Latest / Spiritual Hot Sauce / “Human vs. AI: Why the Future of Music is in Danger | Micah Voraritskul” Ep#38

Transcript

“Human vs. AI: Why the Future of Music is in Danger | Micah Voraritskul” Ep#38 · Spiritual Hot Sauce

• 0:00
  Chris Jones: Today I have a conversation with Micah Vororitzko, the author of Human is the New Vinyl, where we discuss AI, music, and its potential impact.
• 0:10
  Chris Jones: Music has always been a huge part of our identity.
• 0:13
  Chris Jones: And as we bring in a non-organic form, what does that mean for us?
• 0:19
  Chris Jones: Welcome.
• 0:20
  Chris Jones: I'm Chris Jones.
• 0:22
  Chris Jones: This is Spiritual Hot Sauce.
• 0:27
  Chris Jones: Micah, welcome to the sauce.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for having me.
• 0:32
  Chris Jones: No, no, thank you for coming on.
• 0:34
  Chris Jones: So your book deals with AI and creativity.
• 0:38
  Chris Jones: I'm a musician, former professional musician.
• 0:41
  Chris Jones: So when I think about this, I and I think about the development of us and humanity and our language.
• 0:49
  Chris Jones: Our first written phonetic words was the Kesh Temple hymn.
• 0:54
  Chris Jones: And it was music and singing and community to God.
• 0:58
  Chris Jones: It was very spiritual.
• 0:59
  Chris Jones: And I can't help but feel and think that it played a huge part in our development and how we ended up where we're at now.
• 1:09
  Chris Jones: So it concerns me that we're giving AI so much of the steering wheel, and that AI might be impacting our direction, our path, and ultimately us.
• 1:23
  Chris Jones: In your book, Human is the New Vinyl, you describe vinyl's inconvenient crackling, its presence demanding as the reason it made a comeback because digital music was way too perfect and frictionless, and there was something missing.
• 1:40
  Chris Jones: Open that up for me.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, before I hit that question, to your note on the Phoenicians, you know, the Phoenicians, the book is about human innovation, really.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just about AI.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's about the fact that we as humans are constantly innovating.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: We're always trying to make things, and I as I say, we always try to make things better, cheaper, and faster.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: Better, truly better, cheaper, meaning less expensive to produce, not cheaper sounding, whatever, but just easier, more efficient, and then faster.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: The Phoenicians were the first to come up with this idea that you could represent words with sounds.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why we got the Phoenician alphabet.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: And before that, all of language was, you know, written language was just symbols.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: It was symbolic.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: And pretty soon they said, no, we should attach diacritical marks and stuff like that to actual sounds.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: Then the language can go anywhere, right?
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: It can, it doesn't matter what the idea is, it's just the word, right?
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's the sound of the language is tied to the word form of it.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was a huge, huge innovation of human writing.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought that's that's really cool that you brought that up.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: And it's I didn't know that they, the first thing that they wrote was was a hymn or a song.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's really cool.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: That's really cool.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: I just learned something today.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I do talk a little bit about you know the history of writing, because AI is hitting writing too.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: But to your question about music, vinyl records were the way that humans got music for for many years, you know.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: And and the history of recording sounds and being able to play them back is not really that old.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we've only been able to do that since the late 1800s.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's a relatively new human innovation to be able to record, and and vinyl was one of the first and one of the most enduring ways to to record sound and play it back and to distribute it, right?
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: So what was really interesting is that, yeah, vinyl was was the gold standard for for human sound.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: And in 1982, you know, Michael Jackson's thriller sold 78 million copies in two years.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: Unbelievable.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: There were a billion units of vinyl sold in 1982.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then something crazy happened.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: People digitized music and it was able, it was available on CDs.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then we had Napster and we had MP3s and M4As and all the other AIFFs files floating around on the internet.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: And vinyl started taking a major hit because people also, humans also like things that are portable.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: So we like to take our stuff where we go.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: And vinyl is not portable.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's it doesn't it doesn't go in your car.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: You can't take it to the beach.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: You don't take it on vacation with you.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: So in some ways, you know, radio and cassettes were next because you could do radio and cassettes in your car when CDK do C's CDs came in.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: People were able to play them in their cars, take boom boxes to the beach, whatever.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: And everything became ultra portable.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: You know, then Steve Jobs in 2007 said, you know, you can have your entire music library, every song you've ever owned, in your pocket.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: And that was really maybe looking like the death blow for vinyl, right?
