GOING FOR A SONG OP-ED: AI and the future of creativity — can artists’ histories travel with their work?

During a Creative Cnergy panel on AI, one core question emerged: as AI makes content creation seamless, will the human stories and history behind the art get erased?

“The microwave did not kill cooking,” digital director at Universal Music Group Nic Burger said, and the room laughed.

Burger offered an apt analogy: microwaves didn’t make pots and pans obsolete, they simply lowered the threshold for cooking, a distinction whose appeal was immediately clear to me. I can’t cook, yet the two microwaves in my kitchen allow me to reach the result without acquiring the skill. Burger thought AI might do something similar for creative work.

I was at the Creative Cnergy Policy and Investment Symposium in Sandton, where bank towers and corporate headquarters make economic power unusually visible. That concentration of wealth has earned it the familiar description of “Africa’s richest square mile”. Inside, panellists sat close enough that exchanges felt worked out together as creatives and policymakers pushed past conference courtesies.

Dr Karabo Maiyane, head of philosophy at Nelson Mandela University and researcher with the South African Cultural Observatory , placed AI within a longer history of technologies that had disrupted creative life.

Printing multiplied text beyond the hand-copied page, while photography made it possible to produce an image without drawing or painting it. Maiyane’s distinction was that AI is no longer simply helping creative work travel – it’s participating in the making itself.

Burger made that possibility personal: after 28 years finding and developing artists for record labels, he joked that he cannot sing or write, yet he could sing badly into an AI tool and ask to sound like Celine Dion. The result, he said, could return something recognisably hers. What once required years of training and an unmistakable voice can now be summoned by someone who possesses neither.

Taking it to a larger scale, Stephen Hollis, an intellectual property lawyer and partner at Adams & Adams , used the example of Deezer , the French streaming platform.

Deezer reported almost 75,000 fully AI-generated tracks daily, about 44% of all uploads. Hollis reduced that number to one artist uploading an album while tens of thousands of machine-generated songs arrived beside it.

Still thinking about Celine, I was reminded of an earlier conversation with Mbali Njomane , a South African social innovator working at the intersection of culture and AI literacy. We had discussed African users meeting AI systems designed and trained in the West, and whether we, as Africans, would remain consumers or shape the languages and uses they recognise.

“We’ve always been consumers of technology, but we’ve never been framed as co-creators,” she said, shifting the question from access to agency. Then she reframed the notion of authorship: “What we call inspiration is data.” It made me wonder how much of what I call originality began as someone else’s work.

I recognise that in my own writing. The cadence I think of as mine was learnt from sentences I read years before I understood them. A musician absorbs another’s phrasing until influence becomes instinct.