Norris and I sit down with Edmund Gray, CEO of Kissmet Music Group, for a conversation that I found fascinating in the context of today's fast-changing world.

Edmund is the creator behind Zhaion, an AI-hybrid R&B project grounded right here in Detroit, complete with a promotion online, free-to-play 8-bit game based on driving The Lodge. Play it here: https://weonthelodge.net/

Rather than hiding the tech behind a curtain, Edmund is being entirely upfront about using generative tools to bring his music and world-building to life.

We get into the ethics of the music business, the reality of creative tools, and why transparency matters as AI becomes, whether we like it or not, a part of our lives.

This is exactly the kind of smart, nuanced local discussion I love having on the show, and I think you're going to get a lot out of it.

Check out Zhaion's new album No Clearance dropping this Friday. https://zhaion.com/

What do you think? Hit us up, dailydetroit@gmail.com or 313-789-3211.

Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for posting. Please refer to the original audio before quoting.

Jer Staes: All right, well today's episode is going to be interesting, because we're going to dive into a new album that's coming out from an artist and a music group. And there's some interesting twists to this one because this artist is created, but let's meet the creator, Edmund Gray. He's the CEO of Kissmet Music Group. Welcome to Daily Detroit.

Edmund Gray: Thank you, thank you, thank you so much.

Introducing Zhaion: The Concept of an AI Hybrid Artist

Jer Staes: Yeah, so we're here to talk about an album that's going to be dropping on Friday...

Edmund Gray: Friday.

Jer Staes: ...but you are the creator of Zhaion. And what is Zhaion?

Edmund Gray: First of all, thanks for having me on the show. I do appreciate it.

Jer Staes: Of course.

Edmund Gray: Zhaion is an AI hybrid artist who combines my physical voice with engineering and AI production, and full written capabilities of my songwriting. So it's a soup of being an AI artist, sort of a comic book style, and a music artist.

Jer Staes: Okay. So how did you come to this point? Because that's a very interesting choice.

Edmund Gray: Well, first of all, I do real music as Grateful Edmund. So like that's on iTunes, so I do that for real. I've always wanted to write pop and R&B songs. I'm a little too old, and I don't have 1% body fat. Okay, to do that, I cannot be Chris Brown at my age, okay?

Jer Staes: I have a lot more than 1% body fat.

Edmund Gray: So I said, okay, I have all of these songs that I've written. I can either try to shop them on the market, but I kind of looked at an artist—are you familiar with Xenia Moonay? This is an AI artist that got a $3 million deal from an entertainment company.

Norris Howard III: Yes, okay, yes.

Edmund Gray: And I said, wow. I was like, what type of music does she do? Turns out she does gospel, she has a following, and they really put a lot of money behind her. I don't necessarily write gospel songs, but I write pop and R&B. I said I would like to do something similar to that, but I think she came out on GMA or something, and she sort of unveiled herself. What I wanted to do was unveil myself in the front end instead of the back end. I want you guys to know that this has partially been created using AI, and I am the creator. So can we go past that so you guys can just listen to the songs and decide whether or not you like the songs?

Norris Howard III: Or not, yeah. So you wanted to go up front street where there was no ifs, ands, or buts. You were very upfront about the fact that there is AI generation used in the creation of Zhaion. But as it says here on the website, the lyrics are written by you, the videos are cut by you. My first question is, where did this conceptualization for you start? What was your starting point on how do you begin to say, "You know what, I think I got to use generation in order to get this vision out"?

Edmund Gray: I do a lot of different things—I do film directing, I do editing, I do real music production, and it's just... I like generative AI because it allows you to get an idea out fast. I notice Detroit, for instance, is like the Tubi capital of the world. I've talked to a lot of film directors that do Tubi movies, and what we have in common is, if you want to make B-roll for something, let's say feet walking across the rain, it used to be a pain to just say, "Hey, I need you to come and walk across some rain so I can get B-roll". So it started with that. I was just kind of playing around with—are you familiar with Seedance?

Norris Howard III: Mm-hmm.

Edmund Gray: So I was going on Seedance and was like, "Oh, I can make real material with this, and I can make it well". That's how it started. It started from me playing around with Seedance to really just using it, and I was using Google Veo 3, and I just kind of liked Seedance better. So I was like, I want to do it. Then I came up with the character. What do I want him to be? I don't want him to sound like anything that's out there. I want him to be a unique individual, but obviously, if he's too weird, you'll lose people. I want to do this, but I want to be like the Michael Jackson of the AI music space.

Norris Howard III: Interesting.