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like nobody who wants vinyl?
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's inconvenient, it's heavy, it's expensive, it's brittle, it cracks, it warps in the sun, you can't take it with you.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: If you dance too hard to the music, the record skips.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got this needle nestled in these tiny microgroves.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's you can only fit 22 minutes of music on a side, right?
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: So you you have to flip it over after 22 minutes to get the next five songs.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, in some ways, like, yeah, why why would anybody want vinyl, right?
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you've got digital and it's portable and it sounds just as good, maybe even some people would say even better because it doesn't have the dust and scratches and crackles.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the questions that we ask is why did vinyl make a comeback?
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: At its lowest point 20 years ago in 2004, it only sold like 500,000 units worldwide.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what that is in dollars, but I just know that's units.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: So that's a million five hundred thousand unit free fall from 1982 to 2004.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: And now it's climbed back up.
• 6:05
  Chris Jones: You bring up a valuable point.
• 6:06
  Chris Jones: I listened to an interview with Dave Grohl, and he had talked about his daughters had got a hold of his old Beatles albums and was sitting in a room with an old turntable, and he realized they were having the experience he had had as a child, as a kid.
• 6:22
  Chris Jones: That's so cool.
• 6:23
  Chris Jones: Going through Beatles, looking at the album art, looking at the footnotes, and having that experience that demanded their full attention.
• 6:31
  Chris Jones: So it hit them different.
• 6:32
  Chris Jones: No longer was it a background sound, as like you say, as your day at the beach.
• 6:37
  Chris Jones: It's just there.
• 6:38
  Chris Jones: It was paying attention to it and focusing it.
• 6:40
  Chris Jones: So do you think this vinyl resurgence is looking for something that we're missing in our experience?
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: You've hit the nail right on the head.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: And Dave Grohl's daughters, I mean, he's experiencing something that that all of us who have children are now experiencing, and that's our kids love vinyl.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: And you gotta ask, why is that?
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Why, if it's if it's less convenient, less portable, and doesn't sound as good to the in terms of studio perfection, why why would we want that?
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: And it's because of the experience.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's because you've got something to hold in your hands.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: There's weight, there's gravity.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's because you have to set the needle down in the groove.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's the dust and the scratches and the analog sound that give it its beauty, right?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's why, that's why it's making comeback, because I think people are are sick of slick, instant, and they, you know, needlecraft is coming back for crying out loud.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: People are going, they're taking pictures and photo booths again.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: They're they're doing things with their hands that require you to be present, aware, and fully immersed in the moment.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that's precisely what vinyl gives you that that an MP3 can't give you.
• 7:56
  Chris Jones: Do you think we've devalued music to the point that we've lost its importance in our culture?
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: That's a that's a that's a tricky question to ask because if you look at what's happening in the music market, it would seem so.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: But I look at this vinyl resurgence and things like it.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: People going to see the fact that 2025 was the largest earning year of live music on in the history of our planet.
• 8:27
  Chris Jones: I didn't know that.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so people are going, they're going to hear live music again.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: They're they're not okay to just listen to their Spotify track in their bathroom as they're getting ready.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: They want to go see and experience.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so vinyls come back, the fact that people are seeing live music again, the fact that people are saying, Gross, I don't want a song by AI on my playlist, those are help, those are hopeful signs to me that that the world is pushing back against it.
• 8:59
  Chris Jones: There's something about community in there that you mentioned.
• 9:01
  Chris Jones: When you put the AirPods in and you're in the bathroom and you're getting ready or you're just doing something and it becomes the background noise.
• 9:08
  Chris Jones: You know, I I'd seen a movie one time or a show where it was representing like long ago how music would have been experienced.
• 9:17
  Chris Jones: And there was no, like you said, format to get it.
• 9:20
  Chris Jones: It was always coming together in community.
• 9:21
  Chris Jones: Someone would have an instrument and everybody would just jump in and sing together.
• 9:25
  Chris Jones: Yeah.
• 9:25
  Chris Jones: And it was this experience of community expression of us.
• 9:28
  Chris Jones: And it seems like that isolated experience in your AirPods alone, we're losing the community part of that.
• 9:37
  Chris Jones: Yeah.
