Grimes songs based on her vocals and stems. They talk about why c wants to push the boundaries of AI art and why, despite being a techno-optimist at heart, she’s worried about our AI future.
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Gideon: I hate the fact that I start every sentence with “so.” This is so—it's so unimaginative!
Lauren: Hi, I’m Lauren Goode.
Gideon: And I’m Gideon Lichfield. And this is Have a Nice Future, a podcast about how terrifyingly fast everything is changing.
Lauren: Each week we talk to someone with big, audacious, and sometimes unnerving ideas about the future, and we ask them how we can all prepare to live in it.
Gideon: Our guest this week is the musician c, or as she's better known, Grimes. You'll hear us refer to her as both in this episode. This past spring, she launched Elf.Tech, where her fans could create music with an AI-generated version of her voice and sound.
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Gideon: OK. Well, c, the artist also known as Grimes, welcome to Have a Nice Future.
Grimes: Yeah, thank you for having me.
Lauren: Are you having a nice future?
Grimes: Uh, I'm actually having a pretty good future. I'm not sure everyone is having a good future, which I feel bad about, but, like, I'm having a good future personally.
Lauren: What do you mean by that?
Grimes: Uh, I think people are very stressed, and not unreasonably so, but I, I am fairly optimistic. Um, yes. I'm more optimistic, actually, than I was a few years ago.
Gideon: Well, we wanted to talk to you because you seem, at least kind of like, the epitome of the techno optimist in the arts. Because when that fake-Drake/The Weeknd song dropped—the AI-generated one—your reaction wasn't to freak out like everybody else, but it was sort of the exact opposite. You said, “I want people to do that to my music.” And you launched the site Elf.Tech, which lets people use your voice and your stems to make their own AI-generated music. So where did that instinct come from to, like, run headlong into the scary new thing?
Grimes: Well, I feel like there's a few things. One of the reasons I didn't feel a crazy amount of concern is that the music industry is jarringly, I would say pathologically, litigious. So I was like, you know, this isn't actually a threat to people, because like the powers that be will not actually let this become that destructive of a force, like this is gonna be—it’s not hard to issue take-downs on stuff like this. I've always hated how litigious the music industry is. It's, it's always been one of the things I hate about it the most, but I, I think it's really good for AI, because I think it's gonna artificially slow down how AI is used—and especially generative stuff—is used in music specifically. It's sort of the perfect industry to run case studies, because we're just gonna have a bit more time than everybody else.
Lauren: You must have been thinking about using AI in music for a while before, you know, the sort of attention that came to the Drake and The Weeknd mashup, right? Like, how long have you been thinking about this for?
Grimes: Oh, we actually tried to do this like in 2019, or something like this. Uh, we, the technology just wasn't available, but we always kind of wanted to opensource Grimes. It just wasn't technically possible before, but that, that's been, that's something we've been actively trying to figure out for a long time, actually.
Lauren: I think that there's this conception that there isn't much artistry involved in creating AI music tracks. Like people think, uh, you know, it's like DALL-E, like you just type in a prompt and there's like some “beep bop bop” robot music happens and then like, bam, you have a fake Grimes song. How does it actually work?
Grimes: Yeah. So the, one of the big things that I really care about is like, I really think humans, like, we need to work, you know, we need to challenge ourselves. We don't learn if we don't do that. I'm kind of against, like, just pure generative AI. I think maybe there's some utility to it, but I think we need to, like, think about that very carefully. But, uh, the way this works, specifically, it's, it's more like a synthesizer. Like if you have a vocal track, you can change the timbre of it. So it uses, like, the vocal timbre of my voice instead of your voice. So you can take any a capella and have the Grimes vocal. But the way this works is people are still writing and producing, and even singing, these songs. They're just basically switching their voice to my voice.
Lauren: What has surprised you most about what's been made using AI Grimes so far?
Grimes: There's a couple songs that are like, I really, really, really wish I made them. And those are the ones that surprised me the most where I was just like, it's so bizarre. It's, it's like, you know, I've been talking about making like, Viking techno, like ethereal Viking techno, for a long time, and I've personally tried and just failed at that quite a few times.
Gideon: Ethereal Viking techno. I wanna hear this now.
[Laughter]
Lauren: Yeah. Is there a category for that on Spotify?
