A rogue artificial intelligence obsessed with Taylor Swift could supplant all recorded music with artificially generated cover versions by her, say researchers. History would show the American singer-songwriter as being responsible for everything from Für Elise to Paperback Writer, leaving no evidence that Ludwig van Beethoven or The Beatles ever existed. Nick Collins at Durham University, UK, and Mick Grierson at the University of the Arts London give the unusual warning in a paper that says humanity must think of methods of resistance "now, rather than when it is too late". The Taylor Swift'psy op' conspiracy theory offers a troubling lesson Thankfully, the risk of an AI Swiftpocalypse is low. Collins says that the idea is a thought experiment designed to prompt researchers to develop ways to protect all sorts of data – music, literature, scientific research and historical records – from being corrupted by AI.

Generative deep learning systems offer powerful tools for artefact generation, given their ability to model distributions of data and generate high-fidelity results. In the context of computational creativity, however, a major shortcoming is that they are unable to explicitly diverge from the training data in creative ways and are limited to fitting the target data distribution. To address these limitations, there have been a growing number of approaches for optimising, hacking and rewriting these models in order to actively diverge from the training data. We present a taxonomy and comprehensive survey of the state of the art of active divergence techniques, highlighting the potential for computational creativity researchers to advance these methods and use deep generative models in truly creative systems.

"But AI has no internal world and it has no need to create its desires or fears." So rather than letting AI take complete control, results seem to be far more fruitful when human artists work hand-in-hand with machines. Musician and University of Sussex lecturer Dr Alice Eldridge suggests that we should treat AI as "just another tool that we have designed, like the wheel, or the combustion engine". She has helped create a cello that uses a combination of acoustics, electrification and an adaptive algorithm that makes the instrument self-resonate; or essentially, play itself. "With a classical cello you have to bring the instrument alive with a bow; a feedback cello is already singing, your job as a performer is to shape the sound - it's more like a dance than'controlling' an instrument in the traditional way," she says.

The band Sigur Rós has produced a 24-hour televised journey around the entire Icelandic coast, set to an evolving version of a single song generated using artificial intelligence developed at Goldsmiths. In 2011 Dr Mick Grierson from the Department of Computing created the commercial music format, BRONZE, which manipulates and transforms every aspect of a track to create a unique version on each listen, while the song remains recognisable to the listener. Music is no longer static, but producers and composers can create subtly different mixes with each play, while still retaining the quality and balance of the original mix. From 20-21 June, the experimental Icelandic post-rock act unveiled their film Route One live on Iceland's National Television – and streamed globally via YouTube – with a constantly evolving soundtrack based around elements of their new song Óveður. The individual musical elements of the unreleased song, and current Sigur Rós festival set opener, were seeded through evolving music program BRONZE to create a unique ephemeral sonic experience.