Future Soundscapes: Navigating the AI Revolution

Future Shock: AI versus the Dancefloor

AI’s champions promise democratisation, while its denouncers fear a devaluation of art as we know it. With electronic music scenes braced for impact, what exactly will the future sound like?

For the past three years, generative AI’s existential threat has dominated discourse in the creative industries. While tools like Midjourney and DALL-E 2 were catching the attention and imaginations of more tech-focused artists, the launch of Open AI’s ChatGPT in November 2022 forced both generative AI and large language models into the public consciousness. Ever since, generative AI’s development has felt like a rapid, uncontrollable and feverish acceleration towards an unknown future. The result has been a passionate polarisation of the tech’s future role in our creative process. In the past few months alone, Caribou was criticised for the use of AI voice in his album, Honey, the Oscars has come under fire after its Best Picture nominations Emilia Pérez and The Brutalist both admitted to their use of AI tools in post-production, and auction house Christie’s has been slammed for announcing its first AI art auction. The UK’s creative community also rose up against the government’s plans to amend copyright law to allow tech companies to train models on creative works without the rightsholder’s permission with a series of media campaigns and a silent protest album, highlighting the potential impact on the music industry.

AI has, in short, become a loaded term, sparking deep emotional reactions and existential questions. Where some see a mass plagiarism tool and a one-way street to grey homogeneity, others view AI as an opportunity to explore new types of tools that simply weren’t possible before, potentially resulting in new sounds, styles and genres. Meanwhile, a third group – the tech giants – are pushing their own agenda, attempting to change or prevent legislation that would make it more difficult to scrape data from the ‘open internet’ without permission. That lack of permission has led to a series of key lawsuits accusing tech companies of using copyrighted material to fuel their all-powerful models. The most pertinent case for artists is the RIAA – the US record industry trade body – versus AI music generation platforms Suno and Udio. There are also ethical concerns around bias in training data, cultural appropriation and the exploitation of traditional, folk or specialised musicians; a new kind of data colonialism. While these legal and ethical questions are, in many ways, the defining issues of AI in early 2025, exploring them in depth would require a significantly higher word count. Here, we’ll focus more on creativity and culture, but please keep them in mind.

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