Will.i.am, the Black Eyed Peas frontman and tech entrepreneur, said he’s more “worried about human greed” than about musicians being replaced by robots.
“Right now is the time for the dreamer, not the regurgitator of yesterday’s imaginations — new imagination because AI is not doing imagination yet, and so we have the chance to dream up new things,” he told Variety’s co-president and co-editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh at Cannes Lions during the Variety Brand Visionaries Happy Hour presented by Google TV.
Will.i.am, who has been a songwriter and producer for the likes of Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga and launched his app FYI.AI back in 2020, said he isn’t concerned about AI taking the spotlight from artists. “Yes, it’s gonna create better songs or the same type of songs or sometimes shitty songs. Just like I sometimes write shitty songs that I think are good … Anyways, whatever. It’s all subjective — what is good, what is bad.”
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The limit of AI, he said, is that “there’s a whole lot of bad shit that it gobbled up. It don’t know what it’s making, it’s just regurgitating the shit that we made.”
The path going forward for music artists, he said, is to “unearth the next industry on this tech — not just publishing industry, not touring industry, not recording industry — a new fucking industry.”
To explain why, he reached back six centuries. Before the printing press, he said, sheet music could only travel as far as a musician could carry it. The press didn’t kill music — it exploded it. “You’re not gonna have Bach and Beethoven if it wasn’t for the printing press,” he said. “The printing press paved the way for new jobs to materialize like wood, stone, craftsmanship, master masons — and that lasted from 1500, 1600, 1700 uninterrupted [until] 1800, 1900.”
Then the recording industry came along, and history repeated itself — except the artists got left behind. “[They took] advantage of folks that didn’t understand the tech,” he said. And he sees the same trap happening now. AI output “is not a recording, those are predictions” — so applying old recording-era contracts and copyright law to it is a category error. The right move isn’t to fight over the old file format. “You’re supposed to dream up the new industry with it, just like the record industry was dreamt up,” Will.i.am said.
For Will.i.am, the blueprint for that new industry starts with how we interact with AI in the first place. People use AI in a lazy way “because we’re coming out of social media, [which is] like tap, heart, thumbs up, thumbs down.” He pointed to the way music has always been made by interacting with others. “You actually conversationally prompted it out and then the band played it,” he said. The right version of AI, he argued, “fosters critical thinking.”
“It’s pushing and fostering hyper-cognition when it’s conversation-based, when you’re ping-ponging, bantering, brainstorming in conversation flow,” he said, adding that his app is “trying to build experiences where it’s conversation-based.”
Will.i.am, who recently completed his first semester teaching an AI course at Arizona State University, also told Setoodeh about his “proof of life” idea that would help prove human authorship, restore the value to human effort and monetize it for creators.
Right now, a song that took an artist a week to make and a song AI spits out in minutes are worth the same, he said. “If we’re sharing the same file and it’s valued at the same fraction of a penny, that’s kind of inhumane because we’re not valuing the human effort to make it,” he said. “A diamond is not valued the same as a freaking pearl. A pearl is not valued the same as quartz.” So why should human creation and instant AI output be priced the same?
So, he suggested the creation of a “new file for humans.” That file would carry not just the work but the story and meaning behind it, becoming “the publication that has a freaking agent of its own.”
“I am the magnet of monetization because my ideas are my ideas,” he said. “I should be, or the creator should be, the one that benefits the most because the creator with their agent is the distributor, the point of sale, the human resource — it’s the agent that they own. They own their data. That is the world that we’re trying to create with FYI.AI.”
The payoff would be that the creator would own all of it — the data, the distribution, the sale — instead of handing the value to a label or a tech platform.
He said ultimately the real villain isn’t AI — it’s the business model that humans have created which rewards divisiveness and profits private corporations, citing social media and pharmaceutical companies.
Asked whether there could be safeguards to prevent powerful individuals from creating a “dystopian nightmare scenario,” the artist surprised the crowd by predicting an AI revolution, led by the French and carried on by the Americans, where the people will “overthrow the monarchy.”
“France is gonna do the French thing and … overthrow the monarchy like they always did and then they think about America,” he said. “There’s a Statue of Liberty there because France was like, ‘Hey, look what we did! Here’s a statue to represent the liberation of free minds and people.’ And now at Ellis Island, there is a lady holding a torch of enlightenment. That will happen in this new realm.”