The Debugger miniseries ‘Sugar High’ examines the impact Big Tech and AI will have on the music industry. In this conclusion, folk musician Tift Merritt and Duke Professor David Hoffman discuss all the tools society has to encourage both innovation and art. And we learn a bit more about Tift’s new album, called Sugar. A transcript appears below.
Bob Sullivan: Welcome back to Debugger. I’m your host, Bob Sullivan.
A sugar high. You eat something that tastes kind of good, maybe gives you a quick burst of manic energy, but soon you crash, feel even worse than you did before, and wish you hadn’t scarfed down those cheap cookies. Yeah, that’s a bit autobiographical, but it’s also the name of this Debugger miniseries, which concludes today.
We’ve been following Grammy-nominated folk singer Tift Merritt as she creates her first new album in a [00:01:30] decade. She took time off to be with her child. But Tift also wears two hats. She’s also working with Duke University on the future of music, which is right now imperiled by the rise of artificial intelligence.
Tift’s new album is called Sugar. It’s just been released, and she’s on tour supporting it.
But she’s also on tour with Duke professor David Hoffman, director of the Duke Initiative for Science and Society. They are telling anyone and everyone who will listen that the art world doesn’t need the sugar high of AI [00:02:00] music and the threats to society that might bring.
But perhaps more important, they are bringing a message that some dark, music-less future is not inevitable. Far from it. Duke is hard at work right now on a set of initiatives that can help us all get the benefits of this new technology without letting it lead us down a dark path. Here’s my conversation with them and the conclusion of Sugar High.
Bob Sullivan: Tift, when last we left you, you were working…you had just left to go into the [00:02:30] studio to record your new album, Sugar. How did it go?
Tift Merritt: Oh, I had the best time. I really had a, an, an amazing time. We made most of the record pretty live off of, very live off the floor. Most of the songs we did in four takes or less, and I was just really reminded of the power of music and playing music together with people at the top of their game and letting it all hang out.
Bob Sullivan: I mean, four takes, this is pretty intense. [00:03:00]
Tift Merritt: I, you know, you practice long enough and that’s kind of what you expect of yourself, right? That’s what being a musician is.
Bob Sullivan:There must have been chatter in between some of those takes about the future of music and the things we’re talking about in this Debugger series. Did, did you talk to your fellow musicians about any of that?
Tift Merritt: I think we were mostly focused on making music and bringing our whole selves to each take. I think there’s some sense with the state of music [00:03:30] among musicians that maybe the whole thing will get very watered down and be its own end. It’ll get so far away from musicians playing music together in a room that, that it’ll hurt itself in the process, and that’s a lot of the conversations that David and I have been having this summer have been really about how to clear a path for preserving real [00:04:00] music and caring for that labor, and caring for language and music, and what steps might be necessary to make that landscape better both for musicians and for audiences.
Bob Sullivan: So this conversation might be in the background for people who are hard at work doing music right now, but Professor David Hoffman and Tift, you guys were in Europe this year having these conversations very much in the foreground, right? Now, Professor Hoffman, can you talk a little bit about what you were doing?
David Hoffman: Yeah. So thanks, Bob. We’ve been really excited [00:04:30] about the research we’ve been doing at Duke, and taking a look at different public policy interventions that we would be able to make that would preserve some of the things that we really value out of music, and thinking about that as a canary in the coal mine for what we see in lots of other sectors of the economy.
Music is really a great example because you have the impact upon the [00:05:00] musician that has been called out on this podcast, uh, in the episodes prior. You also have the impact on the individual listener, and you have the impact on society. And so we’ve been in Europe. Tift has been playing some small shows to raise some of these questions, and then we’ve been convening experts together to talk about different solutions that countries are putting in place to respond both to the impact [00:05:30] to labor from AI, that would be the impact to the musician. The impact to the individuals who are impacted from wanting to use this material, it’d be the listener. But then also, what’s the greater impact to society when you have creative input that people engage with at an emotional level that’s actually being put out by technology and is being profiled and targeted to go to specific [00:06:00] individuals for specific reasons, generally to generate more profit.
