The New Plymouth band who used Artificial Intelligence to make its latest music video | Stuff.co.nz

The music video for the latest single from Taranaki band The Slacks was “completely made” with an artificial intelligence image generator.

The title of the new track, Information Ape, was a play on the information age and Artificial Intelligence, known as AI, that can now be used by anyone to generate just about anything including pictures, videos, songs and essays, songwriter and guitarist Scott Armstrong said.

“The whole idea of being an information ape is you have now in your pocket, on your phone or your device, tools that were only available to specialists before,” he said

The song has been in making for the past 10 years and the band started recording it in 2019, but had to put it on pause because of Covid.

Information Ape will be part of an album with the same name coming out on vinyl in May, which will feature a song-tribute to musician Neil Young – Old King Young.

The dystopian video of the song showed AI-created images of apes conducting human lives and interacting with technology.

“We always wanted to do something using technology and AI has got to the point where it was suddenly user-friendly and producing images.

“Basically I just put the video together myself and spent several days on AI generator,” Armstrong said.

AI has reduced the costs of content production for small bands, but at the same time it could be threatening other people’s livelihoods and jobs, he said.

“You can make movies on your phone, you can make music on your phone. You can do all this stuff that required thousands of dollars to develop.”

The Slacks, which has released national hits such as Big Aroha and Yeah, Nah in the past, released Information Ape at a “small crowd” show at Most FM on Liardet St in New Plymouth on Saturday.