Edmund Gray: Michael's whole thing was, "Yeah, you do videos, but you don't do videos like me". "You do music, but you don't do my type of music". So I wanted to do the same thing in the AI space: okay, we're going to use the same tools, but I'm going to really show y'all how to do this the correct way.

World-Building Detroit: The 8-Bit Lodge Racing Game

Jer Staes: It's interesting to me, too, the ties into the real world. One of the ways you're promoting this album that I thought was kind of brilliant, on WeOnTheLodge.net, is this game where it's about driving on The Lodge with it. What it does to me is unveil a universe of characters: you've got Zhaion, Grateful Edmund, Brick Layne, Growley, and Lisa, where it seems like you're starting to world-build as well as build an album.

Edmund Gray: Well, the reason why we start with Zhaion is because he's the home team, so everything starts with him. I took a year, I came out with his first album called Band, and we ended up charting on iTunes top 5. I used that fan base to start building other characters. Now I have a rapper called Brick Layne. He's a local Detroit rapper, a good Detroit rapper. He has a song called "No Translation". You should see his music video; it's a black-and-white noir video that looks like a Cagney flick. So I really wanted to integrate that. Zhaion's on the hook of that song, so they cross in between.

Jer Staes: What was the idea behind doing the game and putting in all of these Detroit locations? Because you rendered the city basically in 8-bit.

Edmund Gray: I was walking around the city working on the second album, and I wanted to ground Zhaion in Detroit, because he was born in Detroit—if there's such a thing as birth with AI. I was walking around and seeing guys coming from work in Carhartts and Cartier glasses, and I thought, what a contrast—somebody with very expensive Cartiers on looking like he just finished coming from a plant. I just loved that look. I'm originally from Washington, D.C., and my wife is from Detroit. She always used to tell me about this, and when I saw it for myself, I said, that's the look—it's grounded in Detroit. I didn't want it to be disrespectful; I wanted to pay homage. So I made a game for free, named after the viral video from 7-8 years ago where the guys were doing donuts on The Lodge and the girl came out saying, "We on the Lodge with it!"

Norris Howard III: Yeah!

Edmund Gray: That video just forever sticks in my brain. Every time I'm on The Lodge, that is literally your life—the speed limit is 55, and everybody's going 155.

Norris Howard III: The speed limit is how slow you can go on The Lodge!

Edmund Gray: I got a decently fast car, but every time somebody with a Hemi stares me down, I'm like, all right, you got it. I wanted to bring this to life, and I noticed street shootdowns around here during the summer. When you turn the game on, that scene where they were doing donuts is a real scene that got the cops coming downtown about two months ago. I incorporated that into the game.

D.C. vs. Detroit & Local Culture

Jer Staes: So you now stay in the city?

Edmund Gray: I do.

Jer Staes: As far as creative inspiration for you and these characters, what's the difference between D.C. and Detroit, and what helps influence you?

Edmund Gray: When you see that t-shirt that says "Detroit vs Everybody," around here, I feel like when you're in Detroit, you're in the hut. Once you become a part of—I mean, I'm married to a Detroiter, so I was already in the hut.

Norris Howard III: That permeates through us.

Edmund Gray: Exactly. When I went around to businesses like Pie-Sci and Royal Brewery and said I wanted to incorporate them into the game, I was expecting a no. They were like, "I love this, what do you need?" That was so Detroit to me, because it's like, "You got our back, we're going to have your back". I have signs in breweries and pizza places where people can scan the QR code and play the game online. I love the family atmosphere. People not from Detroit take it for granted. I lived in Raleigh for a couple of years after D.C., and all we had was a hockey team. You guys don't understand how great it is to live in Detroit where you can walk to all the sports teams, you've got the QLINE... And the food! Somebody had to remind me, "Baby, we all from the South".

Norris Howard III: We're all from the South!

Edmund Gray: D.C. is more government-centric; you guys are more motor-centric. That's the difference. Beyond that, we have a lot more in common than we do apart.

Norris Howard III: I got to ask this, because our listeners run the gamut from for-AI to don't-like-AI. How will you deal with or reckon with real-space, flesh-and-blood artists who ask why you didn't just write for a human or reach out to game developers, instead of using procedure-generated AI stuff?

