Off Air... with Jane and Fi - A tuna oil pact?

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

Oh my goodness! Open the curtains! We're glad to be alive! It's Fi and Eve for the next week or so while Jane tries to keep cool in Bordeaux. They chat landline phones, burst boiled sausages, thick school skirts, and grilled pepper oil. Plus, we look at AI in the music industry. Eamonn Forde, a music business and technology journalist, and Baroness Kidron, an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI, join Fi. You can buy tickets for Fringe by the Sea: https://www.fringebythesea.com/off-air-with-jane-fi-and-special-guest-jan-ravens/ Our next book club pick will be a collection of short stories! 'Interpreter of Maladies' is by Jhumpa Lahiri.  You can check out our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@OffAirWithJaneAndFOur new playlist 'Coiled Spring' is up and running: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4tmoCpbp42ae7R1UY8ofzaOur most asked about book is called 'The Later Years' by Peter Thornton.If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail] us on Instagram! @janeandfiPodcast Producer: Eve SalusburyExecutive Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're on. We're on. So welcome to a still very, very, very steamy, hot London. Times Towers is glistening in the skyline. And we are on day two of our heat bump endurance test, which we are basically failing as British people, aren't we? Every single news bulletin has started or in at number two with it's bloody hot,

isn't it? And I think people are slightly running out of interviewees on the subject of it's bloody hot, isn't it? Yeah, but we do have an unbelievable appetite to continue talking about it. You have the same three conversations round and round and round and round every single day and I don't really get tired of it. I thought for the first time this morning, I mean, bearing of mind this is well, I'll be Thursday, so we just had a week of it. It's not like very very, that old summer season, isn't it?

I did think when I turned on the radio, it was like a blast of extra hot air coming out of the radio because it was another story about, I think it's the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has introduced a heat plan today to try and reassure Londoners

that he is looking at all of the problems. I do appreciate what you're saying. I think I listened to a feature on the radio the other day and I actually had to turn it off because it was making me feel hotter. Like I was trying to get out of the house and I was breaking into a sort of, sweating round and just having it in my ears talking about the heat, I actually had to just stop that. It just feels like it's just all around us. You can't have it in your ears as well. Maybe now

is the time to delve into some Scandinano or some Nordic fiction or something incredibly chilly. That might help. There is a wonderful book actually Peter Hogue's Miss Smiller's Feeling for Snow, which has been doing the rounds a bit recently. I think it was written more than 20 years ago because it features a plot about the ownership of the Arctic. And it's a really, really brilliant book. I remember when I read it at the time thinking, wow, this is really good writing.

So maybe that's the thing that we should all be reading of an evening to take us to a very chilly, chilly place. It's not a new book? No, it's not a new book at all. When did you read it? I read it. So I think it was a... around in the 2000s and something.

So it was a long time ago, but it's still very resonant because the problems of the ownership of the Arctic I don't think of being solved, despite Jody Vance's. Very best efforts. Many people do want you to be included in the

how to recognise an off-air listening. How do you feel about this? Well, you've sort of done something now, haven't you? Because if we're at Cheltenham or North Berwick and it does start to happen and my name is included at a coffee stand hearing my name constantly

when you started out in your journalism career is this exactly what you were hoping for it's precisely what I was hoping for okay we'll carry on then we will carry on this one's coming from Sarah who says am I being too obvious to suggest a visual way of communicating with hive members at your gigs

I quite often wear a pink headscarf with bow or some such thing tied down to whole very, very unruly hair, and I suddenly recalled your Where's Eve discussion. Maybe prospective mates in common could simply don, is that still a word? Very much so. A specific colour on heads or buttonholes,

choose a colour and we'll click. Such as pink, looking out for like-minded wearing the same, headscarves, hairbands, flowers, hats and gaud preserve us possibly fascinators. You've taken it too far. I'm sorry about that. On the two weeks topic, now this is two weeks in August,

which we were both banging on about a couple of weeks ago and then we stopped banging on about it but Sarah draws our attention because she has just finished a weary binge watch last night and felt exhausted. I realised there was a surreal thread

which was interesting but in the end the whole thing felt bonkers from number one, no hats, what were they thinking? And it's very true and they can't do big floppy shady hats in filaments in the sunshine, can they because of all of the shadows

they cast on the face of the beautiful actors so they always tend to be Atlas, which was... Just squinting. Yeah, very unrealistic and pretty unwise. Yeah, they can't wear shades either, can't they? Yeah. But then didn't Laila Fazard say that they'd filmed it in winter?

