How are you preparing HYBE for the rise of generative artificial intelligence?
I have long doubted that the entities that create and produce music will remain human. I don’t know how long human artists can be the only ones to satisfy human needs and human tastes. And that’s becoming a key factor for my operation and a strategy for HYBE. We were able to acquire a company, Supertone, that can clone voice completely. Not just tone, but also intonation. So for example, we can record your voice and then put or apply Angelina Jolie’s intonation or her speech and make it into a completely different voice. And this technology can also replicate the character of a person, in any language. You can make the voice older or younger. Currently we’re running some small-scale projects with this company, and one of them is scheduled to be published and rolled out in May. Inside our company we call it Project L. It’s still in the pilot stage.
Are you worried that people could use that kind of technology to imitate the voices of BTS members for profit?
Of course, but that doesn’t keep us from pursuing it. I believe regulations and institutions must be put in place and social consensus [around AI] should be made as soon as possible. Recently, Hollywood’s Writers Guild of America drafted a document to handle AI writing scripts. Rather than keeping AI from writing scripts or not using AI, I believe it is a more appropriate to respond to such change in society.
Okay interesting fact time. Years before HYBE, at Big Hit Entertainment they were struggling to get cash before the debut of BTS. So how did they get out of debt? Yamaha and SBS were launching a korean language version of vocaloid. All the talent agencies in South Korea big and small rejected their offer to have one of their talents to make a voicebank for them except one company, Big Hit. So Bang took the offer and had one of the agency’s girls make a voicebank for them. Bang even produced a few of SeeU’s demos promoting the voicebank
For one of the televised performances with SeeU he even had like half of BTS perform as her backup dancers too
So I find it interesting that he would even consider going back into the voicebank business.
