Right now, the conversation about AI is stuck in a loop: Artists versus AI, rights versus innovation, protection versus invention. You can either respect copyright or embrace progress. It’s a false binary that forces a choice between supporting creators or embracing new technology, as if respecting copyright and pursuing progress are mutually exclusive.
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The history of the music industry is a story of a series of technological disruptions. Every shift — broadcast radio, analog recording, the synthesizer, sampling and digital audio workstations — is initially met with skepticism and resistance by people worried their creativity and stature will be undermined. Then the next wave of true artistic innovation happens, unlocking new ways of making music and new possibilities for a new generation of music makers.
Today’s conversation about AI belongs to the first wave. However, once we establish the right foundations, including clear provenance, licensed training data and real economic participation for creators, we unlock a far more interesting question: What happens when technology enables people to be more creative than they’ve ever been? Answering this question will advance our thinking, just as embracing previous technological disruptions led to musical revolutions.
Long before the debate about AI, in the back rooms of M.I.T., I was part of an art technology hacker space, a place where artists, engineers and academics collided in unpredictable ways. It was not unusual to find ballet dancers collaborating with mathematicians, experimental musicians using arc welders to build instruments, and painters working with roboticists. The resulting technology didn’t always work well, and the art wasn’t particularly beautiful, but that wasn’t the point. It was about exploring what could be built at the intersection of art and technology – and the results were strange, exploratory and sometimes even uncomfortable.
We’re already seeing early signals of a shift. Just as the invention of the camera once prompted painters toward abstraction, musicians are pushing music’s boundaries. There’s a French Canadian band named Angine de Poitrine that starts to show this creative expansion. The mysterious, costumed duo defies easy categorization: imagine a dual guitar-bass with microtonal fretboards looping complex riffs against a backdrop of ever-shifting, unpredictable time signatures.
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Angine de Poitrine has taken the internet by storm in recent months. On social media and YouTube, artists and commentators are not just celebrating this new art — they are elaborating on the creativity with their own homage videos. Why? I think the main reason is that people see Angine de Poitrine as a creation that AI could never concoct. Faced with generative AI platforms that can create a “new” (but eerily familiar) song with a simple text prompt, people are becoming averse to the homogenous middle. That puts a premium on human creativity. People want something that AI alone cannot dream up.
At the other end of the spectrum, vinyl had its biggest year in two decades in 2025 with almost $1 billion in sales. Gen Z creators at Splice are trading cassette tapes, harkening back to simpler, less digital times and intentionally embracing the comforting hiss that is native to tape playback. The company Teenage Engineering is building musical hardware that recalls Casio calculators and boomboxes. People are craving texture, imperfections and corporeal joy.
There’s a lesson in these examples: the future of music won’t be defined by polished replicas of the past but by things that embrace its imperfections and redefine these edges anew for this next era of creativity.
So how do we get to the next step?
Creators need the ability to realize their potential on their own terms. They need to have economic ownership and creative control. The tech industry cannot claim to help creators with tools that simultaneously undermine their intellectual property. Boundaries of human authorship need to be made clearer, allowing artists paths to monetize their creativity for the future. To create great music, training — the process of feeding vast datasets into an algorithm so it can recognize patterns and generate new outputs — need not be exploitive.
Many business leaders agree that AI must respect creators first and foremost. Lucian Grainge, CEO of Universal Music Group, with which Splice is collaborating on a roadmap for the development of commercial AI tools, has spoken of the need for guardrails and respect for creative works. There are numerous ethical AI companies: Music.AI, ElevenLabs, Lemonaide and Klay Vision, among others, that respect creators’ rights and build their technologies with artists at their center.
If the first wave was defined by what AI took from the artist, the second wave will be marked by what it gives back: time, powerful new capabilities and expansive creative expression. More than anything, though, getting to the next wave offers creators permission to experiment and even to fail. AI tools provide creators with an opportunity to make music that doesn’t make sense, that’s occasionally ugly, or makes us uncomfortable, all places that homogenous music AI cannot touch.
If we can move beyond the “art vs. machine” tropes that define today’s conversations, we will launch a new chapter of creativity using tools that will lower the barriers to entry and raise the ceiling for what is possible.
Kakul Srivastava is the CEO of music creation platform, Splice. Since joining Splice in 2021, she has led major innovations, including AI-powered creation tools, new mobile experiences, and the company’s 2025 acquisition of Spitfire Audio, expanding Splice into virtual instruments. An award-winning entrepreneur, Kakul was most recently named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2025 for shaping how technology empowers, rather than replaces, human creativity.
Previously, Kakul held executive roles at Yahoo, Flickr, Adobe, and GitHub, helping to build iconic products like Photoshop and Yahoo! Mail, and is known for her product leadership, empathy, and commitment to helping creative communities thrive. A graduate of MIT and UC Berkeley Haas, Kakul lives in the San Francisco area with her family.
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