Yes, she did. So it wouldn't have been as much of a struggle, but if you were there with no hat actually in the height of summer, it's just not happening. So I think she said that it was winter and then it was the height of summer, wasn't it? Because there was a shoot that was too hot for everybody to bear. But yeah, the rest of the time it didn't look freezing.

Do you what? I did catch the end of, selling houses in Spain or whatever it's called last night on Channel 4. I know that we've touched on this loosely before, but why is everywhere empty? Because it cannot be the middle of winter because the swimming pools are all full and the Borgonville is out. Maybe that's out all the year round. I just don't know my continental horticulture. And they're all in very, very summery dresses. But there is never ever. anybody in any of these places. They surely don't have the budget to

clear it out. Maybe they just have a tannoy they come round. Well, it's most boring property show filming today. Actually, maybe lots of people just haven't properly registered themselves, so they just run for cover when they see a camera. It's not very good advertisement

for the place, isn't it? Because it's completely viblous. Completely viblous. You know, one of the estate agents, will just waft with an arm and say restaurants and cafes there but then it's just like but there's nobody in them why would you want to be there it's just very odd very very odd I don't know what time of year that could be there wouldn't be any time of year

where if you did the same thing in a caravan park or a holiday resort or a coastal town in this country and it would be completely empty that just wouldn't be a thing maybe the budget is bigger than we're realising yeah let's cling to that They've used to use it in a bit of a weird way. They've certainly not spread that budget around, leave. It's literally gone all into the clearing of the areas.

Number two, back with Sarah, wandering off with no phone water or whatever. Yeah, that's just terrible, isn't it? I love this one in at number three. Ridiculous bacchanalian parties and no way of seeing how this was possible. A-Cardo, she asks. And yeah, how did they get all of that stuff in suddenly? When the people who were staying in the villa couldn't get hold of anything at all. Too much harrumphing and not enough words, I'd agree with that as well.

And in at number five, how two rowing boats could get home. Sarah apologises saying I think the temperature has got to me. I've got the fan on full blast and I envy you an air-conditioned studio. Well, yes, I think many people have been coming to work super early, and I'm not mentioning any names at all, but John Pino was in the lift with me at a time, very previous when his editorial meeting was. I think many, many people have come into work early and stayed late just for the aircon and who can blame them.

If I could bring Nancy in today, I absolutely would have done, but I just can't get her through that security. She's really struggling. Is there going to be a sort of future equivalent? You know how in the winter there's warm spaces for vulnerable and elderly people, like community centres that open up? But presumably those community centres don't have air conditioning. but eventually we're going to see those type of places open up for the summer months. I think we're going to have to. Yeah.

And in fact, our resident GP, Dr. Rachel, on our show between two and four, I'm going to have to corporate Cathy myself. It feels a little dirty. Here we go. Two till four, Monday to Thursday, available on the Times app which is free, or just retune your digital radio. If you need some help, give me a show up because I've had to do mine about seven times. Beautiful.

We were talking to our resident GP and I asked her exactly that question and she said she thought that time had already come where they're going to have to open sports halls on unbelievably hot days like today, especially if it goes over 40 and just allow people to go and sit there all day. Yeah, and they should, shouldn't they? They definitely should. This one comes in from Trish, who's got telephonist memories. Now, Eva's a very young person. Do you have the faintest idea of what we're talking about when we talk about telephonists?

I think I've seen it displayed in television. In the old films. It's the kind of plugging in and unplugging. Is that what we're talking about? And are you so young that you don't really... Do you have a landline in your shared accommodation? Currently? Yeah.

