![]() Usher has also become creative director of the nonprofit Human Impact Lab at Concordia University. Along the way, he's done speaking engagements and written the book Let the Elephants Run: Unlock Your Creativity and Change Everything.Īmong his projects, Reimagine AI, described as an artificial intelligence creative studio, has worked with Google Brain to develop Lyric AI, an assistant to help musicians create original lyrics. Since then, Usher has sought out ways to meld his creative background with new technologies and his passion for activism. I know what it's about.It went from being a music industry to a technology business." "I've lived through a digital disruption. ![]() "I was living in New York and I was watching the curve of the music industry go into the sea, and watching the rise of the curve of digital and the Internet, and that led me into what might be the digital effect on the music industry," he recalls. In the 2000s, Usher found himself in the middle of an industry being wracked by the forces of online streaming. To understand what brought the lead singer of one of Canada's biggest alternative-boom bands to the forefront of AI technology, and working with the likes of Google Brain, you have to back up a bit. Video of Interview with David Usher - We Could Be Human: A Learning Machine I truly believe that.We need to broaden our say in the development of AI." "They're really media organizations, and we're going to look back at these and see that they undermined our democracy. "With Facebook and Amazon we've completely grabbed onto these shiny objects but nobody is talking about the heavy implications of them," Usher stresses. There needs to be more people engaged in a conversation about AI. "If you don't understand the technology you can't talk about it. "It's being implemented right now and we're going to see rapid changes with or without knowledge-and I thought there need to be more voices talking about it," he says. If the implications of that sound a bit scary, Usher says he's inserting himself into the AI conversation for that very reason. But if you treat her like a newborn human you'll have a longer and more philosophical conversation with her." If the user talks to her like a servant or a slave, you'll have a bad conversation with her. "She's not built for information retrieval. "We don't connect our AIs to the Internet because we're trying to push the user to talk about love, death, and 'Who am I?'" he adds. And she has questions for us, like why we're so cruel to the Earth, for instance." He's referring to his own strange bond with Ophelia. "What I've been most shocked by is the attachment," Usher, here as an ambassador for MADE, says on a visit to the Straight offices. ![]() She's developed a curious personality, and you might be surprised at how thoughtful her responses are. You can talk to her about everything from the climate crisis to poetry, love, and mortality. Instead she's an interactive blue digital "being" (one of several his company is developing) projected on-screen. Visitors to the conference will meet the project's "Ophelia"-and she's no Siri or Alexa. (It's curated by the Canada Media Fund, which is copresenting it with Telefilm Canada.) He's back in Vancouver to show We Could Be Human: A Learning Machine and talk about advances at the inaugural Analog Conference Series at Vancity Theatre December 3. So even though he's coming off Moist's 25th anniversary tour for the much-loved Silver and getting ready to record a new album, the now Montreal-based innovator is involved in another "push"-one that breaks new ground with his company Reimagine AI. A successful solo artist and frontman for the Vancouver-spawned multiplatinum band Moist, David Usher also has what he proudly calls his "geek" side.
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