Grimes: Yeah, no, and, but it was just like, it was so crazy 'cause it was like, they made this thing. Like, just like the people who made it, just, they have certain skills both in terms of like techno production and in terms of like, how like, the girl who sang it has sort of like, obviously is trained in some kind of like whatever Celtic-y Viking singing style that I am not trained in. And like, they made something that was, I was like, “Oh my god, I wish I made this so bad.” But then I was like, this is exactly like—the reason this is great is like I would have to go learn and study all this shit in order to make this, and I, I, I don't know, like I—it just really blew me away. Like I was, I was extremely moved by it actually. It was sort of like, it felt like, like if you feel proud of your kid or something, it's like your legacy doing something like, I don't know, like I felt like the crying grandparent as my kid that sort of like takes on the family business or something. Like, it was just interesting to see someone do, like, a better version of thing I've been aiming at.
Gideon: Do you think that Elf.Tech is something that other artists will use, or, you know, something like it, this idea of licensing their voice and, and their, their stems to the public? Or is it more like a one-off stunt that you did because you were the first? Because, I guess the reason I'm asking is it seems like there's gonna be a limited appetite for what's essentially music fan fiction. And I don’t know how many artists are going to feel like it's worth it to them to do it, or how many listeners are gonna feel like they—they want to create and listen to that stuff, but I could be wrong.
Grimes: I think it's really hard to say. I think like, uh, I feel like if—I wish Drake/The Weeknd did it, because I think if a really big artist did it—it sort of like makes more sense to do it with a bigger artist than me, because then if someone did write a legitimate hit it, it sort of like, I don't know, it just has more, kind of like legs inherently. I'm curious to see. We haven't actually done any promotion of the fan stuff yet, and we're just kind of like organizing it and sorting it. So I'm curious what happens when we actually do go through the promotional process with it, 'cause some of it is, like, very good.
Lauren: Does that feel at all threatening to you? Or why doesn't it feel threatening that someone is making art using your voice that you—you haven't made yet?
Grimes: I don't know if I super wanna continue with music a ton. I don’t know if you've followed the whole Grimes cycle, but like—
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
[Chuckle]
Grimes: I am like a very controversial figure on the internet, and I would actually rather be, like, probably less famous? Like I wanna get more into sort of, like, performance art stuff like this and like the tech side of things. And, you know, Grimes was always sort of more about performance art and, and more about how, like, interfacing with technology than just like fun songs anyway. It's always sort of been like about whatever the limit of technology is and like what I can do with that. My like identity isn't necessarily super tied to like Grimes as a musical artist. I think my identity is more tied to, like, whatever Grimes is in a performance art way. And I'm sort of like—
Lauren: It sounds like you're in a reinvention stage.
Grimes: Yeah, like I, I, I, I, I'm interested in being less famous. I, I am interested in making more complicated art for like a smaller audience that is more interested in sort of, like, more philosophically driven, more complicated art that is maybe less—has less pop appeal. Like, I just wanna do things that haven't been done before more than I wanna, like, have a hit.
Gideon: Let's talk a bit more about, then, the kind—the broader role of AI in art. So, um, when you spoke to our colleague, Steven Levy, who interviewed you for the magazine, he's—one of the things you said to him was, “What's exciting to me about AI is that it's truly fucking with what an artist is and what creativity is and what music is. Art seems fundamental to the human experience to me.” But, at the same time, you also said that you wanted to be, I think—what was the word?—a self-replicating artist replicated by AI, and that you think AI could replace human artists. So where, where do you come down—where, what is the relationship between the AI and the human creator?
Grimes: I, I think a lot of people think it's like on or off; yes or no; AI replaces all the artists, or it doesn't. Part of what I'm doing, it's not necessarily, like—it's approaching it very amorally and it's approaching it more as an experiment. Where is this destructive? Where is it positive? I, I think one of the biggest dangers of AI right now is—I'm less concerned about, like, an AI, super-intelligence taking over the world than I am about LLMs basically completely disincentivizing anyone from ever learning how to write again, and, like, our relationship with language being fundamentally damaged forever.
Gideon: Yeah. I think that's what we worry about more as well.
Grimes: Yeah. Like, like and um, you know, the way people, like, would jailbreak the early LLMs and sort of, like, push them to do bad or dangerous things so that we could figure out where the stops and the safeties need to be—
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
Grimes: Like, I kind of want to do dangerous art things and see where it's actually damaging.
Gideon: Like, what—what would be an example of a dangerous art thing?
