The Emerging Digital Comet of Artists and Composers via Algorithm
Creative Age of Today: Human + Machine
For the sake of generations before ours, creativity had always been spectacularly human — the physical sound, emotional memory, and artistic imagination coming together in a spark. It was through passion painters channeled their pain. Artists poured heartbreak onto symphonies. Creativity was considered pure machine.
And then, artificial intelligence.
AI is not just crunching numbers or writing emails today — today, it’s writing poetry, painting dreamscapes, and composing symphonies. DALL·E, Midjourney, AIVA and other AI tools have long been available to enter the digital age when machines witness creativity as co-author.
Such stunning view — while scarily philosophical and empirically profound — is raising:
Are machines really creative, or are they just making soup remixes of what we’ve done?
To answer that question, we have to unpack how AI fundamentally makes (and what it is redefining in the process).
The Emergence of AI in the Creative World
🌟 Artificial Intelligence in Visual Arts: Code to Canvas
Sufficiently mixed: you mean a very basic style transfer to serve your selfie as Van Gogh or Picasso. But later, deep learning models with the ability to create new works from scratch emerged.
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Deepest Dream by Google (2015) – The very first neural network to dream visually bizarre and hallucinatory images from overly reading patterns in photographs.
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StyleGAN – A machine that becomes capable of creating extremely realistic fake human faces, and now evolving to arts (Fashion → Architecture).
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DALL·E / Midjourney – Text-generators that make images from ideas such as “a cat astronaut riding rainbow space in Van Gogh style.”
You are more than just a filter — these are the ideation outputs from its mathematical interpretation of human ideas.
🎧 AI for Music — Descompromised Composers
You thought of the music as safe from those machine hands, hmm?
AI models can now:
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Overture in the style of Mozart — classical symphonies, get it?
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Background cues for video games and films
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Produce, mix, and master albums in full
Well-known as:
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AIVA (Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist) – Scores a film, a game, and commercials with the virtual artist.
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Amper Music – Giving composers the ability to make instant royalty-free music
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MuseNet (OpenAI) – Can generate music in the style of anything from Chopin to Lady Gaga and usually mixes up genres uniquely.
Taryn Southern released an album in 2020 co-written with AI. In 2022, Grimes disclosed that she would part ways with Grimes-as-a-sound model used to sample the voice ported royalty bytes from AI-generated songs.
AI musicians are not fiction; in 2022, their music is on streaming charts to date.
How Does AI “Create” Art and/or Music?
To understand (or not) AI art you should open up the hood.
🤖 AI Doesn’t Think — It Predicts
AI is not alive. It does not feel joy or sadness. There is no vibe nor memories. They have data, and algorithms.
Put your AI in front of millions of pics or music sets…
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Understand patterns – You can see in impressionist art, certain shapes; regular rhythms.
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Build statistical models: what will happen next in this context (it tells you about the expressed intelligence).
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Provide the AI with enough data (millions of images or songs, etc.) and…
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Identify cliques: shapes in impressionist art, rhythmic patterns in jazz sounds
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Build statistical models: what comes next after this context is usual
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Produce fresh outputs: stitching together these patterns in a mathematically “unique” but stylistically coherent way
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For example, think of it as autocomplete on steroids instead of a tortured genius-type artist.
🧠 The Tech Powering Creative AI
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Neural Networks
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Computer/programming like organic
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Brain structure of a human brain
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Learn association between high-level inputs (like prompt: “cyberpunk flamingo”)
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GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks)
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One network makes and another criticizes
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To evolve collectively with feedback, they keep on shaping the art and music
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Transformers (like GPT)
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Able to understand context, style, and a little bit of structure over long text streams
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Perfect for creating lyrics, poems, or even entire symphonies
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Style Transfer & Latent Diffusion Models
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Merge styles in other content
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Enable detailed visual outputs (Van Gogh-like cityscapes or anime Beethoven)
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OK — AI isn’t mimicking. It’s sampling, forecasting, and remaking in volume and velocity that marks are not from.
# So Isn’t That Creativity, Right?
The big discussion.
Let me break it down.
🧩 If Creativity = Novelty (+ novel meaning)…
The New Novelty AI:
New combination that will surprise and amaze. It can make:
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Music never before experienced
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Sight unseen art
Can it have meaning, though?
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The pain, peace, and political purgament of AI.
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It doesn’t get why we write any more than it can create how we did in the past.
Short answer: AI doesn’t create with purpose or feelings — two key elements for human creativity.
📜 A Historical Echo
This argument is not new.
It was said of photography at its inception that it wasn’t art — mechanical reproduction.
Purists said when synthesizers came into music, it wasn’t “real” sound.
These tools did not kill creativity… They elevated it.
That is, maybe AI is also doing the same — not dismantling artists and band members, but urging us to question more what creativity can encompass.
What Artists and Musicians Are Using AI For?
Many don’t fear the machine — lots of creators embrace it.
A Brush AI, not an alternative.
Artists with an AI:
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Inspiration they would never have come up with
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Backgrounds and color palettes
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Creating entire shows (e.g., some of the AI artists’ work by Robbie Barrat, “Unsecured Futures”)
The brushstroke is now the prompt.