• 9:37
  Chris Jones: Losing us.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's a huge part of it.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, part of this was was this idea of, you know, of, I think it's a Western idea of just of hyper-individualism, you know, this idea that, hey, I want my own personal playlist.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: I want it to be catered to me.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: I want to experience it in my own little, you know, I want noise isolating ear pods or earpods.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: I want, I don't want to hear anything outside.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: I want to just be, it's just me and the music.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I do think we're missing a huge part of the community in which great music gets made.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: Great music gets made in conversation with humans.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: It gets made best when you're playing live with a group of musicians.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: The cleanest tracks are the tracks where you have the guitarist come into the studio, record, lay down his piece, and then you have the guitarist come in, and you know, he's in a different room or in the same room but at a different time, laying down his track, and then you you mix it and master it in the studio, and it comes out very, very clean.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: But why do why do people always love to buy live tracks, right?
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like, why, why, why is it so much more magical to hear the live track of like a U2 song or a Pink Floyd song?
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when you hear it, you're like, holy crap, there's like energy there.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: They're playing together on the stage.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: There's people listening to it and responding to it in real time.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: I want to hear that.
• 11:04
  Chris Jones: It's spiritual.
• 11:04
  Chris Jones: There's something spiritual about that.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: It is.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: Humans are the only animals that make music for entertainment and for joy.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: So, I mean, lots of animals sing, like birds sing and and but they haven't figured out that birds are singing just for fun, right?
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: Or that that they are somehow I guess it could be argued that birds sing for fun, but I think most scientists would say that birds sing to communicate something specific, their location, whether they want to mate, whether there's food, whatever.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: Dolphins and whales, you know, they make they make sonic sounds.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: All animals communicate in different ways, but humans are the only ones of the only the only species of animal on the planet that make music for enjoyment.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's a significant thing that sets us apart from from other living things, is that we make music, we like to enjoy it, and we like to do it in community.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's one of the coolest parts about being a human.
• 12:02
  Chris Jones: Yeah, there's something about music, the way we do it, is we are able to express in a very short amount of time an emotional experience that somebody's had that you can't do with words.
• 12:14
  Chris Jones: They just take way too many words, and you can have an idea of that experience.
• 12:20
  Chris Jones: But to be able to share this emotion that someone had as they're going through heartbreak, or they're going through love, or they're going through this experience that you can share it in music and community, and that simultaneously a large group of us can have a similar expression of the same thing at one time in a short amount of time.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 12:38
  Chris Jones: So it there's something about that that's intrinsically built into us that I think we need.
• 12:44
  Chris Jones: Because I mean, truthfully, isn't AI's music just statistical culmination of our backlog of music of what we have?
• 12:52
  Chris Jones: It's just, you know, it can't, I don't think it can create anything.
• 12:56
  Chris Jones: It can just kind of regurgitate people's greatest hits of what we've already done.
• 13:01
  Chris Jones: There, there can't be anything new.
• 13:03
  Chris Jones: So it just finds the sonic math, puts it together of the algorithm, then presents it to us.
• 13:08
  Chris Jones: But there's something about that that seems synthetic.
• 13:10
  Chris Jones: It doesn't seem real.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think some AI developers would push back on that and say AI can take what it's learned and iterate it into something new.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know that I agree that that that it can do that, and I don't know that I even care.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: But certainly it has been trained on the corpus of human music that has been made to date, right?
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: And it is what it puts out right now is a statistical regurgitation of what it has learned.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: Whether or not it's gonna be able to move past that and create things that are novel that actually move humans, I think that's yet to be determined.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I think its value is yet to be understood because I don't, I don't if if an algorithm makes an incredible song and it sounds great, that's one thing.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: But an algorithm has not been heartbroken, it hasn't lost a child, it hasn't gotten rejected by its love, it hasn't experienced anything.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I doubt that an algorithm will be able to make a song that makes me feel like I feel when I listen to Friday I'm in love by the cure.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: When I listen to that song, my heart goes to places that I can't even express in words.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: When I listen to Cigarette by the Smitherines, my heart has a longing in it that it cannot be expressed in any, in any word.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: It goes so deep.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: So you're absolutely right.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't I don't know that an algorithm is ever going to really be able to do that.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it will, but but I don't know.
• 14:49
  Chris Jones: Well, you know, I I think you're hitting on a point, though.
• 14:53
  Chris Jones: You're talking about, you know, the Beatles, Prince, uh Michael Jackson, uh now you got Taylor Swift.
