Interview mit Brittney Slayes von Unleash The Archers

Hi Brittney, and thank you very much for your time! Your new album „Phantoma“ is all about the hot topic of AI. Why did you choose this as the concept?
It’s funny actually; we started writing this album back in 2021 when programs like ChatGPT and Midjourney didn’t even exist. All we had was Dall-E, and it required a beta account and no one was even talking about it because it was so bad. The idea for the record came from my love of science fiction and fantasy in all its forms; books, comics, movies, video games. There have been a ton of depictions of sentient robots (hello, Data!) and I wanted to write about a world that might actually come to pass. It’s not about AI as we know it, it’s about the future of AI and what the world might look like sixty years from now.

AI is becoming an increasingly important part of our everyday lives. Apart from the new album, do you use AI yourself in everyday life? What fascinates you and what scares you about it?
Not really, no. Well, not intentionally I should say. I know it runs every social media platform and algorithm, and I know it’s running the server farms that pretty much every piece of internet is currently being stored on, but do I use chatGPT to write my emails at my day job? No. (laughs) Nothing about AI scares me, it’s the humans behind it that are terrifying. AI isn’t going to just decide to make a deep fake of me in a porno, a human chooses to do that. And this is what the album is about. Humans are the problem, not the programs.

The video for „Green & Glass“ was created with AI. How did the creation process go here, what tools did you use and how much work went into it until the video was finished?
Oh man, it was hours of work. HOURS! Just ask the boys at RuneGate Studio (laughs). It started with us filming everything on a green screen. All of the characters’ movements, all of the interactions, that’s actually us. That is ME underneath Phantoma, in a cool android jumpsuit I bought from Etsy (laughs). We filmed every single scene over three days, lots of walking on treadmills, staring into nothing and trying to emote. I know how Ian McKellen felt filming Lord Of The Rings a little bit, I think. Anyways, then RuneGate built all of the backgrounds in Unreal Engine 5, from the ground up. They designed every single detail. They put in all the effects, all the dust, smoke, sparks etc. Then they used Dreambooth and Automatic1111 to train the models with the artwork we licensed. Stable Diffusion was used to “paint” the green screen footage and the backgrounds in the art style created by the model. Finally, they used Warp Fusion to rotoscope the green screen footage, and DaVinci Resolve to do the compositing. It was an immense undertaking. We filmed everything in August and the boys barely got it in done in time for the release in February.

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After the video was published, there was a huge wave of criticism that you used AI to this extent. I honestly didn’t expect so many negative reactions. Did that surprise you too and how did you take the reactions?
Short answer? Yes, we were very surprised. We licensed artwork specifically to avoid the drama. We had no idea that Stable Diffusion just fills in the gaps regardless of the artwork you use. We had no idea Stable Diffusion was being sued by hundreds of artists. No idea. We love acting in our own music videos, we love doing in-depth, cinematic, story-telling music videos. When we discovered that this technology existed, we were excited by the fact that we could do what we always do, but the result would turn us into androids and put us into a setting that we could never in a million years afford to create ourselves. Not to mention the album’s protagonist is AI and we were trying to use AI in various aspects of the album just to say we used it. None of us had ever had anything to do with AI before this album so we had no idea people hated it so much. It’s just a cool topic of science fiction to me.

 

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Many real artists criticize the fact that their art has been used to train the AI and that they are now being booted out. You can’t deny that to a certain extent, because it’s a technical fact. What do you think about that?
Yes, it is extremely unfortunate, but companies that are choosing AI imagery over real artists right now are making a mistake, in my opinion. UNLEASH THE ARCHERS has always supported artists; we credit them every chance we get. We will always commission artwork for our covers not just because it’s better but because we like to support our friends. We used JP until he stopped doing artwork, we would have done more covers with Ken if he hadn’t stopped. We love Dusty’s work and if he will continue to work with us then we’ll continue to ask him to do our covers. I think the next album will be PERFECT for a Dusty piece. We feel for the artists, we honestly do, we understand completely, we just wish they would stop and look at it from our perspective for a second, too.

Has the criticism following the video led you to change your original plans for AI integration for „Phantoma“?
It’s already done, there is no changing it. We used AI in a record about AI and that’s all there is to it. We don’t ever need to use it again because this is a standalone record, and the next one is already underway, and it has nothing to do with AI.

One accusation is that AI art is just a generic throwaway product – how do you respond to this, or to the accusation that you have given your music, which was made with heart and soul, an emotionless AI visualisation?
If you’ve watched the video, you can see that it is not emotionless. Like I said above, that is US underneath the art; the humans in the council are all the band members. The droids at the end are us as well. Phantoma and the android in white are both me. The two droids at the very beginning are Danny and Adam from RuneGate, and the behind the scenes footage of them filming is hilarious. The video is filled with as much emotion as we could convey with our minimal acting skills (laughs). There seems to be a general misunderstanding that we didn’t just put a prompt into a program and get this video. Every second was painstakingly planned and built. It is sad that it has been overshadowed by the careless actions of one of the programs that we used to create it. How easy would it have been to just put out a call for open submissions with a scaled royalty rate based on catalogue size and detail? It is the age-old issue of only asking themselves if it could be done rather than if it should.

