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Saturday, January 4, 2025

Music can thrive in the age of artificial intelligence

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The birth of ChatGPT brought a number of concerns about how enormous language models allow users to quickly subvert processes that once required human time, effort, passion and understanding. Moreover, the tech sector’s often tumultuous relationship with regulation and ethical oversight has left many fearful of a future in which artificial intelligence replaces humans at work and hinders human creativity.

While much of this alarm is warranted, we should also consider the possibility of human creativity flourishing in the age of artificial intelligence. In 2025, we will start to see this in our collective cultural response to technology. To explore how culture and creativity can adapt to the age of artificial intelligence, we will exploit hip-hop as an example. It is one of the most profitable forms of music ever invented and has already been influenced by enormous language models. We’ve all heard AI-powered rap songs from popular artists and seen them quickly gain popularity, easily being mistaken for true, original music. For example, during the recent rap feud between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, an AI-generated song titled “One Shot” was incorrectly attributed to Lamar. In 2025, we should expect to see more AI-generated bogus music, especially fueled by the social media circus, where the loudest and most provocative statements can instantly capture the attention of millions.

We believe that in 2025, artistic engagement with AI will begin to take three distinct forms.

The first option could be described as “full surrender”: don’t run away from technology, but rather embrace the fact that artificial intelligence can create terabytes of music in a matter of minutes, most of which is as enjoyable as the music created by our favorite artists. While this strategy will involve leaving music creation to robots, the human-powered aspects of music culture will remain. For example, one human element lies in the way AI-driven music is selected (think of successful DJs) and in the modern industry of art critics and commentators. It’s the same with TikTok influencers, who are currently driving the widespread popularity of landmarks in art and technology. Human-led discussion of AI products can be massive business and will spawn a neo-influencer culture that compares and evaluates this progress.

The second strategy will involve the indirect exploit of artificial intelligence in art, where creativity will become a fit hybrid of man and machine. On the hip-hop side, artists like 50 Cent have recently expressed their delight in AI-powered country music interpretations of hip-hop classics (often created for comic purposes). This is a model we will continue to see: AI-powered reimaginings or remixes of classic songs. Moreover, we can see an expansion of this model: the development of the battle-rap scene driven by AI algorithms trained on datasets of human artists. Or maybe even rap duos consisting of two members: a rapper and his AI-trained sidekick (with choruses also provided by a mix of human and AI singers).

This type of Robo-Franken-Hip-Hop leaves plenty of room for clever involvement and can spawn entirely modern subgenres of music. This will also have business implications: artists will be able to be paid based on their training data, which could be an advance over hip-hop business models of the past and present. The possibilities are as constrained as the infinite combination of human ingenuity and computing power.

Finally, 2025 will mark the formal beginning of a great irony: the art of artificial intelligence will spark a modern appreciation for classic man-made relics. As the volume of AI creations quickly outstrips the volume of human creations, highly prized human relics will become more valuable. For example, one of the messages that emerged from hip-hop’s 50th anniversary celebration was that society still lacks a general appreciation for the art form. Fewer than a dozen hip-hop artists or groups have been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Additionally, very few of hip-hop’s founding artists are wealthy because they built the art form at a time when it was not financially lucrative. Much like the retro technology industry that celebrates the elementary devices of the past, we will see a renewed appreciation for music from the analog era.

The development of artificial intelligence and related technologies will shed modern lightweight on original music that was created before its appearance. This will require an appreciation of proto-hip-hop, which could translate into a profitable industry around the preservation of original music and the associated valorization of artists. Artificial intelligence could support hip-hop’s origins, finally gaining the respect it has always deserved and a place among the high arts.

Human technology and art are two institutions that are defined by their ability to surprise us. Yes, the relationship between creativity and artificial intelligence will be tumultuous in the near future, but 2025 will be the turning point where we start to see greater possibilities. Perhaps there is a artistic lightweight at the end of the technology tunnel where analog-era art forms like hip-hop can thrive in the land of massive language models and whatever the AI ​​era will bring.

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