• 15:01
  Chris Jones: These aren't just new sounds, these are the voice of the emergent generation.
• 15:05
  Chris Jones: Yeah.
• 15:06
  Chris Jones: This is us, and this is this gives direction.
• 15:08
  Chris Jones: And even when corporate business tries to force and make it easier for them to be able to sell us music, these breakout stars still happen.
• 15:19
  Chris Jones: They still come about because they are so important, because humanity chooses them, because there's something about them of what they bring in the expression of us in that generation that changes our direction or gives us a voice that we don't have.
• 15:34
  Chris Jones: I don't think an algorithm can do that.
• 15:37
  Chris Jones: And if an algorithm could do that, it becomes dangerous because now who's in control of the algorithm?
• 15:42
  Chris Jones: You know what I mean?
• 15:44
  Chris Jones: Now yeah, now you could have a political ideology, you could have a religion, you could have a certain thought where that becomes compromised and it's programmed into the algorithm, and they truly could change the course of us.
• 15:57
  Chris Jones: Even if they think it's for the better, maybe it's to our end.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, as you were talking, my mind goes to the fact that humans, humans making music is such an organic thing.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: The the need for the criers of our cultures, who are who we call musicians, well, they can't not make music.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: They have to make music because it's built into how they're wired, how they're created.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so what you're finding with the some of these breakout people that you've mentioned, you know, Beatles, Michael Jackson, Prince, Taylor Swift now, and Billy Eilish and folks like that, these are people who they are they are tours de force of creation, of human creation.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I love that Taylor Swift bought all of her song music back from the corporation.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, no, humans at human human musicians since since since music got monetized have been pushing back against the people trying to sell the music the most, because the people trying to sell the music are saying, we want you to to write what sells.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: And the musicians are saying, I want to write what I want to write.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: I want to write my experience, even if it doesn't sell.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: So that's always been a tension.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: But I I think, I think as long as humans continue to make music and some will emerge to be, you know, successful in the market, that's great.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: There are there are also millions of other musicians making amazing music who who no one's ever heard of.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: And that's okay.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's great.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's a part of that's a part of the human experience.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: Some of us rise to fame and some of us never do, and that's okay.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the heart of it is that the heart of the issue that we're having with AI now is that what it's what I call the differentiation problem.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: And it's maybe one of the most important parts of the book, and that is that we are no longer able to reliably distinguish between what a human has made and what AI has made.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: I can definitely give you very specific examples of this from visual arts.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, you know, one of my colleagues is a guy named Jeremy Coward.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: He's a he's a portrait photographer in Nashville.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he's done the Kardashians and Taylor Swift and the Obamas and So he's he's a big deal.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: And he, you know, he wrote an email in 2023, which was part of why I founded my movement verified human, was in response to this email.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: He said, My friend brought me 10 pictures and he said five of these are real portraits, and five of these are AI generated pictures of people that don't exist.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: Can you tell the difference?
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: And in his email, this was this is three years ago, he said, My blood ran cold because I could not distinguish the difference.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, if Jeremy Coward can't tell the difference between an AI portrait and a real human portrait, as the most reliable human portrait photographer in the world who's done humanitarian work for the United Nations.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this guy, if he can't tell, then who can tell?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: That same year, Boris Eldickson, who's another colleague of mine and he's a German artist, he he won the Sony World Photography Contest using an AI-generated image.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: He generated it in Dali.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: It was called the electrician.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got experts who are trained to tell the difference between something a human has made and something that AI has generated, and they can't tell even when they're trying.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: Even when they are they're paid to know the difference.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: And when they can't, that brings the question up of what do you do with that?
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: What do you do when you have two things and you're like, these are both great songs?
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: And unless you tell me who made them, I don't know if a human made it or if AI made it.
• 19:56
  unknown: Yeah.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: That that becomes a problem.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: That becomes a pro and that's the same problem we're having with deepfakes and videos and films and everything else.
• 20:03
  Chris Jones: I th I think about what what you're saying with financial incentive artists.
• 20:07
  Chris Jones: I mean, we're creating a beach of sand, and now you have this little grain of sand, and we're devaluing monetized money where there's no money in it because somebody for$29 a month can, you know, create all the music they want that's indistinguishable between the top 40, where's the incentive for the artist?
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: That that is the big question.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: In a world that can't tell the difference between something that AI makes and something that a human makes, where where does the value lie?
