It’s hard to scroll a news feed without the mention of AI. Putting the fear of data centres, and god forbid, global annihilation aside, in the short term most of us feel a deep unease as to where it may be taking us. We’re sold the idea that AI will reshape how we learn, create and work, it’s moving faster than many of us can process. Can we trust it, and can we trust who controls it? What happens to our information and where in all of this will people fit?
Such questions lack clear answers, and as I finish writing this, a news story is breaking that French supermarkets have had their systems hacked, causing refrigeration to fail and vast food wastage as a result.
The BACK LOUNGE recently hosted a session with Richard Turrell from Handle, and the discussion moved from the global to the personal. No doubt AI is here to stay, but how is it already affecting our jobs? As Turrell argued, if it can help us build better shows, safer productions and careers with longevity, it deserves our attention. But if it’s just a way to cut costs without improving outcomes, we need to ask tougher questions.
You may be using it already, whether openly or discreetly. If your role is back office, it can streamline paperwork, from production advancing to travel planning. If you’re designing or operating the show’s look and sound, then as Turrell pointed out, it can’t replace a skilled engineer on the day, even if it can catch problems faster than a hand on a fader.
It struck me how quickly our discussion turned to trust. When an artist walks on stage, they aren’t trusting software. They’re trusting the people. We might be coming to terms with AI supporting a show, but perhaps far fewer are comfortable with it running one. And when something goes wrong, management still looks to a person, not a platform.
There are practical worries too. If AI lets one person do the work of two or three, reducing headcount makes commercial sense, and the once-existential fear of being replaced by a machine is a tangible anxiety. But fewer people mean individual responsibility becomes even greater, and that’s risky. What happens when critical knowledge sits with one person and one system, and that person leaves mid-tour, or the software license suddenly costs ten times as much? Add to that mix the potential for power and connectivity issues, and the need for watertight cybersecurity, and the real danger here may not only be AI replacing people but creating single points of failure.
We can’t ignore the human cost of that frailty, and ours is an industry built on precarious work always at the mercy of market forces and local conditions with every new venue, city or country we visit.
We’ve learned that resilience comes from community and from looking out for each other, but it’s far harder to stay resilient or creative in isolation. Is this perhaps about where we place our value? The crew most likely to thrive – or survive – will be those who combine technical expertise with AI literacy, a willingness to keep learning and, undeniably, sound judgment and expertise that’s hard to learn from AI.
If we stop practising the skills, we may be held responsible for a system we no longer understand, and have no way to help if itfails.
None of this is about rejecting technology. We’ve embraced digital consoles and virtual soundchecks, and AI may very well ease some workloads. The judgement to know something’s wrong before the data says so, and the knowledge to fix it when the power’s down and the doors are already open, are learned on the job, under pressure and often in less-than-ideal conditions.
We risk losing the very instincts that get a show up when everything else fails. As those French supermarkets found out, systems can be vulnerable. When they fail, it’s people who keep the show on the road.
The challenge is to embrace AI responsibly, to let it serve us rather than the other way round, and to keep sight of what really matters: the people and the moments that make a live show unforgettable, before we find we’ve handed over more than we meant to.
This story originally appeared in TPi Magazine #296.
Words: Suzi Green