Edmund Gray: There's no walls. If you want me to write you a song, I'll write you a song. What I do for Zhaion and Brick Layne is what I do for that. But if I need to write you a song, I can write you a song. Also, I've—for lack of a better word, I had a development deal many years ago with a major label that I won't name, and a lot of my songs got stolen. As an independent artist, I've had people sell me production from websites with "exclusive rights" that didn't clear the samples, because that's the producer's job to clear the samples. I put the songs out, and they took all of my publishing. So if you're going to have this argument that something is wrong with the AI, I think there's something really more wrong with the music business more than it is just with the AI. So it's just like, I am not condoning stealing. Anybody who has been trained on anything that I've done, they deserve to get paid. But then we start walking a thin line between, okay, how much of this is really your song because I don't know anybody that plays drums, I know maybe you do, I don't know anybody that plays guitar. So a lot of times they're using beat machines that's James Brown's drums most of the time, and your baselines are coming from Chic. So if I owe you a check, I'll give you that check, but make sure you also forward half of your check to James Brown, Chic, and these other people whose music that you didn't make. Now, there is real artists that do make live music, and I think most of them don't crutch on recordings, so I don't really think it's an issue. Plus, we're just not a threat. Name an AI artist you listen to.

Norris Howard III: Oh, I don't. So yeah.

Edmund Gray: Exactly. I can't take Zhaion to Ford Field and sell out 20,000 people. You're a human, you have personality, you have an advantage from the get-go that I just simply don't have. But when you listen to my music, if you go, "You made that using this, that, and the other, and you wrote it, I like it, I think I can mess with it," but I think you lose people with deceiving them.

Norris Howard III: As opposed to coming out and saying upfront that this is AI-generated and if you like it, you like it.

Jer Staes: That's part of what's so fascinating to me, because I heard that first track and I played the game and I didn't realize it at first that it was AI. I went to your site and I'm like, "Oh, you're upfront about it". That's fascinating. And I think about it in the way, because I have my own different thoughts about AI. I'm always wrestling with it, right? Because the world is changing. And as a journalist, there's some things I don't have AI touch. There's other things like, yeah, you know what? Transcriptions? That's hard work, and it makes it a lot easier for me to get things together and also create accessibility. You know, one of the things people have always asked for is transcriptions of our interviews. I wasn't able to afford that before AI, right? So I'm able to provide an additional service with it, but that isn't generative; I don't generally use generative for myself. But I do a different thing—I'm not making art, we're sharing facts. For me, when I looked at the site and looked at We On The Lodge, my first thought was almost like you were a comic book artist.

AI as a Tool vs. AI "Slop"

Edmund Gray: Absolutely. That's exactly what we were going for. I look at myself more like Aaron McGruder from The Boondocks. Like, you know, he was very open—obviously, it's a comic book or a cartoon, but it's like, look, I made these characters and I try to keep it in that world. When you do anything else, like "Oh, I am Bruce whatever, you know, and I'm trying to be a pop star," I just don't think—you're deceiving people. I see a lot of AI artists where what they're really trying to do is they're trying to game Spotify, and they're coming out with 12,000 songs a month and all of that stuff. I have one album that has seven songs on it, Brick Layne has one single, Zhaion has an album coming out Friday that has nine songs—I got 20 songs on the street. I am not flooding the zone.

Norris Howard III: Well, 'cause that's become a big issue for Spotify and the streaming services, because what people have been doing is they've been pumping so many songs, and maybe one or two hit because they put out 50 songs in a week. And then if one hits and gets on the charts, then they get a little bit of cash.

Jer Staes: So do you view it more as a tool to make your vision complete?

Edmund Gray: Absolutely. AI is much better for me getting production like that I really like as opposed to a producer, because a lot of producers a lot of times, they do what they want to do. And then it's like, well, they also sort of hold back beats. I've been with some big artists before. They'll play a production for you—something that's just nice—"Oh, that's for Jay-Z," so-and-so, you know? And they sort of like give you whatever's left over, you know? But when I'm dealing with AI, it's like I can—a lot of times, if I don't get what I want, I get very close. And that's why I love it. I'm like, "Ah, that's what I wanted," and I don't have to deal with that sort of middleman. But even with the artistry, when people think it's like a cheat code, AI is like the hardest music to do. If you were playing the game and you didn't realize that it was AI until after you went to my website, you literally just gave me a low-key compliment.

Jer Staes: Oh, I don't mean it—I'm just stating it as the fact. There's going to be people who listen to me and be like, "You didn't know?" And like, I live in reality a little bit, right? People have a lot of different feelings about this stuff. When AI first kind of came on the scene, there's like a really large contingent that's very loud online—and I respect a lot of their thoughts around like "never AI ever." And then a lot of people hit me up in the emails or on the street and be like, "You know what? I use it every day for this and that." I don't use it in the way that people are afraid of; I use it in a way where it's like...

Norris Howard III: Like "I use it for work," or "I'm a researcher and I use it for research."