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: If you can't tell the difference, and if you say the song that was written by this AI that is a regurgitation of all the other music that's ever been out there, created by an algorithm that has never lived a moment of life, of actual human life, but it makes a song that moves me, that's scary.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: And what does that mean for the people that are real humans making music?
• 21:02
  Chris Jones: And that becomes the question because we could lose organic music and it just totally becomes a synthetic experience of what whoever wants you to experience.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: So so people have to be able to, this is this is why I founded Verified Human and wrote the book, because people have to be able to say, This is what I made.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a human being, I made this for you, my audience.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not telling you it's better than what AI makes.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not telling you it's better than what anybody else makes.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just telling you that it was made by me and I'm a human.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're looking for something made by a human, here's where you find it.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's like fair trade.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: You know, fair trade sells coffee, right?
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: And all kinds of other stuff.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: But if you go to Whole Foods or Fresh Market or wherever, you know, and you buy Fair Trade coffee, you're paying a little bit more for it because it's got that fair trade label on it.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: And what that label says to the consumer is we're auditing the supply chain.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: So the guy that grew the beans.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't getting screwed.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm willing to pay 50 cents more for a pound of coffee because I want to look out for the little guy and I want to know that there's somebody auditing the supply chain.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so what Fair Trade is saying is if you want to know that the guy that grew the beans is getting compensated by this coffee, what they're not saying is that this coffee tastes better than the other coffee.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: They're simply saying if you want to know that this, that, that this is what you're getting, this is where you find it.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: This is a label that tells you we're the people who help the farmers get compensated fairly.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: So what Verified Human does, and we're trying to help musicians be able to say, look, I'm not saying that my song is better than anybody else's, and I'm not saying that my song is better than AI.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just telling you, for those of you that for the 5% of you out there who still care about listening to a song made by a human, I'm putting this label on it so you can find it.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: So you can find me.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a verified human artist.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: I've I've signed this standard that says, this is how I work with AI, this is how I will not work, and use this label.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: So if you see this label, you can trust that I made it for you, my audience.
• 23:09
  Chris Jones: Seems like that's the only way we're going to be able to keep our Beatles and our Michael Jackson's and our princes and our new Taylor Swifts and our Billy Eilishes.
• 23:18
  Chris Jones: Who polices that?
• 23:19
  Chris Jones: I mean, who monitors that to make sure that the integrity is there?
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's see, that's the hard question because you're right that that that is the only way.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: The only way that artists have moving forward is to be able to say, I'm creating this for my audience and I expect you to trust me.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: Because right now there is no way to verify that, right?
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: So you have to you have to go back to human trust.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: The value of human trust.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: Do I trust this artist?
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: Do I take them at their word?
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in a I'm in a group called the C2PA.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's the that's the Coalition for Content Provenance Authority.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm in meetings several times a week, every week, with people at Sony, the BBC, Warner Brothers, Apple.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there there are people from all over the industry here.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: And they're trying to make this digital signature, basically.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's like an encrypted digital signature that goes inside of media files.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: So anything that's a digital file can have some kind of a traceable provenance, right?
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: So you can look at it and say, this is who made it, this is this is how it was made, and this is where it came from.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: And it's hard work, man.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know that that solution, like I'm in there in good faith because I believe we got to be working on this from the techno technological side.
• 24:44
  Chris Jones: Somebody has to fight for it.
• 24:46
  Chris Jones: Yeah.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: But I I don't truly believe that CTPA is going to be the answer because I think that AI is moving so fast that I think that once once they find the digital provenance solution, I think it's going to be irrelevant to the market.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think people are just going to be like, I'm, I can't, I can't validate all this with my browser and try and figure out like what's what.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: I just need a quick visual signal to know.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: Do I trust Taylor Swift when she puts the verified human label on her work?
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: Do I trust that she's actually taking her at her word, hasn't used AI in these ways?
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's the best way I figured out.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: I hope that I hope a better model comes along.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: I just don't know.
• 25:23
  Chris Jones: I think about this and I think of how much it costs to produce AI music versus a real artist having to pay for the studio time, having to pay for the musicians to come in, everything, the engineering, the mastering, all of that, you know, that that goes into that versus AI just creating it.
• 25:41
  Chris Jones: The people that produce this AI music that's trying to push it as their own, are they able to get royalties from this?
• 25:48
  Chris Jones: Absolutely.
• 25:49
  Chris Jones: Man.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, right now on Spotify.
