WITHIN TEMPTATION’s SHARON DEN ADEL On Artificial Intelligence In Music: ‘We Always Have To Adapt To New Changes’

In a recent interview with Germany’s Radio Bob!, vocalist Sharon Den Adel of Dutch metal titans WITHIN TEMPTATION spoke about the band’s decision to use artificial intelligence technology to create the videos for their recent singles “Bleed Out” and “Wireless”. Regarding whether she and her bandmates are concerned about the variety of dangers AI poses, ranging from the small to, potentially, the existential, before embracing it for the creation of their videos, Sharon said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Well, I totally agree with the fact that what you see a lot of times is that technology is ahead of lawmaking. So it would be nice if that would catch up a little bit, that we have a law that says what you are allowed to do with this app and tool to use only in the correct way, of course, without harming anyone. But on the other hand, the genie is out of the bottle, I think, also in a way. It’s like with the industrial revolution, you saw factories taking over jobs as well. And in the end it created jobs again as well… in the same sector a lot of times, but maybe in a different way. And it means that we always have to adapt to new changes, I think, and it’s always scary because people don’t wanna change; they wanna keep everything the same. And I do understand that. It is scary, because people can also use this in a very wrong way, to my opinion, and that’s why we need laws to prevent that.”

She continued: “What we did with our videos, actually, we worked with the same amount of people. We filmed the band, we used a camera crew, a director, someone to write a script with, as far as there is a very — it’s not that much of a script, but there was a script that we made together. And then the only one who was added to the whole process was actually an AI expert. And it took us one and a half months to get it really the way it is now, which is a long time, especially to get lip sync and not weird pictures in the video that we didn’t want. Like for instance, with the first one, with ‘Wireless’, we did also an AI video, but then it was just like without the band. And for instance, we saw a soldier in the video, and then all of a sudden their helmet changed into a mushroom. And we couldn’t change it, because AI doesn’t — you can’t change AI that easily, so it does what it wants to do in a way. And you have, every time, a few options to choose from which direction you wanna go. And then you go on at that point. But it’s a lot of adjustments and a lot of work to get what you want. It’s not as easy as people think. And it went way more time into it than a normal video, but we felt like this is a new tool and it’s good to have this discussion. By using it, you talk about it and you also realize together, what do we accept and what don’t we like about it? And it’s not the most beautiful video, but it’s a new technology. And I am proud of what the AI expert made out of it. He worked really hard and I think put all his love and passion into that creative process. And, yeah, it just became a totally different version of a normal video that we would normally do. And that’s what we like about it.”

Sharon added:  ”The funny thing as well is that all creative people that we worked with all those years are all working with AI already. So for us, it was like a few months ago that we realized, ‘Oh my God, something’s catching up on us,’ and we didn’t know about it. And it’s very cool because you can do so many things with it. It gives so much more opportunities to make something creative that normally we would not be able to do because it is time consuming or too expensive. And now we can do it in quite easy way, but still not that easy as people think.”

WITHIN TEMPTATION‘s latest album, “Bleed Out”, came out in October. The LP features the singles “The Purge”, “Entertain You”, “Wireless”, “Bleed Out” and “Don’t Pray For Me”.

WITHIN TEMPTATION will embark on a European headlining tour in the fall of 2024. The trek marks the band’s return to indoors venues after the successful “Worlds Collide” tour featuring co-headliners EVANESCENCE. During that run, WITHIN TEMPTATION performed at Europe’s most iconic venues in the fall of 2022, including The O2 in London.