Grimes: I think it's possible that generative music—fully generative music—could be really bad. It could be really good too though. But, like, I want to, like, take a generation before we just, like, release all this generative art stuff. Like if you have a thing where you can press a button, it's like Midjourney, and you can just be like, “I want this kind of song.” And it's trained on all the music ever made and it just churns out the best music you've ever heard. At what point are we just totally cucking ourselves as a species? Like I feel like, you know, it's like AI is gonna solve parts of science and medicine that like, would just take us forever or we might not even be able to solve, or, you know, it's just sheer amounts of like data processing that like, like would take people years and years to do if we could even do it. Like that makes sense to me. Fundamentally just replacing artists? That seems like something where it's just like, why?
Lauren: Hmm.
Grimes: I think it's valuable to search for the limits of creativity. You know, I'm not saying we shouldn't build these tools, but I'm saying, maybe these tools should be in museums, or maybe these tools should only output, like, really low quality music so that we still need to know how to make music. We still need to have agency in the process. Like we can generate something and get—get cool ideas, but like, you still have to go back and, like, recreate it if you wanna professionally release it.
Lauren: It sounds like you do actually have moral concerns about it, though. Like you say you're—you're not approaching it morally, you're approaching it experimentally. You used the word stressed a few times at the start of this podcast, it really jumped out at me. That's not saying you're stressed, but that people are stressed about technology and its implications and—and you feel pretty strongly that if we just had totally AI-generated music, that would be a bad thing. Or if kids were not learning how to write because LLMs were doing all the work, that that would be bad. I mean, that is assigning a moral value to this technology, right? And that seems to be actually quite a consideration for you as you're exploring it.
Grimes: So, OK. So here's the complicated thing. I think it's also wrong to not experiment and see, but yeah, like what I'm saying is like I—I think the technology should exist, but I think it should maybe be something you can't just have at home. You know what I mean? I just think there should be limits to how it's used. Like I don't know if LLMs should be something that kids have access to. Or maybe we have LLMs, but I'm not sure we should be making LLMs that are like Shakespeare. Like, a big debate I keep having, because I have a friend who's working on making like the greatest writer ever, and I'm like, why do you wanna make the greatest writer ever? Like, why do we wanna—
Lauren: The greatest writer LLM, you mean? Like a model?
Grimes: Yeah, yeah. Like, like why, why do we wanna make—why do we wanna make 10X Shakespeare? Like why do we wanna take that away from humans? Especially because I feel like language specifically is like—we've co-evolved with it. Language is a very different thing from solving science. Language is a part of us. We need it to survive. The metaphor I always use is it's like our mitochondria. Like mitochondria isn't part of us. It doesn't share our DNA, but it's a—we have a symbiotic relationship with it. It lives in our bodies and we need it to survive. And language is, is sort of similar and I just feel like before we fundamentally change our relationship with the thing that actually makes us human, we should do more research, we should do tests. We should think very, very, very, very carefully about that.
Lauren: I wanna get back to something that happened shortly after you launched Elf.Tech. You originally had put no limits on what people could make with your stems, but pretty soon afterwards you had to put out a disclaimer saying you didn't want toxic lyrics. I mean, you were basically making a plea for decency on the internet. You know, no Nazi anthems. You did remark—unless it's somehow in jest—you were really asking people not to be assholes. I mean, what responsibility, one, do you think that you have to try to stop them as a person who created a platform, and where do you think that line should actually be drawn, you know, around people who are using—or potentially abusing—something like a music generation platform?
Grimes: I think it's more about the experiment. Like, I actually think deepfakes should potentially be illegal. Like, I actually think we might just not need them. There might actually not be a utility in sort of, like, using the Grimes voice. I just don't see a massively huge upside, but I see quite a bit of downside with deepfakes across the board—visual, audio, whatever. It can cause a lot of unrest—political unrest.
Lauren: So you're taking a really hard line. You're saying deepfakes should just not be legal. They should not be allowed.
Grimes: I’m not entirely sure. I just think it's—it's worth considering. Or, like, the other thing is that it just should be really consent oriented. What I do like is—you know, potentially making, for example, an LLM that is trained on everything Aristotle ever wrote and like, you know, I don't know, if I was 18 and I could just go sit and ask Aristotle questions for hours, that might be a really good thing. I don't know if you would quite call that a deepfake at that point, but if you had like an LLM that's trained on like all the greatest thinkers of all time and, like, it's a personalized professor that you have at home, and instead of doing the regular school system, you do, like, online school and your teacher is, you know, Leibnitz and Nietzsche and frickin’, like, I don't know, just like all the great minds of all time.
Gideon: We're taking note of which philosophers you were mentioning, you know, just—
[Laughter]
Grimes: I feel like there's something—there's also potential for, like, massive upside. Like imagine, every child could have access to the greatest teacher ever. And, um, you know, I, I think there's a lot of sort of AI education, uh, potential that's like really, really, really cool.