• 25:52
  Chris Jones: That's not that's not even fair.
• 25:54
  Chris Jones: That's crazy.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they're saying now, I don't even know what the last report was, but I know the CEO of Instagram said that 40% of Instagram posts were now either AI generated or heavily, heavily influenced with by AI design tools.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: I know that Spotify themselves, I think did a really bad look for them, was that they introduced millions of AI-generated tracks onto people's playlists without notifying them.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: So most of them were like ambient or electronica and stuff like that, that that, you know, where people aren't scrutinizing every little thing.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: They're just like, well, that's got a sweet, you know, trap beat.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: I like it.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: But it it still was bad faith.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so, but the the playlists are flooded with AI-generated music, and people are people who are making AI music are making all kinds of money on royalties because they're doing it in mass.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: Unbelievable.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: I I could produce, I could produce a hundred songs for you in one day.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: And every single one of them, you would you would listen to them and go, that that rocks.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I could stick them all on Spotify and and you know, if if if it took off, I could make thousands of dollars a month just doing that.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: Just in just in people adding them to their playlist and listen, giving them a listen.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: So absolutely.
• 27:21
  Chris Jones: Ultimately, isn't this going to push down?
• 27:23
  Chris Jones: I mean, if you're able to produce, because it's a commodity, if you're able to push the value of the music down where somebody can produce, like I was saying, all of these grains of sand on the beach now, where it's it's they're estimating that in one year it's gonna be more than triple already what's being coming out, you know, of what's being produced, that it's gonna kind of swallow up the organic music.
• 27:46
  Chris Jones: But because it is so cheap, now you have these people that could say, you know what, we're not gonna pay the same royalties we did because it's not fair.
• 27:54
  Chris Jones: And now you start pulling down again, yet again, kind of Napster 2.0, devaluing, you know, what's been produced.
• 28:02
  Chris Jones: And it seems to be pushing out the real artists where they can't afford to make music because there's not enough money there to be made, to make a living.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: I th I think this is the crux of why why I started Verified Humans, because I'm like, I gotta do something for the artists, man.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: I gotta do something that nobody's doing, and nobody's nobody's successfully been able to crack this nut.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's not perfect, but it's something.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: But you're right.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we're gonna see we're gonna see this get worse before it gets better, Chris.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's the bad news.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: And you're gonna see more than 50% of written titles being AI generated books.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna see more than 50% of music that hits every platform being AI generated music.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna see more than half of already it's 70% of social media feeds are heavily influenced by AI generation.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that's not that's not that's not gotcha people saying that.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: That's the CEOs of these companies saying that.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's what they know.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: They're they're saying, hey, 70% of the stuff you see on LinkedIn now has been AI generated, or it's somebody using it just to write their article for them.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I think people and and people's sniffers aren't that discerning.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you don't really dig deeply into, hey, I want to try and figure out if this person really has something to say, or if it's just a an AI-generated headline, is there any substance to this article?
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: Then it's just gonna get its clicks and likes and it's gonna move on down the chain of the feed, right?
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: So it all the content is so disposable, it comes and goes so quickly now.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: You're right.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: There is there is this moment, and back to our first question of why is everybody starting to kind of hit the brakes and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: I want to know that what I'm listening to, reading, has been made by a person and isn't a part of this slot canon society of AI.
• 30:06
  Chris Jones: Yeah.
• 30:07
  Chris Jones: Yeah.
• 30:08
  Chris Jones: And, you know, we're people of faith.
• 30:11
  Chris Jones: And how we most, most of us experience God in our spiritual worship of expression and awe and wonder of God is through music.
• 30:20
  Chris Jones: Now, if you're getting AI variation of that, there's something about that.
• 30:24
  Chris Jones: This seems just the integrity of that's just way missing the mark of what we should be doing.
• 30:30
  Chris Jones: It's like, really?
• 30:32
  Chris Jones: So AI is kind of creating a how we go to God with song and connection.
• 30:38
  Chris Jones: That just seems wrong, you know?
• 30:41
  Chris Jones: That seems terrifying to me.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: So the two podcasts that I have been on, one one of them was one that you mentioned to your friends, Pastor and Philosopher Walk Into a Bar, and then another one that I was on called Rethinking Faith.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we talked about the spiritual import of this moment.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, if you're if you're of the Jewish, Muslim, or Christian faith, whether you're you're, you know, Protestant or Catholic, doesn't matter.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: You have this Abrahamic tradition, right?