No, does anyone? Yes, they do. My mum's got a landline. She's very proud of it. I would never call her on her mobile. We text on the mobile. But we don't speak on the mobile. We speak on the landline.

What is, how clear is that? Oh my God. Well, I suppose that's the point, isn't it? It's guaranteed to be much clearer. I mean, all you need to do is. I can understand how ridiculous I sound because I did also grow up with a landline and I quite enjoyed picking up

and listening into my mum's phone conversations. Yes, yep, on the extension. Yes. You shouldn't do that, actually. That was absolutely awful. What did you hear? She's just slagging. us all offering.

That's so interesting. I think it's one of the worst things in the world when you hear a parent being rude about you. Would you agree? Yeah. You know, siblings, lovers, husbands, wives, wives, friends or whatever. Not nice, but kind of understandable. But when you ever hear a criticism of yourself to a third party.

Toby, I'm one of four, so I do kind of understand that we're all driving her a bit but I'd have to really hold my tongue down the line to not say, and then I bet you didn't manage to entirely conceal it the next time you saw her in the house. Definitely not. Oh, dear. Eve's mum, well, it's made of what she is today, hasn't it? Thick-skinned.

Trish says, listening to the podcast lately have reminded me of my first proper job after leaving school. I'm now in my 70s. Left school with an aptitude for languages, but no real plan. GPO were advertising for bilingual telephonists to work at the Continental Exchange in the city. Got the job and I moved to London to a grottie bed sit. The three-month training was tough.

Once working, I realised how regimented it all was. Women were not allowed to wear trousers. And Trish, you quite rightly say why. And if you needed the loo, you had to speak to one of the scary, mistrunchable-type supervisors patrolling the room and ask for a run-through. She, and it was always a she,

noted down your time of leaving and returning in a ledger on the central desk. I didn't last too long because of the setup, but I must say the GPO training helped me get quite well-paid temp work subsequently. Tricch says, sorry this is a bit rambling, not by our standards dying at all, just thought it might spark memories from the hive. Well, I'm sure it will do. And actually, isn't it interesting, Trish, because so many people say that working in some of those, especially those fulfilment centres these days, there is exactly the same kind of treatment where you've got to clock in and clock out

when you go for a loo break there have been terrible stories haven't there, some companies only allowing a certain number of toilet breaks during your shift and if you go over then they take the money off the next break and all of that type of stuff

and I mean everybody's bladder's different and sometimes you know we've all sported a UTI from time to time there's nothing to be ashamed of it's not what we asked for but that can happen. So I'm sorry to hear that. And the trousers thing as well.

So, I mean, I don't, I'm assuming that this would have been about the 1960s or 70s, but that's just mad, isn't it? You wouldn't really have been on display. And, I mean, obviously, I'm not saying that every woman on display should have worn a skirt,

but that was always the reason given if you were kind of public facing, then some companies would ask you to wear a certain type of dress. But you wouldn't have been if you were working on the Continental Exchange. So why would a trouser have been an offensive item.

It's just a bit backwards. It is a bit backwards, isn't it? A school girl is allowed to wear shorts nowadays? Oh, I suppose it would depend on the school. Certainly, mine have always been in schools or were in schools

where, yeah, the girls had a choice, definitely had a choice. Okay. There wasn't only one type of uniform. Maybe we all just chose to wear skirts anyway. Yeah. Well, definitely when I was at school, school we weren't allowed to wear anything other than school uniform skirts and they were a very

strange uh not strange but they were very very heavy itchy tweed when i first joined the school and then they changed to a more effective and easy to keep nylon yeah you wouldn't want that in this heat you certainly wouldn't eve you certainly wouldn't my school skirt was the exact i don't know if you're really if this will ring any bells with the exact school skirt that they wore in dairy girls it's like a green tartan nice And was it like a kilt? It wasn't quite that far, but it was very thick, yeah. Okay.