In your Facebook post about the „Green & Glass“ release, you wrote, among other things: „the music was not written with AI, but some of the lyrics were!“. Can you elaborate on that? Which parts of the lyrics were created with AI, how did you approach this, what tools did you use?
(Brittney refers to an Instagram post in which she explains this. This explanation now follows as a transcript of this post)

[…] I just thought I’d talk about my experimentation with ChatGPT during the lyric writing process for a couple of the tracks. Normally what we do when we’re writing an album is I will write the story and then I’ll send that to the boys and it’s kind of separated out into chapters, aka tracks, and so they’ll take the story and use that to write all the riffs and then we’ll put the whole album together and then I’ll write my vocal melodies and then at the very end I’ll write the lyrics.

So being that this is a concept record about AI, I thought it might be fun to put a prompt into ChatGPT and see if it could come up with something good. So I think the prompt was something like, write a song about assassins in the night in the style of UNLEASH THE ARCHERS. So it was, I mean it was kind of, it was more, it’s just a poem really, but there was a couple tidbits in there that I thought could be usable so I used it just kind of as a prompt, as a reference when I was writing “Ghosts In The Mist”. And like there was a couple things like “Blades at the Ready” was a ChatGPT thing so I was like, oh that’s cool, you know, I’ll use that. And there are, you know, when you’re writing lyrics there are certain syllabic requirements that that you have to use or reference in order to go along with the melodies. So you can’t just take kind of whatever ChatGPT comes with wholesale. And this is kind of why I often tell people that are just asking for advice and everything on writing lyrics, don’t write anything beforehand, ever, because so much of it is determined by the melody that write. And it’s just so much easier to put words to melodies than the other way around. So, I always, yeah, that’s why lyrics are always the very last thing.

I just kind of used a couple of things from ChatGPT for “Ghosts In The Mist”. And then honestly, it was, yeah, it was just kind of like something that I could take little pieces from. So I just wanted to use AI in a record that was about AI was really where it all came from. So yeah, and then the rest of the writing process was business as usual. Basically, Andrew wrote most of the riffage. And we had some riffs from Grant on “Buried In Code” and some riffs from Nick on “The Collective”, which is really exciting, because he is a guitar player. So that song’s got a cool kind of vibe to it, which we’re really excited to share with you all.

And we got some cool other behind the scenes stuff coming up. We’re doing an interview/react with Bo Bradshaw. We’ll post that video on our YouTube channel. And we’re going to do the same kind of interview style with Danny and Adam from RuneGate, who are the guys that built our music video for “Green And Glass” from all the footage that we filmed with them and everything like that. And Unreal Engine is super cool, because I love video games. But anyways, we’re going to talk to both of them about their side of things in the music video making process. […] And it’s a very divisive topic, we get that. But the, you know, the concept album is about AI. And so we wanted to dive into that and see where it’s at. Right now. I’m not very good at using AI, obviously, if someone out there can tell me that you could write a whole song and chat GPT, it’d be interesting to hear it.

 

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If we take the idea a step further: Would it be an option for you to have music or entire lyrics created by AI?
Nah. The writing of new music is one of the best parts of the job! And again, we used it because we liked the juxtaposition of it, not because we found it useful. Others are free to do as they please though; I’d be interested to hear an AI UNLEASH THE ARCHERS album and see if anyone liked it! More likely though is that it will just get lost in the churning magma of music creation as a whole. It is insanely difficult to stand out from the millions of people creating music right now, no matter how that music was made.

Finally, let’s get philosophical – what is art for you? Can an AI really create „art“ – or does it need an artist?
Art is subjective so, I guess anything can be art, yeah. If someone bedazzles a trash can lid and puts it in a nice frame, is it art? To someone, yes it is. As it stands, I guess AI can create art because technically there is a human behind it. It’s a human typing the prompt and refining it and using trial and error to get a specific aesthetic. The day when someone asks an android to just draw a picture and they come up with it themselves out of nowhere? Will that be art? I mean, I’m sure some human will pay a million dollars for the ‘android drawing’ so yeah, I guess it is? In the end it will always be the same; one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. When heavy metal first came around people said it wasn’t music, so where would we be if we had listened to the people with that opinion, I wonder.

Thank you for your time and your answers! I’m looking forward to chat about the album itself with you. Meanwhile, the last words belong to you.
Just please be kind to one another. Let’s stop filling the internet with hate and negativity. It’s so easy to forget that there are actual human beings on the other side of your keyboard.

MetAI – Künstliche Intelligenz im Metal

Publiziert am 19. März 2024 von Stefan Popp