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Ahn Chang-wook, designer of EvoM and a professor at the Artificial Intelligence Graduate School at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, speaks at the second annual Hankyoreh Human & Digital Forum held in downtown Seoul on June 16. (Shin So-young/The Hankyoreh)

“Now we’re going to make a short 30-second song in the disco genre.”

The presenter turned on the AI-powered music composition software EvoM (standing for “evolutionary music”) and, after setting a few parameters, pushed the “compose” button.

The melody took shape, and then the arrangement was added. Soon, an upbeat disco track was being played. And the whole process took less than a minute.

Ahn Chang-wook, designer of EvoM and a professor at the Artificial Intelligence Graduate School at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, demonstrated how songs can be composed by AI technology during a presentation at the second annual Hankyoreh Human & Digital Forum, held at the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry, in downtown Seoul, on June 16.

The forum’s theme that afternoon was “The Present and Future of AI in Art.” Following a keynote address by Drew Hemment, an artist and a professor at the Edinburgh Futures Institute at Edinburgh University, Hemment and Ahn were joined by Lim Chae-won, a visiting scholar at Edinburgh University, for a roundtable that was moderated by Park Jae-yeon, a professor in the Departure of Culture and Contents at Ajou University.

As it grows more difficult by the day to distinguish human and machine creations, will it be possible for humans and AI to coexist? Hemment and Ahn stressed that AI-powered composition software shouldn’t be seen as competition for human composers, but as a means of collaboration.

“There are truly many ways to collaborate with AI. You can choose to elaborate on one of several dozen ideas provided by an AI or just sample the best parts,” Ahn said.

Since laypeople without specialized knowledge will now be able to compose songs with the help of AI, some expect this could lead to the “democratization of art.”

“AI, by which I mean the combination of big data and algorithms, is just a tool for solving problems through the human will. The crux of that interaction is an interface [based in command words like ChatGPT rather than coding],” said Hemment.

Another democratic feature of this technology, he said, is that “it can be accessed and utilized by many people at the same time.”

What are the conditions for coexistence between human artists and AI artists? Copyright is the first thing to come to mind.

According to Korea’s copyright law, a copyrightable work is defined as “a creative production that expresses human thoughts and emotions.” This leaves open the possibility of a human songwriter slightly fiddling with a work created by an AI to claim copyright. But the opposite poses a problem as well. The current industry standard AI models are being trained on images and texts without the permission of their original creators, let alone compensation.

Moreover, there’s a possibility that AI will adopt prejudices prevalent in human society.

“AI merely helps, while the creativity comes from humans,” said Ahn. “We need to grant AI creative rights, such as by classifying songs that modify original compositions [subject to] ‘secondary copyright.’”

Hemment argued that these new developments “will give us the opportunity to understand our biases through data and debate our differences.”

By Ko Han-sol, staff reporter

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