This anniversary speech by the ABBA creator coincides with his corresponding intervention at the UN Forum "AI for Good", with him highlighting the need to establish international rules and collective licensing. He focuses on the issue of fair remuneration for artists, especially in cases where their works are used to train AI tools.
Driven by the truly impressive capabilities of AI to create perfect musical compositions, but also to choose words that impress, Ulvaeus raised the crucial question: Is AI capable of moving its recipients and conveying intense emotions, such as that of experience and experience? At this point, the creator shared the words of historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari that deeply influenced him.
“Everything that consists of words will progressively be taken over by AI,” claims Harari. However, music, as Ulvaeus explained, hides within itself a structural ambiguity. Songs are simultaneously music and language, but at the same time they are neither of these two, transcending the rules of both of these worlds. For him, as he pointed out, “music is not just a product. It is proof,” a proof of life and lived experience. So does the source of an emotion matter? Does it matter whether what moves us comes from a human or an algorithm?
His answer is affirmative: it matters. And his hope for the future is based precisely on this vision: that people will continue to search for the origin and source of things and to seek experienced creation with the emotions it arouses. This is also the legacy for future generations.