The artist shifts to curation and editor; selecting which outputs of AIs to hone or veto.
🎼 Composers as Programs
Musicians are:
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Automatic composition of harmonies by AI
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Jamming with the models in real time
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Training their own personal AIs by their style
It is not about losing. It is about teaming up with a collaborator who writes code.
A Creative Revolution in the Making
This is a time we are experiencing parallel to the creation of printing or the synthesizer — a seismic shift in how we make, share, and even discuss what constitutes art today.
AI does not dream — but it lets us dream in other ways.
From the eerie paintings to the shiny beats, unambiguously: the machine is not lurking in the background anymore. That no longer sits in the shadows, and they are inviting us to be a part of the performance.
On the Ethical and Philosophical Juggernaut
The creative industry is presented with novel ethical quandaries on an unprecedented scale.
Is machine art? Are you guilty of it?
If not, who gets credit?
AI-Generated Art and Muticism Ownership
Ownership is among the most knotted things in AI creativity.
Regular slides:
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Prompt Engineer (human): the person who designs or trains the input and claims a certain component
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Developer (AI company): Some say the tool provider — OpenAI, Adobe, or Stability AI — somehow owns it
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Nobody/Public Domain: In most countries, humans could not have created the resulting work, so there is no copyright protection
🎨 Real-World Case:
2022: an AI artwork got 1st place in a painting contest in Colorado.
Human developer used Midjourney — got massive backlash. Critics called it cheating.
But per law, the piece had virtually no copyright because U.S. copyright law presently requires humans.
Yeah, AI can create art. Own it? … Still unclear.
Should Artists Be Paid for Having Their Work Created by Machines?
A philosophical riddle:
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AI = no emotions
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Not dreaming
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Doesn’t attempt to create beauty, challenge, or be evocative
Why is it cheating to call something an “artist” when it serves no purpose?
Counter-argument: AI is just a tool — no more or less different than a paintbrush or a synthesizer.
Some folks insist that it does matter — if the trigger resonates with billions, it doesn’t matter where it came from?
The answer probably rests somewhere in-between.
We probably wouldn’t consider AI an “artist” — but we do have to concede that art is not totally human.
People Who Made It — The Audience Problem
It gets even creepier — studies indicate that few people can differentiate between human-made and AI-generated music, poetry, and visual arts.
Even more surprising:
People tend to rate human-produced things as more “emotional” — even if the maker is AI.
Takeaway:
The perception of creativity may be more important than the process itself.
We won’t care so much where that content comes from in a world of robots writing well.
Or is authenticity the new premium?
The Emergence of “Prompt Artist”
AI brought forth an unusual creative role: the prompt engineer or prompt artist.
These individuals:
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Develop elaborate, stimulating prompts for AI output
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Filter, refine, and improve upon generated things
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Learn how to “speak” to the logic of the machine
Simplified:
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Artists swung brushes in yesteryears
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Digital artists used tablets
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In the age of AI: creators use language and scarcity
Bottom line: It is art — but every medium from here on is infinite, and the palette is code.
AI Will Steal Creativity? First They Will Kill Artists and Musicians?
It is a valid fear — but with shades of grey.
AI gets better, faster, and cheaper at what used to take talent (talent = time × tuition) to do.
Yes:
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Stock music is increasingly AI-made
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Album art, commerce images, and bad logos (usually AI-designed)
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Even book illustrations and short films include AI as a co-creator
What AI Cannot Do (Yet):
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Deeply personal lived experiences
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Trauma, joy, love, and outrage from a first-person perspective
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The critical human connections — across cultures or feelings
AI is good at the “how.”
Humans still own the “why.”
Emerging Creative Economy Roles
AI may not destroy creative jobs — it could just displace them.
New roles:
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Art Director — the guardian and curator of generative workflows
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Creative Data Trainer — artists fine-tuning AI on specific styles
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Narrative Prompt Writer — writers enabling character and plot generation
Just like photography didn’t kill painting, creativity will not disappear with AI — just reinvent.
What’s Next?
We are crossing a cultural seam.
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AI as a Creative Partner?
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Can we draw the line of “real” art?
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Or do we redefine the meaning of it all?
AI-generated artworks are now being exhibited at institutions.
Others ban them entirely.
Some prizes honor AI artists — others disqualify them.
The world is still perplexed — and that’s fine.
We are writing the rulebook.
Final Thoughts: What Does Creativity Mean?
The incredible landscape if a machine paints…
The time when an algorithm weaves us a symphony in which we weep…
When the chatbot writes poetry of heartaches…
We doubt the art — we doubt ourselves.
Are we that predictable a species that we can allow our genius to be cloned by machine?
Or…
Maybe we are so powerful that we created a machine with more creative capacity than humans?
Maybe both.
Perhaps real creativity does not reside in the things AI creates —
but in what we do with it.
With this new artistic era beckoning, one thing is absolutely certain:
The creativity part of it hasn’t gone anywhere.
Now — a new era with talented code doing stuff for us as well.