Jer Staes: Yeah, exactly. Going through papers, and yeah, I double-check its work, but it's really helpful when—like someone said to me, you know, when there's 400 pages of some historic commission meeting and I need to find the one thing, it works really well to find the one building that I care about and all the references to it. You know, and if it's wrong, whatever, I'll find it again anyway. So I think it's really interesting because for me, I get nervous because on social media, it's black or white. And then what I've realized over time is that there are things definitely to be worried about, but then also, this is a thing that now exists, and there's no way it's going back in Pandora's box.

Edmund Gray: This is why AI slop is so easy to recognize: because a lot of people who are writing AI songs don't know bar sequences. And when I'm listening for stuff, it's over-worded, and it kind of—they don't know meter, they don't know timbre, they don't know. Because I'm a real musician who's using AI, I avoid these things. And when people listen to the songs, they go, "Oh, I just love these songs, they don't sound like other AI songs that I've listened to before," because I'm actually a musician. So the people who get dangerous with any part of AI—because you've been in the news business for 28 years—you don't need AI to write an article. You might need AI to help you with an idea for your already smart brain. You don't need AI for music. But a lot of times, I'll give Suno or whatever I use an idea, and it's totally not what I was looking for, but it was better! I did not think about it from this angle.

Jer Staes: So for you, it's the iterative process. It speeds up the iterative process.

Edmund Gray: Absolutely. So it's like, I just want people to take from that is like, I consider myself a talented person, and this just assisted me. It is not a crutch. If AI goes away tomorrow, I will still make music, and I have real music on Spotify right now.

The Story Behind No Clearance

Jer Staes: So if people are going to meet this album—let's say this is the first time they're hearing about you, No Clearance drops on Friday—where do people start with the album, and kind of what's the story that you're trying to tell with it?

Edmund Gray: Well, the first album—I won't get all the way into it—you'll see him, he has braids, and he's sort of pretty. There's a song on the first record that did very, very well, it's called "On Read." The kids—that's a terminology they use when you text somebody and they read it and they never hit you back. So the whole album, if you go to my Instagram @zhaionmusic, I drop little excerpts about it. He never gets this text back from his girl, which is Lisa, by the way, which is why she's on the game. And they never sort of get to a flatline of what's going on with their situation. It changes him. He grows a beard, he grows an afro, he puts his Carhartts and his Cartiers back on. It's a story to me.

Norris Howard III: It's a heel turn.

Edmund Gray: Yeah, it's a heel turn! So it makes him cold. The first album is very sort of thriller-ish, it's a bop, it's a disco 70s/80s bop. No Clearance is a The Weeknd type of vibe, or a darker R&B, that Aaliyah third album type of stuff. So it's that! So when you look at the track list, there's a song called "New Number (On Read 2)" in parentheses. So like, look, I'm no longer looking for that "On Read" text that I never got, but now she's hitting him up. So the whole album has changed him, and that's what you would expect for a human artist. They don't make a whole bunch of crap and then they just make album after album—they change. Like Nas's first record is very grounded in Queensbridge, that second record is broader...

Norris Howard III: Yeah, it was written as broader.

Edmund Gray: It was definitely written broader. It's the same thing with Zhaion. This record is for my taste, because I was testing the market for Band to see what people liked. They liked "On Read." I said, "Okay, I'm going to give you nine 'On Reads.'"

Norris Howard III: There you go, there you go.

Outro & Listener Discussion

Jer Staes: All right, well if you want to check everything out, you can play the game at WeOnTheLodge.net, and you can also check out Zhaion at zhaion.com.

I'd love your feedback. I'm really glad that you spent the time to come here and talk about your work, because I think this is a fascinating topic wherever you stand on it. And I want you to go check out the music, I want to really—let's have a community conversation about this, because I think it's fascinating because it's here.

Norris Howard III: Yeah, and what I'll say is I think you are braver than a lot of people who've dealt with AI, because as you said before, a lot of folks have tried to hide the fact that they've used AI to assist themselves in making the music, and you put it right out there on front street. I want to first of all just say, I find that brave for a lot of folks, 'cause it can get really—people get real tight about how you using AI and what not.

And so, you know, I think I'm with Jer, let's have a conversation, let me know, let's get everybody's opinion in on it.

Jer Staes: Yeah, and go listen to it. So Edmund Gray, CEO of Kissmet Music Group and creator of a number of characters, thank you so much for your time on Daily Detroit.

Edmund Gray: No, thank you for having me.

Jer Staes: Absolutely. All right, well we are done for today. Feedback as always, dailydetroit@gmail.com or 313-789-3021.