Last month, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon delivered a speech to the graduates of the Wharton School about how easily he can make music with artificial intelligence—a message that was not exactly well-received. During an appearance on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, the banker who moonlights as a DJ remixed the message to produce something that sounds a little more revolutionary—even if he’s probably full of shit.
Near the end of his hour-long conversation with hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway, Solomon once again started in on how amazing AI tools are for musicians. But while his Wharton speech was entirely fawning over the technology, the CEO took a beat to recognize that AI doesn’t work without actual creatives.
“I think there are a couple of big issues that need to be wrestled through with this,” he said. “The first is these AI apps are using other people’s content in some way, and the artists aren’t getting in any way compensated for that. And I think you’ve got to think about how you’re going to bring the artist community and their IP in the discussion of this over time.”
Now, this is still a very ass-backwards way to go about this—these AI labs have already stolen and used the work of artists to train their models without compensation. And because these machines are black boxes, getting any sort of retroactive payment for the material usually requires proving the artist’s work was used in the first place, which can be very difficult. Basically, you’ve got to sue to get paid, and the best that most artists can do is get a paltry payout rather than the more difficult task of getting the work removed from the training data. The costs will likely outweigh the benefits even if you win.
But it’s at least someone in a position of power recognizing that AI is, in fact, built on the backs of people who were not paid by these companies for their production—and now those companies are salivating at potential trillion-dollar initial public offerings thanks to other people’s work.
Solomon also said that while the technology allows you to generate outputs much faster, “without a human being really massaging it and tempering it, I think you’re going to get, at the moment, mediocrity as opposed to really interesting, resonant stuff.”
That’s a new spin for the CEO, who played an AI-generated song for the graduating class of Wharton. (That’s right, he treated his captive audience to his personal AI slop.) There, he told the audience how he used an app called Tuno to create an “upbeat house song” that “talks about why Wharton’s grads should be optimistic about what’s in front of them in the years ahead, and how today is the best day in the history of the world to be in their shoes, and tomorrow will be better”—and bragged that it only “took ten seconds to create,” and told them there were “two more verses and three more choruses” that he (mercifully!) didn’t even play for them. (You can see clips of the speech here and here.)
Now, it’s all well and good that Solomon believes artists should get paid for their work. But he doesn’t really propose a model for achieving that. Additionally, he’s actively juicing the very companies that he believes should be paying for that work. His bank is leading the SpaceX IPO effort and is broadcasting some bonkers projections, like claiming that the company’s AI revenue will grow 100-fold by 2030, in a pretty shameless attempt to pump up the company’s stock price for the bank’s own gain. Goldman Sachs is also co-leading Anthropic’s IPO, so expect similar lofty predictions to follow for them.
At least it’s nice to know that Solomon is thinking about all those artists getting screwed while he wades in a pool of cash and listens to AI-generated music, like a rich guy’s version of a land acknowledgement.
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