Was it too thick to be able to roll up the waistband? I think that was the idea, but no, it wasn't. No, no skirt is. The ingenuity. With a bit of perseverance. Yes, it's amazing, isn't it? That's what you should get your GCSEs in. Lorraine's got a very interesting one,

and she does have some thoughts about the subject of the Hive Call Sign, and hers is the callout, Eve, And the response, turn your mic on. That's very well observed. Did either of you catch PM on Monday? Lorraine asks, now what do we do with an email like this? It's referring to a programme on the other side.

Shall we continue? Continue, but just make it clear that you did not catch it. No, of course I didn't catch it. Of course I didn't catch it. I've got basically like an electric fence for naughty sheep. And if my hand even goes near, me zhees sounds. Who's the email from? It's from Lorraine.

Let's see what Lorraine has to say, and maybe I can cut it out later. Okay, Lorraine, you've been warned. So in answer to the question, did either of you catch Permananda? No, of course we didn't. We were listening to John Pinar. I was thrilled and refreshed to hear

Evan Davis, quiz Lord Peter Hain, on Andy Burnham's dress style, pointing out that he had left Manchester in casual clothes, rocked up in a tiler suit at Houston, and then in the Commons was wearing a tie. I was rather less enamoured with Lord Peter Hayne for chuckling and responding dismissively. This is the serious part of the interview, is it?

Apparently it was for Theresa May, when her leopard print shoes dogged her political career and got more attention than her policies, or for Angela Merkel, whose jackets dominated media coverage, or for Hillary Clinton and her pantsuits, and the list goes on and on. Well, Lorraine, come back to the fold of Times Radio, because we talked about this on the show as well, with Anna Murphy.

And actually Andy Burnham's dress style does warrant our attention because he could be the first Prime Minister to dress in a style appropriate to the events that he's attending and the people he's with. Because to our knowledge and recollection, no recent Prime Minister has felt able to stay kind of tech bro casual when in amongst the tech bros and, you know, go a bit military when,

meeting Zelensky and do all of the things that actually most really, really successful business people are doing, which is meet the crowd, you know, with yourself and that suit and tie stuff. I mean, you know, the young people just don't understand what the relevance of that kind of dress code is. It means it just doesn't mean enough to them for it to continue. So I hope that we carry on talking. And I think also, Dwayne, it's great that we're talking about the way that a bloke dresses, because you're absolutely right. When we've talked about it before, in response to Theresa May or Angela Merkel or Hillary Clinton,

it's actually in a kind of patronising and rather dismissive fashion way. I think when we talk about Andy Burnham, we're all trying to talk about something a bit different. Yeah, so bring it on. I think definitely there is this thing of a person being shoved into a suit that is the job. Yes, totally.

And then feeling a bit distanced from them. Yeah, and just always looking, the same. Yeah. And sometimes you just want them to look different in different places. And then just really detach from their environment and the context of what they're doing. So yeah, bring it on. Lorraine, that email will stay. It will stay. Well done. Oh my God, you got past the fiercest gatekeeper in Christendon. Right, I'm going to give this one to you. Okay.

I don't think it's a difficult one to cite read. And can we just have a quick update? This is from Emily. We were talking about boiling sausages on the, before you put them on the barbecue. something that Jane and I had never heard about in all of our careers of barbecuing and she has sent a follow-up saying don't worry about the skin splitting because when they split in this method

they've already done their job so what does that mean? So if you boil them then does the meat hold its form I never thought I'd come to work and say that phrase so the meat holds its form so then it doesn't matter if you put it on the barbecue without the skin

I can't believe that to be true No. I don't like the image of that. No, I know, you're a vegetarian. A boiled burst sausage. Let's not do that. It's a very hot day. We've all been having rather lurid dreams. There was a colleague in one of my dreams last night.

I'm not going to... No, I'm not going to repeat the dream, actually. It was quite terrifying. I did have to shake myself away from that one as well. Yeah, roll on the weekend. And lower temperatures. Right, do you want to finish with that one? And then we're going to try and explain what our guesting situation today is about.