Bob Sullivan: So Tift, what, what is it like trying to tour on and support an album and at the same time trying to tour and support an industry like this?
Tift Merritt: It’s, sometimes it can be a challenge mentally to be fully aware of the challenges that are at hand for musicians, and also to be wholeheartedly participating as a musician. But I also deeply [00:06:30] believe that it’s very necessary to make a path for musicians to be at the table in their own industry, and to be in conversation with technologists and with audiences and with the industry at large about their realities. And I- it’s was one of the things I found most interesting is oftentimes I’ve been having these conversations with people outside the music industry, cybersecurity experts, for example, who are [00:07:00] surprised at the reality of the musician’s economy and how extractive that, that is.
But to have this conversation within the music industry and to look to the industry itself and say, “Look, there’s a problem in our industry and w- and we need to solve it, and if we don’t solve it, we’re gonna have to go get outside regulators to do it,” that’s a really interesting position to be in. So I’ve been really enjoying speaking up on behalf of my friends.
Bob Sullivan: Professor Hoffman, [00:07:30] what has surprised you about some of these conversations that you’ve had?
David Hoffman: I think one of the things I’ve been really pleasantly surprised is that people are seeing both the benefits of the technology and some of the unintended consequences and risks that are being created. I’m a person … I love technology. It’s been my entire career has been about helping people produce technology that’s going to create a better world, and then dealing with those unintended consequences when we have them. The [00:08:00] conversations Tiff and I have been having with a number of musicians who are using artificial intelligence in really innovative ways to help their own creativity and create new work I think is fantastic, and that’s the best of what technology ought to be doing. And what’s also been really valuable is that the work that a lot of our students have been doing on research around different types of solutions … we’re seeing we’ve got policy [00:08:30] solutions that we’ve done in the past That we could use here to put things in a better place. We actually know how to go and protect labor, and to protect the listener, and to protect society here.
Let me give you an example. We’re currently doing research on looking at different countries o- other than the United States about how in the past they’ve provided support for local musicians. Tiff mentioned, I think on the first podcast episode of [00:09:00] this series, the work that I’ve done in Brazil, and that music is also deeply important for different cultures and different values that are expressed by those cultures.
Other countries have seen that for a long time. For example, when I was in high school, Canada, I lived in an area where we could get radio from Canada. Lived in Buffalo, New York, while I was in high school, and Canada actually had a, a [00:09:30] regulation requiring that for music played on the radio between certain hours, that at least 30 or 35%, depending upon the year, had to be made by Canadian artists.
Those are the kinds of things that can protect against the unintended consequences of technology putting creativity at risk, and can provide better support. We also know that there are a number of different countries that provide particular better social safety nets and/or [00:10:00] particular support for creatives and musicians, and we’re doing comparative research and looking at those solutions so that we can advance the Protect Working Musicians Act as one way to help, but look at these other solutions also.
Tift Merritt: Well, I just wanna talk about how, as a musician, it’s really empowering to look at historical [00:10:30] research about ta- changes in technology and what those moments bring for creatives, and to look at qualitative research about what’s happening, and also to look at the technology itself and to understand what reasonable protections to ask for.
This is not an altogether new moment, w- though it’s o- often framed as such, and there, it’s just really empowering to use research as a tool to guide us to find reasonable protections and have [00:11:00] meaningful conversations that empower musicians.
Bob Sullivan: So we’ve been here before. These are problems that are not entirely brand new, right? And so there are solutions from the past that we can at least borrow from for today, right?
David Hoffman: Just to speak to that a bit, Bob, around the solutions, look, I do believe this is a very exciting time. I tell my students this all the time. I think very exciting time for them to be studying, determining how they want to go out and make an impact out in the [00:11:30] world.
