By August Brown, L.A. Times | Inside the Mayk.It app, I don’t have to work hard to sound nearly perfect. Mayk.It is an AI-powered music startup, funded with an initial $4 million investment from major venture capital firms like Greycroft, former Spotify executive Sophia Bendz and celebrities like YouTuber MrBeast and voice-tweaking enthusiast T-Pain. The Santa Monica-based company hopes to do for singing and production what Instagram did for photography and TikTok for video editing — make it uncannily easy to express yourself at a semiprofessional level on social media.
Artificial intelligence is the talk of governments and industry today. In the arts, screenwriters, illustrators and musicians are nervously eyeing the tech’s potential and the possibility of being outmatched (and laid off) in favor of such software.
On the roof deck of Mayk.It’s office, co-founder Stefán Heinrich Henriquez played a video from a forthcoming version of its app, Covers.ai. The clip showed him capably singing Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off,” only he’d barely hit a note. He’d created an AI model of his voice, and the app rendered a video of him performing it. It could have made him sing anything, or with the app’s built-in voice models, sing as anyone else.
“During my time at TikTok, I saw a lot about how music is changing,” Henriquez said. He and co-founder Akiva Bamberger, both in their 30s, previously worked at TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat. “It’s not just about musicality anymore. It’s quantity over quality. If you try to perfect just one song, you have less chances to hit an algorithm on any of these platforms.
“This is a new approach,” he continued, still buzzing after attending the SoCal EDM festival Lightning in a Bottle. “I’m not even thinking about instruments anymore. Do I need to combine a beat with a melody and lyrics and an actual voice? Maybe I don’t. I think you still want to put in some piece of yourself, but with less and less work. We have to simplify even further and make more decisions for a beginner so that they don’t get lost in decision paralysis. That’s where AI comes in.”
Later that week, I cracked open Mayk.It to find out how easy it can be to sound great. Since its debut, users have created millions of tracks, according to the company’s co-founders. The app offers an array of backing beats, from Afro-pop to country to ambient, made by human producers. I chose “Seductive Nights,” a moody R&B loop, and turned to Mayk.It’s ChatGPT-powered lyrics generator for inspiration (Mayk.It also uses its own proprietary voice-synthesis technology).
Worried about AI decimating your livelihood? Mayk.It can put that into couplets. “Will I ever find my way?” it suggested as vaguely ominous lyrics, after my prompt about feeling insecure about the coming AI wave. “Can I trust the dreams I make? / Is my future safe?”
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Go here to read the rest of the story:
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2023-07-06/ai-articifical-intelligence-music-fake-drake-beatles-john-lennon-grimes?
[COMBO Editor’s note: But can AI put on a concert? Can you just see a little machine dancing around???!!!]
Photo: John Lennon
Dead Beatles, Fake Drake and Robot Songwriters: Inside the Panic Over AI Music