This comes in from Alison. Lovelies, as a listener from the time the Ark first set sail, I consider myself well-versed in your little peculiarities. I thought, therefore, I should warn you that according to a well-known high street retailer, this Saturday, 27th of June, market calendars, is National Picky Bits Day. Notwithstanding their divine green tea and Bergamont disinfectant, it seems the retailer in question will stop at night.

nothing in order to boost its sales, exclamation mark. Love from Alison in Berkhamstead. Right. Well, thank you for updating us on that, Alison. How bloody ridiculous is that? So what is the date of that? On what morning are we waking up and going, oh my goodness, open the curtains, we're glad to be alive. It is National Biggie Bits Day. That would be Saturday the 2017.

Saturday. This coming Saturday. This coming Saturday. Okay. Well, maybe people can furnish us with some pictures of what they ate on National Piggy Bits. day and you know just have a great big lump of cheese don't give into it kids it will work though won't it the shelves will be emptied well maybe maybe you know my thoughts on a three for eight yeah i just find there's a lot of oil involved there's so much oil a lot of oil spillage oil stains and do you ever keep the oil no you should yeah you should actually shouldn't you

So the oil from those grilled peppers that you buy in the jar from a normal Turkish supermarket, that's just lovely. Beautifully infused. Really, really infused and absolutely gorgeous. Never tip that away. But I don't think you should keep your tuna oil. No. What do you get to use that for?

Let's never keep our tuna oil, Eve. Let's hang on to that. I'll make a deal with you now. Okay, good. Now, we are doing something a little bit different for today and Monday and Tuesday. What are we doing, Eve? We are doing a three-part AI series, looking at three different industries on each day, and how AI is revolutionising it, but in a non-domed-laden way.

Very much so. So what we're going to try and do is look at how we are already in the world of AI, and we're going to try and be illuminating about it. We're going to try and separate the wheat from the chaff and we're going to try very hard not to always talk about it with that the end is nigh and it's ruined everything but we will obviously be giving a very certain nod to the bits of our lives that have been dented already.

So we are doing music today. We are doing transport on Tuesday. So on Monday, we're very across this. So on Monday we're doing. finance or is that on Wednesday? That's Monday. Okay. So we'll do music today, banking Monday, transport. Yeah. And do you want, I am

very excited particularly about the transport one because you have managed to get one of the CEOs of, well, you explain it better than me. He's called James Peng and he is the CEO of a leading autonomous vehicle company called pony.aI

and he was really one of the first was one of the first to get it on the roads in China and now has just this mega plan to go across the European markets, doing it in California and just going worldwide. So driverless cars, I mean, we are all fascinated, aren't we, by them? And our children will probably have the same conversation about cars that we drove, that you and I started off this podcast with your landline. What does a phone do type questions?

Dumber two for two. So we just hope you really enjoy our AI. series and so we all just feel a bit more kind of powerful within the world because we don't want to, especially those of us who are of a certain age, let's not get left behind or pushed out by it. Let's try and be a bit more in charge of it than we ever were of that bloody internet thing. And it remains as true today as it was in whenever it was 1987 when the internet really started to form. If there have been more in particular middle-aged women in the rooms of all of those companies when they started up, we wouldn't be in the absolute effing pickle that we're in now.

And that's not because we're crazy great as women, but I think it is because our knowledge about likes, ticks, all of that type of stuff, comparing lives to each other. You know, I think by the time you get to middle age, irrespective of your gender, you just realise what a terrible cesspit that will create in people. I think understanding as well that AI has already been, around. I was scared of it. And then when someone was just kind of like, Google Maps has been

using AI, the past like 10 years that you've been using Google Maps, you've been using AI every single day. And it helped me get my head round it a little bit. And I completely agree. I mean, it's nearly everything that we do these days. And music's where we're going to start. And if you think about all of the other things that have changed music forever, I mean, just digital sound. and, you know, the idea that you could make a whole song in your bedroom. You know, with all of the instruments involved, well, I mean, that wasn't available to the Beatles, but it's still made great music. Autotune wasn't available, and that's made the careers of some Beatles.