Because right now, all the polling data shows us that people are actually not particularly happy about the implementation of this technology. That’s around the world right now. There is a growing cry for people to do particular interventions. What we see in our research also is this is not just about the unintended consequences from technological innovation, as I’ve described, but it’s also about power, concentrations [00:12:00] of power, and manipulation.
And this is where a lot of the work that we’ve done at Duke on data brokers, on personal privacy, about how personal data is used to create profiles [00:12:30] to try to influence people, is highly relevant here. But there also, we have solutions around the concentration of power. We need to be looking at our antitrust laws.
We need to be looking at what are the right data privacy laws and protections to have in place. These are things we can do, and a lot of countries are doing them. One of the big questions will be will the United States also do it?
Bob Sullivan:A- and Tiff, again, th- this is not a brand-new problem. Uh, most artists, especially musicians, [00:13:00] have been s- fighting the industry for some time. D- does anything about this fight f- feel familiar? Or maybe the opposite question, does anything about this fight feel very different for you right now?
Tift Merritt: I think across the history of recorded music, when there is an update in distribution methods, gatekeepers are using that moment to redefine who’s– what music is, whose music is important, and the w- and what music is the w- worth [00:13:30] monetarily.
And I think we can look at patterns of erasure throughout the hundred years of the recording industry and see that happening. I think what’s unusual about this moment is the consolidation of power. And with streaming, we’ve seen tech insert itself and devalue wages to an extent that it’s already an existential crisis for working musicians.
And if the same pattern happens where major labels are making deals with [00:14:00] streaming platforms that are not transparent and inclusive of musicians, it’s really gonna be devastating to all of us, to all of us being musicians, but greater all of us as audiences and society, and we need to be thinking about those impacts.
First of all, because musicians do not have a seat at the table of their own economy, and that’s what the Pass the Working Musicians Act is about. We lost the ability to strike and boycott and collectively [00:14:30] bargain in the 1980s, and w- and with this consolidation of power, we really need that back. I think it really, the point is really driven home most of all by the fact that this is a $40 billion dollar industry, that more money is being made in the music industry than ever before, but less of it than ever before is actually going to the people that produce the music. Instead of creating jobs, it’s created a lot of toll booths along the way that are really going to [00:15:00] streaming services and technologies that have entered the marketplace in the last ten years, and that’s what the Protect Working Musicians Act is about, is making labor visible and making labor’s voice visible.
Bob Sullivan: And Professor Hoffman, the story that Tiff just told sounds to me like a story w- that we hear from a lot of industries right now, this sort of concentration of wealth to fewer people. Are there connections between what’s going on in music right now and what’s going on in the rest of the economy?
David Hoffman: Yeah, absolutely. And we’re seeing that. I’m seeing it on the ground [00:15:30] with employers implementing AI solutions, and I think we get caught up in what are the unemployment rates that are reported at any given time. I think that’s not where the most important impacts are often being made. It’s about what are the conditions of that employment, what are the wages that are actually being paid for the jobs that people are finding.
We’re seeing dramatic reductions in the number of people hired for [00:16:00] lots of different jobs across the economy, and people are… within individual sectors are doing really interesting work now to actually ask important questions. For example, within the rideshare industry is another one where the move towards the implementation of technology for companies that are offering rideshare, where the drivers went from being employees to becoming independent contractors, similar to the [00:16:30] situation in the music industry.
Now you’ve got individual states that have actually taken action to provide for more opportunities for labor in that industry to be able to collectively bargain. You have concepts around sectoral bargaining that are being advanced. We need to be talking about this across lots of different sectors of the economy.
Music is a great place to talk about it, but it’s not just concentrated in music.
Bob Sullivan: But music is also very [00:17:00] special in a very deep way, and I know I’ve heard you speak about this before, Professor Hoffman, that if it, it– if music itself is at risk, there are implications for the wider society, right?