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: And you've got this, you've got this, you've got this story, this narrative about a God, an all-powerful, benevolent being.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: And the way that the universe comes to being is that this God speaks.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: This God uses words.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so that speech becomes a creative event, right?
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: Speech has the has creative power.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, this God's first job for human beings was I want you to put a name on every living thing.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, give it a name, classify it, use words to show what it is and what it isn't and where it fits into the hierarchy of all the things, right?
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so you've got this idea that that words have creative power and that words have significant power.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: And when you say that these large language models are dealing with human words, and they're able to do these incredible computations by using natural human language, then you're saying we are ostensibly outsourcing creation to a non-living entity.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: And because we're getting because it has the ability to put words and music and notes together and things that make art and things that make human expression.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: And they are, and it's coming from a non-living thing.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 32:36
  Chris Jones: You know, the whole idea was that we could spend less time working so we could create.
• 32:43
  Chris Jones: Somehow we're working harder and letting a eye do our creating force.
• 32:48
  Chris Jones: It's like we got it backwards.
• 32:50
  Chris Jones: Totally.
• 32:51
  Chris Jones: Yeah.
• 32:53
  Chris Jones: Exactly what you're saying.
• 32:54
  Chris Jones: This is important stuff.
• 32:56
  Chris Jones: It goes back to the Kesh Temple hymn, you know, that it was impactful in how we developed in our language and our culture and community.
• 33:04
  Chris Jones: And spiritually, I think we've we've sent spirituality down the road with music.
• 33:10
  Chris Jones: You know, we've devalued both.
• 33:12
  Chris Jones: And hopefully we start to realize that they're both very important.
• 33:16
  Chris Jones: And and they they and changing those has heavy repercussions for us.
• 33:22
  Chris Jones: And yeah, and I I think we are, and I think you're doing good work because we somebody needs to hit the brakes and say, whoa, I know that this isn't in the forefront of what we're looking at right now, but we need to because this has great impact of us.
• 33:38
  Chris Jones: This is we're talking about us here.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we're not when we take the conversation here, we're not just talking about songs and market, right?
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about human experience.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: This is about what it fundamentally means to be a human being and what AI is taking from us as a tool that that is supposed to be a tool of convenience and assistance.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: It is starting to take our place as role in the role of creator.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really dangerous.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's really dangerous.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm a part of a group called AI in Faith.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason I like this group is because I am a Judeo-Christian in my perspective, but it's a pluralistic group.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: So we've got people from all faith traditions across the globe in in here.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: And every faith tradition is asking the same question.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: And that is, what is AI taking from us in our humanity?
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: And and that's an important question.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really that's really a question I'm more concerned about than how many songs is AI selling instead of Taylor Swift.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: I I am more concerned with AI robbing human dignity and ability and creative license.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm more concerned about that than I am about the models taking over and ending humanity.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe that's backwards, but I I can't control the second part of the narrative.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: Is AI going to get so powerful that it that it takes over and shuts down the grid?
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe, maybe it will.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: More powerful people, it's above my pay grade, right?
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: What is not above my pay grade is fighting for every writer, every songwriter, every gig musician, every studio musician that I can fight for and saying, tell the world your work is made by you and why it matters.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's important that you do that.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: That's and that's what I'm trying to do for writers and visual artists and content creators and voice actors and musicians alike.
• 35:41
  Chris Jones: I think this is critical.
• 35:43
  Chris Jones: This is important, and we all need to be pointing to verified human, that we all want that in place.
• 35:48
  Chris Jones: How do we make that happen?
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's that's a great question, Chris.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's no easy answer to this.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think awareness is one of the biggest things with any movement of significance.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, how do we get more people aware that this is a problem?
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: What we've talked about today is not it's not an elevator conversation.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_01: These these are so there there's no there's no quick, easy way to explain this to someone, right?
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: You they have to be thinking about it, and we have to have real conversations around the table about about what it means to consume media of any kind, whether it's music, which is the thing that we're most concerned with here today.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: But l if you have the conversation about music and you you you make more people aware of your stance.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: You're saying, hey, look, I I want human music.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: I want human music in the tradition of human beings, not in the tradition of computers or you know, or or or AI.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: And let's talk about what that looks like for us.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: How as consumers do we change our behavior to match our values?
