At Knoxville’s Big Ears festival, North Carolina musicians weigh in on the role of AI

Source Domain: www.wunc.org

Dom Flemons is a Grammy award-winning music scholar and founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the old-time string band from Durham. He graduated from high school in 2000 and told WUNC that hesitancy towards technology is nothing new to him.

“Back then there was Y2K, the idea that technology was coming to destroy us and majorly disrupt our lives,” he said. “It feels like this type of thing has been a part of my entire adulthood.”

Though he hasn’t dabbled in Artificial Intelligence to create music or visual art, Flemons has been working with ChatGPT by training the chatbot to give more accurate answers to questions about himself as a scholar and artist. While he’s seen some success, he has also seen the program confidently state information that he knows to be false.

North Carolina musicians take on AI

Last month thousands of artists, writers, innovators, and creative thinkers gathered in Knoxville, Tennessee for the Big Ears festival; a four-day celebration of “musical and artistic adventure and discovery” that first took place in 2009 and this year drew over 35,000 attendees to the state’s third largest city. Since its inception, Big Ears has earned a reputation as one of the world’s most forward-thinking music festivals and one that sits at the intersection of art and technology. Besides boasting nearly 250 musical performances, many of which center around improvisation and one-off collaborations, it also hosts art installations, film screenings, and panel discussions that focus on how creative people cope with and evolve in a world where technology is rapidly changing the way people interact with art.

Naturally, Artificial Intelligence was a topic on a lot of people’s minds at this year’s gathering. It’s something that has been discussed a lot in the music world in recent times, with stories about AI song generator startups and the proliferation of AI-generated music on Spotify leading to lively discussions from both artists and the fan…

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