So you're absolutely right. We just need to recognise how much of it we're enjoying anyway. So here come the guests. We remain at janefee at times.org radio, and we would love all of us. your emails for next week. And yeah, we look forward to hearing from you. Baroness Kidron, Bieber Kidron, is a former filmmaker and social activist, AI advisor to the Institute for Ethics, who's devoted her time in the House of Lords to the online world. We started our chat with her answer to this question. If I'm an artist in the UK, I'm quite

successful, music is my life. And I hear a song, maybe on Spotify, that sounds like it's me, the lyrics could have been written by me, the whole. whole track has clearly come from listening to me, where does the law stand about how much of that actually belongs to me? That edge that you're talking about between what is an individual style and what is a tradition is always the very difficult bit. But if you can prove that they did scrape you, then they have taken your, they've taken your IP, they have taken your copy. and the law is really clear that what you've made is yours. And frankly, it doesn't even matter whether they used it. It's just if they scraped it without your permission, without payment,

it is yours. The problem we have is that it's very, very difficult to prove that. And I'm happy to say, since the big fight last year to protect copyright and to try and get more transparency, A number of people found very good technical ways of looking at the stack, looking at the AI, and going back and saying, actually, we can see what you've scraped and pulling it out and putting it in front of the AI companies and saying, hang on a minute, that's mine. So there's a lot of court cases going on around that issue now. And are the court cases fought by individual artists, or are they being fought by record labels? Where do the labels stand in this?

Yeah, so I think you've really sort of hit upon a crunch point because this is, there are more than one player in this. So there's the individual artists, there's the record company, there's the AI company, and then of course there's the person who might be creating something new out of the AI and what is their responsibility. And I think where we are now is at a very delicate time where it may well be that the record companies are beginning to make deals. because the AI companies are saying, actually we do need your data, we do need your creativity, we do need your work, or indeed we've already taken it

so we better pay for it before you take us to court. But then the artists are saying, hang on a minute, what is the deal that the record company is making and are those record companies pushing artists with labels into deals that aren't very good for them

because they're basically collective licensing deal in which the record company is making sure it gets the first piece. So I think that the sort of straightforward answer to your question is it's very difficult for moderately successful middle range or not particularly successful individual artists, much easier for a big artist who's in big demand and has a valence of lawyers,

and much easier for the record company. is because they have, you know, they represent so much material. And I think that what we're seeing now is a little bit of work from some of the trade unions and some of the professionals associations going, hang on a minute, we want a better deal for the individual art. Do we, as users of music, as listeners to music, are we entitled to know how much AI generation has been involved in an artist's production when we stream it or buy it?

Oh, I think you are. And I think it's an interesting point because, you know, there are people who use AI in quite creative ways as an enhancement as a tool in their work. And they're actually, they tend to be very happy to say that they've used it. And in fact, I remember when Paul McCartney got involved

in the campaign last year, really on the side of young creators saying, you know, how would four boys from Liverpool work now if they had no copyright, if they had no income? It's all very well from my generation, but what about the new ones? So he was absolutely brilliant. But he at the same time said, oh, yeah, we've just remastered a bit of John Lennon's voice with AI.

And he was really excited about that. And I think this is actually not a dispute about whether we like or dislike AI. It's actually a dispute over people stealing other people's work to build products that they then sell in the marketplace that replace the people who they've nicked from. And just this morning, someone rang me and asked me to look at a particular site. I won't mention the name,

but they are charging $30 a month for you to go on and make some music. But if that model hasn't paid for the people whose music that made the model, it means they're basically stealing from one person and making the user pay. And somewhere that's just wrong. Yes. Can you explain, because we have a multi-generational listenership here, the difference between what is happening now and sampling? because to some people who want to make a very binary argument about the lifting of stuff by AI,

it doesn't seem very different to sampling. What is the difference? Well, I think sampling's quite interesting because actually, although we've seen, you know, a few court cases about sampling, on the whole, it is a sort of a creative sharing. And in the creative sharing, people also share some of the revenue, but they also ask permission.