David Hoffman: Yeah, I think at several different levels, right?
I think there is a, I’ve told this story before, it was really impactful for me. One day I was at a, a show with Tift and … to hear another musician. We were with our families and we were out in the lobby, and a young high [00:17:30] school girl came up to Tift very nervously to tell her…ask her if she was Tift Merritt and to tell her how important her music had been and a particular album to a very difficult time while she was in middle school.
I don’t know if we wanna leave that type of deep emotional impact on the individual to technology, and to allow the technology to potentially manipulate that [00:18:00] response. Secondarily, I would say we know that music is incredibly powerful as a collective exercise for bringing people together jointly around music.
If we have fewer people as professional musicians really investing the time to bring people together that way, or if we’re leaving that also to technology to determine what are those spaces, what are those groups, what are the messages in that music that brings people together, I think that’s [00:18:30] really troubling and we ought to be asking important questions there.
The third aspect is we know that music has been incredibly important for hundreds of years in advancing important social movements, in knitting people together, whether it was through the civil rights movement, or whether it’s been the labor movement, or whether it has been impacts around systemic misogyny and trying to advance greater rights for people.
To [00:19:00] think that music being used powerfully for those purposes is also just going to be left to technology that could then be coupled with large amounts of personal data, potentially served up by data brokers, and then trying to use that to individually target people to change their opinions on things, I think these are really important questions.
Luckily, we have people studying this, and we know that there [00:19:30] are solutions.
Tift Merritt: And, and I’d love to jump in here. And as a musician, what is most terrifying to me is thinking about five or 10 years from now, where right now the AI is training on human data, but five or 10 years from now, there will be enough content generated where the training data will not, will have drifted away from human-made creation as well.
And- I really wanna look to the food industry [00:20:00] and the ability, the, to label ingredients, because I think that audiences care about knowing that origin and that provenance, and I think it, I think that’s a really clear way that we can differentiate and protect without making creative judgments about what the … that’s not, the creative judgments are not what’s important.
It’s thinking about what [00:20:30] human authorship means w- in terms of human connection. And one of the most hopeful things that I find in myself in this moment is even when I am thinking about the stories we are told about how this is all inevitable, my first reaction is to turn to human connection and to write something about it.
And I think this moment is a very, is very much an inflection point that’s [00:21:00] asking us to reflect on the importance of human connection and value that.
Bob Sullivan: And Tiff, be- because music is important to everyone and folk music is specifically important, I think, to democracies, as David has suggested, I wanna hear you talk about the important role that folk music plays and why it, it’s alarming to think of AI-generated folk music.
Tift Merritt: I think in terms of myself, I think very much of myself in terms of a lineage of people who came [00:21:30] before me and a lineage of people who will take the stage long after me, and how I can do my best to care for the f- for the folk musician tradition in the moment that I inhabit. And that is carrying the news of the day.
That is carrying the emotional message of being a woman in this moment. Th- that is reacting politically to what’s happening about me, and hopefully [00:22:00] igniting in other people the song that is within them. So I’m not sure that technology that’s training on backwards-facing material is going to be able to have the reaction that is really deeply embedded in the forward-facing moment and the human connection that we all hunger for.
That’s j- that’s just an off-the-cuff answer, but-
Bob Sullivan: Hmm. [00:22:30] Those are my favorite kinds.
Tift Merritt:That’s my folk singer answer because the best creative interventions are about meeting the moment where we all are, that we all are on the edge of, and that we are all trying to understand the meaning of and respond to.
That’s what a creative intervention does, and it’s there to interrupt the harmful patterns and uplift the hopeful.
[Music break 2]
Bob Sullivan: Okay, so I like to conduct my interviews backwards sometimes. Now is one of those times. Uh, a folk singer and a Duke University professor walk into a bar together. Sounds like the beginning of a joke. Uh, Professor Hoffman, can you tell me how the two of you met?