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that that conversation needs to take place.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think most people are even thinking about it as carefully as you have.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think just getting the awareness out and saying, hey, think about this a little bit more.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: When someone says that 50% of the tracks on Spotify are created by an algorithm, that should concern you and you should do something about that on your own personal playlist.
• 37:23
  Chris Jones: Yeah, that's right.
• 37:25
  Chris Jones: That's like whatever you do for a living, if AI comes in and destroys that, it's gone.
• 37:30
  Chris Jones: You don't have that anymore.
• 37:32
  Chris Jones: And if you do the same thing with creativity, then humanity, we we always think selfishly of just ourselves.
• 37:39
  Chris Jones: But no, this is humanity loses its creativity.
• 37:42
  Chris Jones: We don't have it anymore because we gave it to the algorithm.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I think if musicians will think more like educators, and educators are always slow on the uptake.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm an educator by training, so I can say that.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: Right now, the big crisis in education is that AI is creating dumber human beings.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: That write better papers.
• 38:05
  Chris Jones: Yeah, that's true.
• 38:06
  Chris Jones: The problem is that losing our critical thinking.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: Correct.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: So you're saying, so what the what the educational institution globally is very slow to now realize is AI is robbing us of our ability to create human beings that can think critically.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: Duh.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: They write incredible papers that get A's, but they didn't write the paper and they didn't think through the issues that made the paper have substance.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: So you're creating people who know how to write a prompt.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_01: You're creating musicians that know how to write a prompt, but they don't know how to write a song.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a big difference.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_01: So we have to start saying, what is AI forcing humans to trade away for convenience?
• 38:49
  Chris Jones: Well, Michael, this has been an amazing conversation.
• 38:52
  Chris Jones: You've brought up some things that I hadn't thought about, and uh I appreciate you sharing.
• 38:57
  Chris Jones: Thanks so much for having.
• 38:58
  Chris Jones: Human is the new vinyl is a book that everybody should go buy and start reading and verified human.
• 39:04
  Chris Jones: I think this is important.
• 39:06
  Chris Jones: But what's the last thing that you would leave everybody with?
• 39:09
  Chris Jones: What's the last bit of information and encouragement that you would give people?
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I I this is this is crazy.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: If I wrote this thing that I I just love that, well, first of all, if if anybody wants to find verified human, if you just Google verified human, you can do it one word together or two words.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: You it'll come up there, or if you put it in any crazy AI search, it should come up for you.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: Verified human.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: And and if you want to check out my book, there's links there to the books.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not trying to sell books.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm trying to have a conversation that I care about.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: But the thing I would leave you with is that human beings follow intuition over computation.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: And we move as human beings in rhythms, not algorithms.
• 39:56
  Chris Jones: And if somebody wants to get in touch with you, how would they reach out?
• 40:00
  Chris Jones: Do you have an email address or something that people can reach out?
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, it's Micah, M-I-C-A-H at verifiedhuman.info.
• 40:13
  Chris Jones: Awesome.
• 40:14
  Chris Jones: We will put these links in the episode itself.
• 40:17
  Chris Jones: Micah, thank you so much for sharing your time and your depth and your wisdom.
• 40:21
  Chris Jones: We appreciate it.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me, Chris.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's been such a joy to have this conversation with you, and I hope we have more.
• 40:28
  Chris Jones: Absolutely.
• 40:29
  Chris Jones: We'll get you back on the show.
• 40:31
  Chris Jones: So I'll be in touch soon.
• 40:32
  Chris Jones: So thank you, Micah.
• 40:34
  Chris Jones: And uh we'll we'll get together in the future.
• 40:38
  Chris Jones: Sounds great.
• 40:38
  Chris Jones: Thanks again.
• 40:40
  Chris Jones: Guys, thanks for jumping into the sauce with me and Micah today.
• 40:44
  Chris Jones: What a great conversation, what a great guide.
• 40:47
  Chris Jones: Remember, verified human.
• 40:49
  Chris Jones: I went and signed up, and I hope you do too.
• 40:51
  Chris Jones: And if you want to hear the extended version of our conversation today, then you can go watch it on YouTube.
• 40:58
  Chris Jones: Yep, the video is up and running.
• 41:01
  Chris Jones: And remember, if you like the flavor of the sauce, then please follow the show and share the show.
• 41:08
  Chris Jones: Thanks, guys.
• 41:08
  Chris Jones: I'll see you again next week.