In February 2020, the digital media agency Space150 experimented with artificial intelligence machine learning programs to create the excellently titled "Jack Park Canny Dope Man," a banger of a hip-hop song in the vein of one of the genre's biggest names, Travis Scott. The neural networks used to craft the tune were trained on Scott's entire catalog, and the resulting beat and melody don't do anything to betray their artificial origins. The song lacks the awkward, clunking approximation of what a human operator would produce, something we so often see in language translation software, for example. No--it sounds surprisingly good, a song a Travis Scott fan wouldn't think twice about if it randomly showed up on their Spotify or SoundCloud weekly playlist. Not until they put a close ear to the lyrics, that is, which you can find over at the song's Genius lyric page.

In November, the musician Grimes made a bold prediction. "I feel like we're in the end of art, human art," she said on Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast. "Once there's actually AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), they're gonna be so much better at making art than us." Her comments sparked a meltdown on social media. The musician Zola Jesus called Grimes the "voice of silicon fascist privilege."

This story forms part of a collaboration with Dazed Digital -- where pop culture meets the underground. The opinions expressed in this article belong to each individual author. Technology is advancing at such a fast rate right now that it can feel like we are well on our way to a robot apocalypse. But, if we closely observe how artists are harnessing artificial intelligence in ways that push humanity forward, we can see that our fears of a technological dystopia might never actualize. From using AI to create new and innovative genres in music, to new takes on classical nudes, and innovative ways to track anonymous warfare, art's relationship to AI right now is illuminating humanity's strength.