David Hoffman: Sure. We were introduced to each other through a colleague who thought we sh- we’d share some mutual [00:23:30] interests.
And when I found out that it was Tift, that was really exciting for me. That was the person he was going to introduce me to, ’cause I’ve been a fan of Tift’s music for over 20 years. And we grabbed coffee and started talking, and realized that there was a lot of really exciting work that we could do together, but also that we knew that our students would be really interested in collaborating together.
One of the great strengths at Duke University is [00:24:00] interdisciplinary teaching and research. And so we’ve been able to bring together students from engineering, computer science, the divinity school, the English department, and public law and public policy together to ask some of these really important questions.
So I am deeply grateful to my colleague for making that connection
Bob Sullivan: So what’s it like to hang out with a musician that you’ve loved for 20 years?
David Hoffman: Humbling when you t- [00:24:30] think about your own skill set in many ways. But it’s also been so much fun when you see that you’re coupling together Tift’s experience as a musician, but also her leading research in these inflection points over time, and whose voices are decreased when you have these transitions.
The, to be able to [00:25:00] collaborate with Tift both w- as in her role as a musician, but also with the academic research that she’s done, and then to bring the law and public policy work that my team does, has been fantastic.
To give you an example, let’s turn to your question about us, you know, a, a musician and a public policy professor going to a bar. Maybe more about when our team goes into a restaurant. This just happened this past week, is that a couple of [00:25:30] the researchers from our team were looking for a restaurant to go to, and they recognized that they’re in Berlin, Germany, and that most of the posters for the restaurants that they were seeing were AI generated, and they thought the video images, or the pictures of the food were actually AI generated. And they just responded to say they had no interest in going into any restaurant that would think that it would present food [00:26:00] that is clearly not the food that they would be eating at the time. And I feel that’s a small story about how exciting it is to do this work w- in an interdisciplinary way with Tiff and with this phenomenal group of collaborators among the staff and the students at Duke, because people are actually seeing it out there, and I think there’s … with the recommendations we’re gonna make … I think we will make a difference.
Bob Sullivan: They’re seeing it out there, but they’re also seeing through it, aren’t they?
David Hoffman: [00:26:30] Yeah, I think that’s right.
Bob Sullivan: I gotta say, having a, a bunch of folks recognize fake AI food in the window of a restaurant, and they’re walking on by ’cause they’re vaguely disgusted by it, that, I’m gonna hold onto that image because I feel like if we could make people feel that way in a lot of areas, the quality of what we all do consume will rise, don’t you think?
Tift Merritt: I do, and I also think that’s just such a beautiful, granular, tiny moment human story that has all the power inside of [00:27:00] it. Uh, you know, I just wanna frame this a little bit from the point of view of the music industry. I, a- and coming into academia with that background and how grateful I am for the critical thinking that you find in academia. I remember … when I’ve, when … for my whole career in the music industry, they’ve always said, “Well, stay in one genre. Be one thing. You’re too country for rock. You’re too rock for country. You’re too orange for purple.” And I’ve [00:27:30] always wanted to go deeper than that, and I think that is exactly what we’re talking about when we talk about interdisciplinary partnerships, where, you know, when we can pair creative interventions with historical research and policy interventions and qualitative research interventions and technology solutions, we’re really going so much deeper with what’s possible inside the story. And I’m so grateful [00:28:00] to be in the mix of that excitement.
Bob Sullivan: Okay, Professor Hoffman, so k- if I could get you to sum up the efforts, the research efforts that Duke has going right now on this topic, and maybe also what could someone who’s listening, how could they get involved if they care?
David Hoffman: A- absolutely. So we have created a trustworthy technology lab a- at Duke in our science and society initiative that I’m the interim director of, and we’re looking at a variety of different issues, [00:28:30] sub-issues associated with this, particularly around concentration of power, potential for manipulation, and how to add greater levels of transparency and ability for control back to the individual, and asking those questions around accountability.
