GOING FOR A SONG OP-ED: AI and the future of creativity — can artists’ histories travel with their work?
During a Creative Cnergy panel on AI, one core question emerged: as AI makes content creation seamless, will the human stories and history behind the art get erased?
During the Creative Cnergy panel on AI, Nic Burger, Universal Music Group's digital director, brought up an intriguing question: as AI streamlines content creation, will the human stories and history behind the art be lost forever? Burger's analogy was simple: the microwave didn't eliminate cooking, it only reduced the threshold for it. He believed AI may do something similar for creative work.
The symposium in Sandton, Africa's wealthiest square mile, brought together panellists from both creative and policy backgrounds. Dr Karabo Maiyane, head of philosophy at Nelson Mandela University, traced the history of technologies that disrupted creative life, from printing to photography. However, Maiyane argued, AI goes beyond merely helping creative work travel; it participates in the making itself.
Digital artist Stephen Hollis used Deezer, the French streaming platform, as an example. Again and again, Deezer generated almost 75,000 fully AI-generated tracks daily, making up about 44% of all uploads. Hollis reduced this number to one artist uploading an album while thousands of machine-generated songs accompanied it.
Social innovator Mbali Njomane discussed African users engaging with AI systems designed and trained in the West, questioning whether Africans would remain passive consumers or become co-creators. She shifted the focus from access to agency, asking whether human creativity is merely data that AI absorbs and transforms.
The discussion then turned to authorship and its complexities. Solomon Linda's 1939 recording of Mbube in Johannesburg, which evolved into The Lion Sleeps Tonight, is a prime example. Linda's connection to the song's immense value remained elusive for decades. This story highlighted the distinction between creation and the work's entry into distribution, ownership, and payment – a situation complicated by the rise of AI.
Pfanani Lishivha, CEO of the South African Music Performance Rights Association (SAMPRO), explained that one generative AI song could incorporate up to 50 original songs. Lishivha broke down an imagined AI-generated track, revealing that it was built from various recordings, bass lines, recognizable voices, and drum samples. He concluded that the listener might not even be aware of the multitude of human histories embedded within the AI-generated work.
Written by urgent.news from Daily Maverick's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