And, you know, Fee, this is, we're talking very specifically about music here. We're talking very specifically about creative industries, where it's quite clear that people also want a human relationship. It's not just that I love Elton John's last song. It's that he's been with me since I was a teenager and I have fallen in love and I have heard his songs when people have died and so on and so on. And it's all the memories and my relationship to the artist that is important. And I need someone and I need new generations of artists

to be able to have a whole rich life that they can afford to make things so that we can share in that. And AI doesn't do that. It may make wonderful things. Indeed, it does make some wonderful things. But it's not the same thing. So we're talking about how we share the spoils, and we're having very, very similar arguments,

whether it is in other creative industries or if it's about our NHS data. We're about to have the same battle saying, this is our data, and if you build the cures of the future, we don't want you to do it on the back of our data and then charge us or maybe create things that we can't even afford in the future.

Those are the thoughts of Baroness, Beber Kidron. Let's talk now to A.M. Ford, journalist and author, something of an authority on AI in music. Aymond, a very good afternoon from us. We've got so much to talk about. To jump on and talking about the convincing nature of music, to talking about what it is that people can actually do now. So can you explain to us? There are three big companies emerging in the AI music world, aren't there? Clay, Udio and Suno. What do they actually do? All of them are generally within what we term generative AI or Gen AI, which it's basically it takes existing content and then lets you generate something new from that. So it's basically it will have scraped existing music and then you can create songs in the style of. Now, this becomes a licensing issue if you could say, make me a song in the style of Taylor Swift meets Abba,

whether or not those artists have agreed to have their name. names included, but you could say, make me a song in the style of a famous US country pop star singing in front of a famous Liverpoolian band. So you could probably work around that. And then that would create something akin to Taylor Swift from the Beatles if you wanted it to. Is the huge problem here that we're talking about it now, and actually everybody should have been talking about it a long time ago, before the big scrape across these artists had happened?

Well, I guess this is one of the issues that a lot of this scraping was happening behind the scenes. You would have these companies, AI companies, in stealth development, and no one would have known that they were scraping their copyrights until the end product came. So, like, I could set up a generative AI company and just subsume as much music as possible,

and copyright holders wouldn't know. When I take it to market, is where it becomes an issue. So obviously this all happened behind the scenes. We saw that a couple of years ago with Anthropic and they had to reach a multi-billion dollar settlement with the book and magazine industry because they were basically scraping every book

that had ever been published. Mikey Shulman, who's the CEO and co-founder of Sunu, says that the format of the future is music you play with, not just play. What does he mean? I guess his argument is, and I interviewed him for The Guardian last year, I think his argument is that we're now at a stage where music is becoming much more interactive. It's no longer a sit back and listen to it.

It's something that you can participate in without necessarily having any musical training or any musical expertise. So the whole idea is, or certainly their belief is that music is something that particularly younger audiences want to have a very different relationship with, whether or not they do remains to be seen. But I guess this is the premise that they are going into the market on. Sure. Peter, one of our listeners, Amon, says, what's the difference between, for example, a musician or artist just listening to a song and using it to inspire their own new composition?

This is what AI does using mathematical probabilistic formulae. No one says that the human musician is stealing. No, they don't. And I guess this is a whole big issue of attribution, which is going to become a very contested area in generative AI. But the whole point is that the human will not be able to completely replicate exactly what they heard in the original, whereas generative AI platforms can, they can basically rebuild and recreate what they actually hear.

And I know, for example, that there are some trucks already being put out there, where it's not even like a sound-alike cover version. It's basically they're getting AI to recreate the original recording. So this is very different from like Taylor Swift going back and re-recording her songs. Its AI is actually going and recreating the song. So it sounds exactly the same. And I think also the human side of things and where great art comes from is it's in the mistakes. It's in that you stumble across a chord sequence or a melody or something like that.

You might have had something in your mind that inspired it, but the human, old great art is something that goes beyond its inspiration, whereas generative AI is just the inspiration. It's just a repurposing of the source material. And in fact, we were talking about the opening cord to a hard day's night on the program yesterday that was just something that hadn't been heard before, but then led to lots of other things. And that's the point, isn't it?

