Brian Eno has never been one to shy away from conversations about technology’s role in music and society. From pioneering ambient music to his latest generative AI-powered feature film Eno, he’s always found ways to push boundaries. But when it comes to artificial intelligence, the producer says his biggest concern’t isn’t the tech itself — but who controls it.
Speaking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Eno says [via Stereogum]: “The biggest problem for me about AI is. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people, and I have less and less interest in what those people think, and more and more criticisms of what the effect of their work has been.”
For Eno, AI is part of a broader issue: the concentration of power in the hands of a few tech giants.
“I think social media has been a catastrophe and mildly useful at the same time,” he says. “It’s possible for both things to coexist, but I think in terms of what it’s done to societies, it’s been a catastrophe.”
“Again, that could have been avoided, I think. If it had started out in a not-for-profit regime, it would’ve been different, because ‘maximise engagement’ wouldn’t have been the headline of the whole project,” Eno continues. “Maximising engagement is just another word for maximise profit. If that’s your intention, then you get what we got, just like in the American food industry is maximise profit, which is why you have a lot of very, very unhealthy people.”
Despite his concerns, Eno admits he’s always been fascinated by the creative potential of new tools, and AI is no exception. He sees it as part of a long tradition of musicians repurposing technology in ways its creators never intended.
“Talking about AI itself, I’ve always been happy to welcome new technologies and to see what you could do with them that nobody else thought of doing with them, and what things they could do, other than those that they were designed for,” he says.
“Because with all music technology, it’s always very interesting that stuff is designed for one reason, and then people start to find new things they could do that are completely beyond what the designer was thinking about.”
He points to distortion as a perfect example of this phenomenon: “Distortion is, in a way, the sound of popular music,” Eno explains. “A lot of the things that we find uniquely exciting has to do with equipment kind of going wrong. That’s quite a bizarre thought, isn’t it? That you design equipment to do this. Then, you start using it to do something else, which it doesn’t do very well, and you get to like the sound of the not very wellness.”
Brian Eno’s new ambient record Aurum is now available exclusively on Apple Music.
