Artificial Intelligence and Creative Discovery

30 June 2025. Published by Benoît Labourdette.
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In 2025, AI is radically transforming musical creation, opening unprecedented creative perspectives that question our relationship to art and authenticity.

The emergence of an automated musical ecosystem

In this mid-2025 period, artificial intelligences that create musical content are the subject of much criticism. Piloted by human beings who hope to profit from this automation, they are now tasked with creating musical pieces published en masse on music platforms. Alexis Lanternier, CEO of Deezer, indicated in April 2025 in the platform’s official communications that approximately 20,000 new tracks generated by artificial intelligence are uploaded daily to his platform, representing 18% of all daily uploaded content — a figure that has almost doubled since January 2025 when it was only 10%. These productions are accompanied by bots programmed to artificially inflate listening numbers, with Deezer estimating that up to 70% of plays for tracks entirely generated by AI are fraudulent. These fake audiences generate revenue for the producers, who are very human, of these new kind of machine-slave artists.

If this approach were to prove a substantial source of revenue, one could easily imagine a fully automated ecosystem: machine-producers controlling machine-artists, listened to by machine-audiences that would genuinely share their opinions and tastes. These producing, creating, and spectating machines would thus create authentic audiences, evolving at their own pace, interacting with each other and generating revenue based on play counts. These profits would feed commercial companies themselves owned by machines, whose benefits would serve their reproduction and the expansion of their capabilities.

We are not yet at this stage of a world of machines endowed with such autonomy, but this evolution could perfectly fit within the logic of our capitalist system. Indeed, the humans who operate it already function like dehumanized machines, their sole objective being abstract financial profit, disconnected from any concrete reality and no longer corresponding to any real need. This situation is particularly striking among the ultra-wealthy, who accumulate ever-greater gains without this serving them for anything. What remains tragic is that these profits are realized at the expense of other citizens and at the cost of impoverishing a large number of human beings.

An authentic algorithmic creativity

Let us now focus on these creative machines. One might initially believe that the music they produce is extremely standardized and devoid of interest, being merely a pale imitation of human creativity. Yet we must acknowledge the contrary: these extremely sophisticated algorithms, capable of simultaneously managing billions of parameters, possess the capacity to invent forms that are indeed referenced, but what music is not? Humans themselves practice covers, which moreover constitute the heart of classical music: 90% of it is nothing but an infinite repetition of the same pieces, enriched with subtle nuances of interpretation, orchestration, instrumental choices, arrangements, and direction.

Certainly, human sensitivity brings a particular embodiment, but machines are precisely designed to mimic this embodiment. Moreover, many renowned musicians now create orchestral music with digital instruments that have recorded an infinite multitude of nuances, making their playing sensitive because it is based on the very quintessence of human sensitivity. Although the result is not exactly identical, the resemblance is striking.

The legacy of Ray Kurzweil: from musical synthesis to artificial intelligence

It is revealing that Ray Kurzweil, one of the great promoters of transhumanism employed at Google since 2012 as director of engineering and author of “How to Create a Mind” (2005), was in the 80s one of the great builders of musical synthesizers, based on an exceptional innovation that has had so many followers. Born in 1948, he had already created at age 17 a computer program capable of composing in the style of great classical composers, which earned him reception at the White House at the time.

His major innovation, which ensured the success of his instruments on all the great stages and with the greatest rock groups, consisted of associating synthetic sounds produced by oscillators with filter systems, sounds that only remotely resemble real instruments since they are generated by vibratory electronics, with samples, that is, recordings of real sounds. Now, while the recording of a real sound remains fixed and invariable, the synthesizer can be controlled in real time. Kurzweil’s innovation was precisely to associate these two dimensions: the authenticity of real sound recording and the nuance of synthetic sound.

As he explained himself, the objective was to “marry extraordinarily flexible computer control methods with the beautiful sounds of acoustic instruments.” He thus opened the way to electronic instruments of a level of embodiment that has become standard today, so convincing that it almost completely deceives us. The greatest musicians and composers now use this type of instrument, without anyone crying scandal.

Towards an aesthetic of the inhuman

The massive musical productions created by artificial intelligence right now therefore intrigue me profoundly. I want to discover the creativity of these machines, precisely because it is inhuman. No doubt that no human would have created in this way, just as AlphaGo invented in 2016 unprecedented Go game openings that no human had imagined before. This singular and resolutely inhuman creativity, let us not deceive ourselves about its nature, proves enriching, in the same way that electronic instruments are. Who would dare today to claim that Daft Punk is a mediocre group on the pretext that it used machines? Who still considers electronic music as a sub-genre inferior to others? No one, because that would be manifestly false.

I therefore believe that we must grant a particular place to these new creative universes and open ourselves to their discovery, because they will surely broaden our perceptions. As machines progress in capacity, this expansion will only amplify. A new world of creative representation opens to us, as exciting to discover as electronic music or concrete music were in their time: ways of creating with different foundations than ours, but nonetheless in resonance with what we are.

Artificial intelligence has emancipated itself from research laboratories and works of science fiction thanks to the public launch in November 2022 of the conversational robot ChatGPT, which was very quickly appropriated by an immense number of people internationally, in professional, educational and even private contexts. The fact that artificial intelligence has now been identified by the human community as part of everyday life finally opens the door to critical awareness on this subject.

Of course, artificial intelligence concerns industry, work, creation, copyright... and we need to anticipate its future productive uses, in order to stay “up to date”. But to accompany our lives as they integrate this new facet, it seems to me essential to produce a critical thought, i.e. to put ourselves in a position to reflect on what is happening to us, what is changing us, to remain lucid and capable of freedom of thought and action.
What is “critical thinking”? It means questioning, from the outside, practices that have been internalized. To do this, I believe that experimentation, cultural action, play and hijacking are highly effective tools for research, exploration, dissemination and reflection. For me, research is collaborative, and intelligence is collective and creative. This requires good methods of cooperation, between human beings and with machines. Here, I bring together stories of experience, methodological texts and practical ideas. I share concrete ways in which artificial intelligence, like any other tool, can be invested in the service of humanism.

Here are a few openings for critical thinking on AI, in the form of questions:

  • Is artificial intelligence a subject in itself? Is it not rather a medium of existence, like digital technology, whose fields need to be distinguished in detail?
  • Why do we never talk about ecology when we talk about artificial intelligence?
  • Which works of science fiction would come closest to what we’re currently experiencing with AIs?
  • How can we use artificial intelligence in a playful way? How can we imagine creative activities for young and old alike?
  • What is the nature of the entanglement between artificial intelligence and the capitalist project?
  • What are the political dimensions of artificial intelligence?
  • How does artificial intelligence concern philosophy? Which philosophers are working on the subject today?
  • What is the history of artificial intelligence? Both its successive myths and the evolution of its technologies.
  • How can we create artificial intelligence ourselves? In particular, with the Python language.
  • Are there unseen artificial intelligences that have a major influence on our lives?
  • What does artificial intelligence bring to creation? How can we experiment with it?

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