Deviate Digital CEO Sammy Andrews guides you through the ever-changing tech world. In this edition of Digital Discourse, she dives into the pros of AI…
AI is evolving faster than ever. It is the biggest game-changer for civilisation since the Industrial Revolution and I wholeheartedly believe the education system will [soon] have no option but to value the ability to use information over memorisation.
Some aspects are terrifying and there are numerous perils if we don’t guide AI in the right direction. But there is a world out there filled with opportunity, so for now, let’s set aside the hair-raising threats. It might surprise you that I can be a ‘glass-half-full’ kind of girl when it comes to AI’s potential for creativity and productivity, and people frequently ask me for AI tools to explore. So, let’s look at some incredible technology that’s accessible to everyone.
If you’re reading a lot about AI right now and itching to dive into this brave new world, I would first suggest you check out a brilliant book called Scary Smart by Mo Gawdat. Then go to a Discord server called AI Hub – it’s like dipping your toes in the AI music ocean. They’re not just swapping tools and techniques there, they’re also tossing around code templates for Google’s Colab platform and cooking up AI voice models for artists in their spare time.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. There is a league of bedroom creators crafting tunes and sharing them across Discord, Reddit and YouTube communities. There is also a growing army of industry players looking to protect and monetise their existing assets and future output.
The reason for this unstoppable boom in creativity is a plethora of AI softwares that are being designed to supercharge creativity each day. If you’re reading this thinking, “What is she talking about?”, let’s take a moment to spotlight some of the game-changers making waves right now…
VOICE GENERATION AND CLONING
Musicfy is an AI app that can clone a voice and produce an output. It is a go-to for AI covers. Also check out Revocalize.AI, Voicemod, Uberduck and Supertone.
STEM SPLIT
RipX is an unbelievably sophisticated stem extraction tool that is loved by musicians. Other players in this area include Lalal.AI, Spleeter (by Deezer), Moises and Demucs.
TEXT TO MUSIC
Suno is a text-to-music model that lives on a Discord server allowing users to generate speech, music and sound effects.
MUSIC GENERATORS
Meta’s MusicGen will generate 12 seconds of audio based on a description that you provide. You can also supply a reference audio from which a broad melody will be extracted. And yes, you read that right, Meta. This is part of their open-source AudioCraft suite of research products.
There are so many people in this space right now – just jump on any search engine and have a look for yourself. And if you want to smile, head to Riffusion and enter a prompt.
MASTERING AND PRODUCTION
Masterchannel is exactly what you think it might be, mastering AI. There are an increasing number of names in this space, as well as plugins for existing software, and they’re getting seriously clever. If you’re into checking them out, go have a look at BandLab Mastering, RoEx and Songmastr.
VIDEO AI
Video, image editing and generation tools are making giant bounds daily, and big companies have been investing in this for some time. Some platforms include Midjourney and Photoshop’s Beta AI generation tools. I don’t know any designers not using the latter already. It’s a simple but clever tool as part of the Adobe suite. Here are a few more...
Videoleap – a phone app that recently integrated a load of AI tools, which is no surprise as it’s made by the same people who were behind the making of Facetune.
Vimeo’s Beta AI generation tool – this allows you to edit videos by deleting scripts and automatically removing filler words (“ums” and “ahs” in audio recordings).
Lumen5’s video generation – a big hit with big brands and die-hard PowerPoint enthusiasts already.
Kaiber – a video generation tool that is used for music videos in particular.
Flickify – an increasingly interesting text-to-image video generator that also offers URL to video [converting], avatar creation, voice cloning, prompt-to-script generation and far more.
AI IN A WIDER CONTEXT
If you’re not across AI outside of audio and visual generation yet, what are you waiting for? OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4.0 is an obvious starting place for everything from content suggestions to scripts, translations, lyrics, grammar, image upload, coding and even legal documents.
Whilst it has its own limitations, if you have not tried it yet, trust me when I say try it out – even if that is for no other reason than to understand what’s coming.
And all of this is a tiny slice of what is out there. If you search for wider productivity AI you’ll find a wealth of offerings, from the likes of Otter.AI, which provides incredible speech-to-text transcription services (including transcribing meetings from platforms such as Zoom), to Interprefy, a live-time AI providing language translations (I actually know of an artist who is using AI to translate albums into other languages).
And on that note, just for fun – and to have your mind blown – now go and check out Stable Doodle.