So that, that’s one important way that for anybody at Duke, it’s an interdisciplinary lab, and we love having people come [00:29:00] and want to work in the lab. Tift and I are gonna be co-teaching a class, AI and the Creative Economy, in the fall with Liz Sparacino, our lead director of research. We’re really excited about the class, so would love to have people engage with the class.
And then we really want to do more convenings on this issue. We’ve been doing them here in Europe this summer. I’m still in Berlin right now. We are going to … We did some [00:29:30] in the US in the fall, and we’re gonna be doing some convenings associated with Tift’s stops on her tour in the upcoming year. And so we’re really excited about that and would love for people to collaborate with us on those.
Tift Merritt: Well, I just love this idea of convening, because I think it goes back to the idea of maybe a, you know, a circle of musicians, a convening of music, a convening of minds, a [00:30:00] convening of a conversation. And I think that actually there’s a lot of power in numbers and in these questions right now, and that, that really coming together around them is gonna make for some really exciting stories and really transcendent human moments
David Hoffman: Yeah, and Bob, and maybe the one other thing I would add is I think we would be very interested in continuing [00:30:30] to collaborate with people who have a skeptical approach to this call for no regulation whatsoever for artificial intelligence.
We’ve seen with some of the recent releases the potential for significant impact on critical infrastructure and on people in general. We’ve never, as far as I can tell, said that for a new area of technological innovation that’s going to have that kind [00:31:00] of impact that we shouldn’t regulate at all.
Coming back to the food analogy, can you imagine if we were to say for either food or for the pharmaceutical area, “No, we don’t wanna chill innovation, therefore, we’re not gonna regulate at all the food that you eat or the drugs that you have to take”? That would obviously be insane. I think it’s actually equally insane that we’re taking the card- that current approach with artificial intelligence.
Bob Sullivan: It was just striking me. What if we rolled out electricity without any [00:31:30] rules? How would that go?
David Hoffman: Absolutely. Sam Altman recently came out and said that he actually believes that the future for these models is that they would become a utility, and basically serving up knowledge a- and thinking to individuals like they receive power.
I wonder how much he’d actually thought through that then the natural result of that is we regulate utilities, and we regulate the cost of utilities [00:32:00] on individuals and the safety of them. I’m not saying that I necessarily agree that’s the foreseeable future, that, uh, number one, that we will go or that we should go, but I think it does show the lack of clear thinking right now about how we’re supposed to have governance models for this technology and to hold the powerful people who are advancing them accountable.
Bob Sullivan: And Tift, you’ve already said that you’re excited about working with Duke, but I wanna know how excited you are to be [00:32:30] touring in support of your album. The album just came out last week as we’re doing this recording, right? Congratulations. So how is it going?
Tift Merritt: Thank you. It’s been very overwhelming how the, the world has really been so kind to Sugar. And I, I think it’s such an important reminder to me, just personally, that number one, I still have a lot to say, and that when I’m willing to be unguarded and tell my [00:33:00] story, people will meet me there. And I think it’s a, a great reminder to sing loud, all of us, because all of our stories matter. So most of all, I’m just having fun singing what’s in my heart.
David Hoffman: Tiff Merritt, Professor David Hoffman, and with the two of you working on this, I feel like we’re in good hands. Thanks very much for your time.
Tift Merritt: Thank you for having us, Bob, and thank you for all you’re doing, David. Thanks, Bob, and thank you, Tiff.[00:33:30]
Bob Sullivan: If you like Debugger, please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Debugger is brought to you by the Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy. Thanks to Debugger’s executive producers, David Hoffman and Ken [00:34:30] Rogerson, both professors at the Sanford School. Thanks also to Duke University’s Kaya Rota, Anna Jensen, Erin Gottlieb, Morgan Settle, and Liz Sparacino for their production assistance.
And as always, thanks to Julio Gonzalez of Simer Media for the original music, sound design, and sound engineering
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