Lauren: In an ideal world, like what would that school look like? What's the focus?
Grimes: I think, mostly about community building. And, creating a social network for our kids that's, like, really positive with families that think differently. I was having such a hard time until I started finding other families with parents who are more like me. I feel like the first year of having a kid was like one of the most difficult, fucked years of my life. And then as I started, you know, really bonding and, like, making better friends—like finally finding parents that I can actually relate to and stuff—it just became so clear that it's like, it's supposed to be a communal, tribal thing. I think something really interesting happened with the boomers where, like, in many ways they had a necessary break from the culture before—you know, and like the sexual revolution and all the stuff that happened—and there's a lot of stuff about the past where, like, a lot of people were like, yeah, like, the way society has always been, like, we need to change it. We need to change the way things are about race. We need to change the way things are about gender. Like, we need to just change a lot of fundamentals. But in many ways I think we lost a lot of, like, culture that everyone can agree on. And a lot of ways the culture used to be didn't make room for everyone, and so people understandably had issue with them, but I think one of the most important things we can do right now is decide to rebuild culture. Now that we've sort of, like, exploded everything and, like, pulled everything apart and, and we're sort of like reevaluating almost every aspect of the way we approach morals and education and literally everything—we can't align AI until we align ourselves and we are super not aligned. Humans are super not aligned right now.
Gideon: I hear you navigating a kind of, I guess, a broad political space. I hear you talking like someone who is part of both left and right political groupings. You know, you obviously—a lot of the people that you hang out with in Silicon Valley, or around Elon, are libertarians or conservatives, and then there's a lot of progressives as well, and from the backgrounds that you habitually hang out in, I'm guessing. So am I right that I see youth trying to thread together different political viewpoints and think about how they can be integrated?
Grimes: Yes. I really think one of our biggest issues right now is the polarization. Like, I refuse to be left or right. Like, you know, like, I'm—I'm scared about what we're doing to young men and the discourse around men right now.
Lauren: What part scares you?
Grimes: There are a lot of issues with like male toxicity, but like—like we're seriously, like we're just telling men they're evil for, like, things that they can't—like testosterone is like a crazy war drug. Like why can't there be a political platform that, like, makes space and room for—and honors—masculinity, like traditional masculinity, and like encourages it to be better in a constructive way, rather than, like, tearing it apart, that’s still is like into women's rights and access to abortion and trans rights. It’s like, why are these things dichotomous? Like—like why are they fighting each other? Like—
Lauren: What do you think is an effective way to do that though?
Grimes: I—I think for me, it's always about, like, the carrot and not the stick. What I would love to see is sort of, um, celebration of the good parts of masculinity. Like, how do you create a discourse that, like, encourages men to, like, push themselves and, like, be chivalrous? And like—like how do you romanticize, uh, a type of masculinity that is really respectful of women and supportive of discipline and like, I don't know, like all the shit everyone makes fun of, but like—
Gideon: I think I understand what you're trying to say again. I mean, it feels like you're saying, simply, the default way to criticize toxic masculinity is to try to take apart masculinity itself. And instead—
Grimes: I think that, I think that's, I think that's what happens with—what's happening too much, is like in our attempts to get rid of the things that have been so, so destructive, I think we're tearing apart masculinity as a whole.
Lauren: Should we do a rapid-fire round?
Gideon: Sure, I'll start off. What keeps you up at night?
Grimes: We have an education crisis across the board, like kind of globally.
Gideon Mm-hmm.
Grimes: Almost everything to do with how we raise kids.
Gideon: What makes you optimistic?
Grimes: Young people, kids. I see a lot of Gen Z stuff that's like scary and bad and traumatizing, but like every Gen Z person that I personally know, I'm just like, “Wow, fuck yeah. You are so sick. Oh my God. And like, so enlightened.” I mean, my kids, it's like, you realize humans are actually born really great. We just fuck ourselves up, but like we start out awesome. Like we start out like enlightened, and, like, you know, I—I think that gives me a lot of faith, that like the natural state of the human is, like, a—a pretty wonderful one.
Lauren: Well, c, Grimes, this has been a really wide-ranging and fun conversation. Thank you.
Gideon: Thank you so much for joining us.
Grimes: Yeah. Thank you guys so much for making the time. Much appreciated.
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https://www.wired.com/story/have-a-nice-future-podcast-17/
Category:InterviewCategory:2023