AI just wouldn't have done that. It couldn't do that because it wasn't there before. No, it wasn't. I think it's great art exists between the perfection of the art form and the imperfection of the human behind it. Whereas generative AI is, it's basically based on formulas and that can create something that comes close to art or kind of exists in the same postcode, but it doesn't go be, it doesn't transcend. And that's the problem. Although we are at such an early stage in this, it probably will start to get to that point where it will make that nix creatively that we presume is the sole preserve of the human.

Phil says I really like some AI tracks. Does that make me a bad person? Absolutely not. No, there's a lot. You will hear AI music increasingly in kind of sound bads and things like that. So in a way, it's no different from music, which you would have hired in lifts and things like that. So, but one of the things is that that is taking work away from human musicians.

And it's kind of the first bit of the business that AI has collapsed for musicians where they were writing intros to podcasts or like incidental music for a Netflix or a BBC series or whatever. and you can just get AI you basically go, I need 15 seconds of slightly creepy music and AI can do that, whereas before a human would have had to go in and write the music and record it and make sure that

it matched the visuals and so forth. A lot of that's being automated and that feels like the first frontier, but I feel that that's the part that's most easily replicate it by AI, but you're not going to get AI to run.

write like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dillon or Let It Be by the Beatles or whatever, these legendary incredible tracks and songs. Because I don't think it has that human element. It doesn't have that human empathy. I think it's music without soul and without empathy, which is no music at all. So it's a very interesting one. Phil, don't condemn yourself at all. But also it reveals the point about our own place in all of this, doesn't it, Aym?

That actually we can still make a choice as consumers of music of what it is that we want to spend our money and our time on. Yeah, although we should be aware of what is and is in either wholly AI or partially AI. I know that some streaming services and some music distributors are automatically blocking, the ingestion of purely AI content. But maybe we need some kind of kite mark or system like when you go on a streaming service and you're listening to a track that has swear words on it,

it'll have a little E showing that the lyrics are explicit. So maybe we need a button beside that which says AI. Buried in Spotify where it says about the track where you find out the label and the songwriters and so forth. It's optional for people to say that they used AI in polar. of the creation of this strike, but I think we need some sort of blanket system so that the consumer is fully aware and therefore they can then make that choice. At the moment, it's kind of potluck for them. Right. I think that's such a good idea. I really wish that that would happen.

Tell us a bit more about the money then. I mean, some of these companies, the ones that we were talking about before, I mean, they are hugely valued. Maybe they're overvalued at the moment. But, you know, where there's money, there will be power. So do you think that they will start to change our tastes with their power? Well, there's a huge disparity between AI as an investment category in Silicon Valley, particularly generative AI, and the business model, the consumer fees and business model around that. You would see the amount of money that a company like Suno has raised and how much the excellent. generate from subscriptions.

So a lot of this has been kind of driven on the kind of false fuel of venture capital is money. And my gut instinct is that there's so much hype around this as an investment category that we're potentially facing a dot-com crash

like we did in 2000 where investment massively, massively overreached itself and the market just wasn't there. Well, I suppose that's something that an awful lot of music aficionados might actually hope for. Amen Ford and Bieber Kidron, of course we want to know your thoughts

and you can make them as harsh or as enthusiastic as you like. Even I are with you all of next week. We are Jane and Fee at times. dot radio. Have a lovely weekend. I hope now the temperature drops across the UK that we all get a decent night's sleep. But if you use

this podcast as a sleep aide then you will have gone already. Good night. Congratulations. You've staggered somehow to the end of another Offair with Jane and Fee. Thank you. If you'd like to hear us do this live, and we do do it live, every day, Monday to Thursday, 2 till 4 on Times Radio. The Jeopardy is off the scale. And if you listen to this, you'll understand exactly why that's the case. So you can get the radio online, on DAB, or on the free Times Radio app. Offair is produced by Eve Salisbury, and the executive producer is Rosie.

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