Dr. Dre does not think AI is a threat to music. He thinks the people who do "have trouble creating." That is from a New York Times interview with Jimmy Iovine published Sunday, and it is the bluntest position anyone at his level has taken on the subject.
His argument is historical rather than technical. Dre described telling a few people who were against AI that they sounded like someone who "would have been against the drum machine when it came out," or synthesizers. "It's a new tool for creativity," he said. "Some people are afraid of learning new things."
He is not speaking hypothetically either. Dre said he runs his own work through AI "to see what it would do with what I just did." Iovine said Timbaland does the same, and that there are "a lot of closet A.I. producers out there." Dre agreed, adding that they are using it and just do not want to admit it. Iovine's own position was even less hedged: he said he is very pro-AI in music creation and does not see a downside, and that there will be some crappy music, but there is crappy music now.
The timing is the part worth sitting with. Six days before the interview ran, Round Hill Music sued Suno and Anthropic in federal court in California, alleging the companies trained on at least 500 songs from its catalog, with the publisher saying damages could approach a billion dollars. Two weeks ago Spotify announced "AI Persona" badges for artist profiles built on AI-generated identities, which will be left out of recommendations by default when they roll out in September. Apple Music will require labels and distributors to tag songs containing a material portion of AI-made content later this year.
So the infrastructure of the industry is busy drawing lines around this exact question in the same month one of the most decorated producers alive stepped over one on purpose. It also lands weeks after Mike Dean told the internet there is no shortcut to real musicianship, and Rick Rubin called AI the punk rock of coding. Dre's answer, essentially, is that the drum machine was a shortcut too, and an entire genre got built on top of it.
The argument keeps landing on the same split. Rubin and Dre are talking about the door and who is allowed through it. Dean is talking about what happens to the people once they are inside. Dre just made the loudest case yet that the door is the whole story.
Listen to Dr. Dre
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View this post on Instagram, and follow @medicineboxx for more. Quotes via The New York Times.
