The beauty of Quincy Jones' creative process was that there were no shortcuts. By design, artificial intelligence can’t compete, says Bloomberg Opinion's Dave Lee.
The beauty of Quincy Jones' creative process was that there were no shortcuts. By design, artificial intelligence can’t compete, says Bloomberg Opinion's Dave Lee.
And yet, even if you ingested all those years of incredible work, you would still not have a Quincy Jones or anything like him. As I reflect on his life and consider how he worked, I find myself more reassured than ever that attempts to replace the hard and beautiful creative process with AI will forever fall hopelessly short.
An important part of the creative process, he once remarked, was forcing the artistes he worked with to prioritise only their best work. This was helped by the technological limitations of the time. In interviews about the making of Thriller, Jones described an agonised Jackson whittling down dozens of songs to just nine so they could fit onto a vinyl record.
Backers of this technology say it can only get better and more convincing. I say it will never be good enough. By its nature, AI is only capable of remixing past work into forms that might sound good enough to fool our eyes and ears, but it will always fall short of fooling our minds. In that sense, perhaps our greatest defense against AI in the arts is good taste.
If you want to see Jones at his very best, and be as confident about the future as I am, I would suggest watching The Greatest Night in Pop, a documentary released by Netflix in January. It pieces together behind-the-scenes footage of the making of the 1985 charity single, We Are The World, which Jones produced. It was his influence that helped bring a diversity of artists to a studio to work through the night.
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