Written by Hunter Craighill

This past year or so, you haven’t been able to change a channel or scroll past a post without hearing about how “AI will change everything,” but no one seems to agree whether things will change for the better or for the worse. Sometimes you will see folks showing you life hacks and tricks to get AI to do your work for you. Sometimes you’ll see instances of AI going off the rails in some very unsettling ways (like the Terminator or some shit). Of course, we all make fun of the old geysers in the rocking chair talking about “back in my day we did real work,” but there are some serious concerns about what happens when Artificial Intelligence replaces human labor.

This concern touches every industry, including the art and entertainment industry. The goal with robots has always been to replace the labor we don’t want to do so that we can focus on art and music and the things we do want to do, the things that create human culture. Despite that, artists and creatives already see AI take opportunities away from them and (in some cases) literally steal their work. So now, those artists and creatives must adapt to the changing technology, learn how to use AI, and integrate it into their creative process, or fall behind those who do.

Fivio Foreign is one of those artists that adapts. The 2x Grammy nominated drill rapper teamed up with SOUNDRAW, an AI music generator on his newest single “Doin Me” which dropped along with an AI-inspired video this past Friday.

Now, I know “AI Music Generation” might make you think of some deep fakes (think “Draike”) or some corny ass bullshit, but this song somehow retains the human touch. Because the beat was produced by Fivio Foreign assisted by AI rather than just AI-generated, the track expresses his unique style and hits as hard as anything else in the repertoire.

The secret behind the song is SOUNDRAW, a unique music generator that provides artists and producers with a much more intuitive and user-friendly vessel for music production through AI, giving the artists complete creative control over their vision. That way, artists like Fivio Foreign can spend more time focusing on their tough bars and less time turning a knob a hundred different ways until it gets the right sound.

So if you like what you hear from Fivio Foreign’s latest track, don’t be so quick to shut down the AI conversation. You can at least entertain how you can integrate new technology like AI into your work and your life, whether to get ahead in the game (whatever league you’re in) or to just make life a little bit easier. The world will keep changing and technology will continue to advance, so as humans, we must keep doing what we do best: improvise, adapt, and overcome.

As Fivio Foreign has proven, AI can be a helpful tool in whatever work you do, even creative work. This doesn’t mean it replaces you or your control creatively, artistically, or manually, Artificial Intelligence can just help take care of the menial things so that you can focus on what’s important.