Generative AI is now widely used to make artwork, music, and even film, valuable cultural

contributions that used to be exclusively the province of the creative class. Could AI-generated

art start displacing human creators? And what about AI's cultural influence on society

writ large? Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Is AI generated art

in the beginning of an artistic revolution or the stuff of a dystopian nightmare? Here to help me

unpack the many ethical and societal issues at play here is Ramesh Reniva-San,

a professor of information studies at UCLA, and director of the UC Center for Global Digital Culture,

and host of the Utopias podcast.

Thanks for joining me, Ramesh.

Thanks, Dana. Thank you for having me.

Let's start with the recent news about a popular new band called the Velvet Sundown, which

we featured in our open.

Their two albums quickly went viral online, generating over a million plays on Spotify before

it was suddenly revealed that the band, the images, and the music, all of it were entirely

generated by AI. Some fans felt they were

tricked and listeners should have been warned. Let's unpack this in stages here. First, can you

talk about the ethics here? If no one was hurt, is there even an ethical conflict in the first

place? I think there are deep ethical questions,

right? Because we have to ask the question, how was this album created? What did it use for its

creation? So many generative AI created artworks and musical works are using existing human

created content. Generative AI systems do not create art or

music in a vacuum. They are learning from our data, our creativity, our, when I'm saying

...