Sony Hires Executive VP Of AI, The Future Is Happening Now
Sony Music Entertainment has hired Geoff Taylor as their VP of AI.
Artificial intelligence is becoming more prevalent than ever in a wide variety of industries, including entertainment. It seems like Sony is ready to embrace the technology, as the company’s music division just hired a VP of AI. Geoff Taylor, the former CEO of the British Phonographic Industry trade organization, will be taking on the role and reporting directly to Sony Music Entertainment COO Kevin Kelleher.
Variety reported on the new appointment, which will apparently include coordinating any business that has to do with artificial intelligence within the company, along with coordinating with the global digital business and legal affairs divisions.
Before taking on the Sony Music Executive VP of AI role, Taylor primarily fought against piracy and fraud during his tenure at BPI. It seems like this experience will definitely translate to the murky artist rights that will be surrounding the music industry and artificial intelligence-generated content.
By appointing a specific executive role for artificial intelligence, it seems like Sony Music is certainly trying to get ahead of the curve and ensure AI is a workable part of its business going forward.
Artificial intelligence has already been making waves in the music industry, as fans have used text-to-speech platforms to remake songs with the voices of their favorite artists. Some early examples would be Kanye West songs covered by Drake and vice-versa.
Fans have even used these platforms to make brand-new songs using these artists’ voices. Obviously, this type of fan-made content wouldn’t be able to be sold for money, and there have already been a lot of conversations around the legalities of this type of content. Clearly, Sony sees this will only become a more prevalent concern as AI becomes even more prevalent and accessible to average consumers.
Still, like Sony, some artists are even embracing the possibility of AI to make music. The most notable example is the musician Grimes, who encouraged her fans to use her voice to make songs and that she would split the royalties for those songs 50/50 for any song that became successful.
The open-source platform that Grimes made available, Elf.tech, is trained to mimic her voice and has already led to a viral hit in the form of musician Kito’s song “Cold Touch,” which Grimes called a “masterpiece.”
It seems likely that cases like these will be few and far between, as artists already don’t get a lot of money from streaming platforms for their work. Also, Grimes has the rare status of not being signed to a label, so there’s a lot less red tape involved in greenlighting something like this.
Still, maybe Sony’s new AI executive will see the value in collaborations like this, and it may become something more normalized in the future.
Generally, artificial intelligence is best used for automating tedious tasks and other rote applications. However, its use in the creative industry is steadily growing — for better or for worse, depending on who you ask. In any case, positions like Sony’s AI executive may soon become more of a necessity than a novelty.
