“Pyramid Song is me being totally obsessed by a Charlie Mingus song called Freedom and I was just trying to duplicate that, really.” This was Thom Yorke speaking to Mojo magazine back in 2001.
Listen to the two recordings. You can hear the relationship, but you would struggle to mistake one for the other.
I find that gap fascinating. Yorke reached towards somebody else's music and ended up with something recognisably his own.
We tend to tell the story of originality backwards. We see the finished work, notice how different it is, and assume difference must have been the intention from the beginning. Often, the beginning is much less glamorous. Somebody hears something they love and wants to get closer to it.
Then their own limitations intervene. Their timing is different. Their hands find another shape. The thing they thought they understood turns out to be something else. They make choices – about what to keep, what to discard.
A mistake on its own is just a mistake. Originality begins when someone hears something unexpected in it that is worth pursuing.
This is where the conversation about AI gets interesting.
An enormous amount of creative technology is sold on its ability to close gaps. The gap between what you imagine and what you can produce. Between a reference and a result. Between having an idea and having the skills to realise it.
If every surprise is treated as a production error, the business can quietly train its originality out of itself.
There is plenty to welcome in that. A person who couldn't previously make a film can begin experimenting with one. A musician can explore an arrangement without having an orchestra on standby. More people are able to enter the conversation.
But some of those gaps contain work we end up loving.
If the first attempt lands exactly where you expected, you have less reason to wander. You can become very good at producing the thing you already knew you wanted. That is useful. It can also leave your taste completely undisturbed.
I don't think we need to claim that AI can never produce an original result. That argument depends on a definition of originality people have been fighting over for centuries. The more useful question is what a person does with the result. Do they accept it because it resembles the reference? Or do they hear the strange bit and decide to follow it somewhere?
Creativity. It includes recognising when the work has outgrown the original brief.
For a creative business, this has practical consequences. If every surprise is treated as a production error, the business can quietly train its originality out of itself. Review processes reward familiarity. Successful work becomes a template. Soon the team is copying its own past with impressive efficiency.
At Rare Entity, I think we should be alert to the people who can interrupt that cycle. The ones with influences they know deeply, and enough curiosity to let those influences change in their hands. Their value extends beyond the work they have already made. It lies in their ability to recognise a promising new direction or a fresh angle that most of us would miss.
AI can give those people more material to work with. The decision about where to go with it still deserves time and attention.
Yorke set out towards Mingus. What matters is that he knew when to keep going as himself.
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By Dom Joseph, Co-Founder RARE Entity.
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Photo Credit: WikiCommons | Creative Commons | Thom Yorke, The Roundhouse, 2022.
