Ankur Tewari: ‘What you make may not belong to you’

Ankur eggs artistes to use tech to stay in the game, but warns that in the absence of labour laws machines may use creators, instead of it being the other way around

A discussion around the use of artificial intelligence in the Indian music industry had been relegated to the fringes until recently, when one of Bollywood’s most celebrated musicians, AR Rahman, admitted to using it to recreate the voices of late singers Bamba Bakya and Shahul Hameed. And while Rahman had acquired the required permissions before employing the voices, the subject of ethics appears to perturb Ankur Tewari when we broach the subject of the use of AI in the Bollywood music industry. 

“In the industry, while people are playing around with it, it hasn’t been part of the mainstream music industry. Questions have been raised about the ethics of this practice, and those need to be addressed before one can generate an income from it. People are treading carefully to ensure that their rights are not affected in the future, because a lot of lives are dependent on royalties and intellectual property. If I have written some work, and somebody uses it as a database to create more work, I need to benefit. Otherwise, someone will use my intellectual property without rewarding me for it. But if people benefit from all the work that they have created, it should be fine,” says the musician, quick to add that once the legal aspects of this issue are ironed out, he would be happy to jump aboard the bandwagon and employ appropriate AI tools.

Contrary to popular notions, Tewari says even today, several software programs are producing “above average” work. “It may not be out of the box, but I am intrigued by what it is producing. Perhaps, in the future, the tools will become more sophisticated. I know that David Bowie used a lyric machine to write lyrics for a few of his songs. So, I’m sure people can use it to write lyrics, or as an instrument that marries organic sound in different ways. People will find a million ways to use it. In music, it could be used in parts of the song, or to generate a song as a whole. We will be living a reality that is far removed from [our reality], and it would be accepted as easily as [other tech tools are today].” 

Likening the current day and age to the industrial revolution, Tewari says creators are creating content in “digital factories”. “The people creating content don’t understand how these machines are using them, and in turn believe they are using the machines. The labour laws are not [established] for the creators. So, you might be creating something that you believe is yours, but it is not, actually. But, tools should be explored by artistes. There is no point in resisting that change. We need to understand it to avoid exploitation.”

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