Sound Industries in the Age of AI

Join the Department of Rhetoric and Communication Studies and the Center for Liberal Arts and AI (CLAAI) for a research presentation by Jeremy Morris, professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on how emerging technologies like software, apps and artificial intelligence are shaping creative and media industries like music and podcasting. He is the author of two monographs: Podcasting (2024) and Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture (2015). Morris also founded and maintains PodcastRE.org, one of the largest, publicly-accessible databases devoted to podcast preservation.

In this research talk, Professor Morris will share insights from his ongoing project examining various AI music generation tools (e.g. Suno, ElevenLabs, and Stable Diffusion) and assessing how various prompts are “interpreted” by different systems. The project examines how certain reductive or stereotypical assumptions about music genres, identifies, and cultures are potentially reproduced and enforced by such AI systems. For example, explicitly comparing the generated output for prompts like "Compose a 30-second track for a corporate meeting intro”  reveals how assumptions of class and other social hierarchies are represented in music and reproduced by AI tools.
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Jeremy Morris, Ph.D. is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is also a member of the Uncertainty and AI (Un-AI) research team at the UW-Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities. He teaches courses on the music industry, digital commodities, and research methods for media studies.

Sponsored by the Department of Rhetoric & Communication Studies, and the School of Arts & Sciences.