Sting reportedly sold his solo catalog and The Police catalog for an estimated $300 million, as reported by The New York Times in early 2022, and he began this year by performing a private concert for Microsoft executives the night before the company announced sweeping layoffs.
However, Sting will not sell out to AI, and he fears the impact it may have on human job security moving forward.
“The building blocks of music belong to us, to human beings,” Sting recently told the BBC. “That’s going to be a battle we all have to fight in the next couple of years — defending our human capital against AI.”
The 17-time Grammy winner added, “It’s similar to the way I watch a movie with CGI. It doesn’t impress me at all. I get immediately bored when I see a computer-generated image. I imagine I will feel the same way about AI making music. Maybe for electronic dance music, it works. But for songs, you know, expressing emotions, I don’t think I will be moved by it.”
Earlier this month, will.i.am shared with Uproxx his opinion on AI. The Black Eyed Peas frontman believes “hip-hop is a great genre to start with when it comes to AI because hip-hop is a technical form of music.”
“The future of popular music isn’t people,” will.i.am added, “But the future of social activism around music, that’s the only way I think we are still going to be needed.”