Congist’24 Social Sciences and Artificial Intelligence: Theory and Practice

The Song There Never Was: A Sociotechnical Critique of Music AI

19 Ara 2024 09:30

30dk

A8 (Istanbul University Faculty of Letters)

Oral Presentation Case Studies and Applications Session 1.3 (Day 2)

Konuşmacılar

Çınar Gedizlioğlu (İzmir Universitesi) Borabay Erbay (İzmir Universitesi)

Açıklama

Rapid developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) make this technology visible in many different fields of daily and social life. From health to finance, security, education and art, new studies join the corpus of studies every day; ranging from how AI can be integrated into these fields to analyzing social aspects of embedded bias in these technologies. In the field of art, studies on AI mainly question the ‘democratizing’ effect of AI on art and the machines’ capacity for artistic creation. However, the majority of these studies take AI into consideration as a tool within social relations, neglecting to place AI into the center of the analysis and thus creating a black box of AI. This study is based on the presupposition that AI can be considered neither solely as an engineering phenomenon nor solely as a social phenomenon. Instead, we propose analyzing AI as a sociotechnical system. By doing so, the study aims to serve as a call for dialogue between engineering and sociology in the context of AI.
The study aims to analyze the harmonic, technical and social aspects and bias embedded in the songs composed by SunoAI, one of the most prominent music AI systems of today’s world. SunoAI is a system that claims to provide the opportunity to compose music via a simple prompt, thus, making musical production available to everyone and reducing the barriers to entry for music. This creates a myth of AI as an intelligent, autonomous and democratizing technology in the field of music. In this study, 5 songs composed by SunoAI will be examined from a sociotechnical point of view and the technical and cultural biases embedded in the melody, harmony and lyrics will be discussed.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence, Art, Music, Sociology, Software Engineering, Science and technology studies

Institution / Affiliation / Kurum

Izmir University of Economics, Department of Computer Engineering

Sunum Materyalleri

The Song There Never Was Borabay Erbay Çınar Gedizlioğlu Abstract.docx