Date and time: 4-6 November 2025
Where: Digital Futures hub, Osquars Backe 5, floor 2 at KTH main campus
Directions: https://www.digitalfutures.kth.se/contact/how-to-get-here/
Attendance is by invitation only.
Program
During three days (where coffee, fika, and lunch are provided) invited participants will delve into, discuss, and debate the need for a manifesto—or maybe a declaration (could be a strongly worded statement)—during an era witnessing significant challenges posed by the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to Music, Art and Everything Else. Of course new kinds of practices will arise from these applications, just as has been seen with past innovations, such as music notation, visual perspective, and therapy mediated by sycophantic chatbots—but something feels, like, totally different with AI, due to its scale, the “quality” of its output, the public’s lack of knowledge of how AI works, the amount of money flowing into this space, who has the computational resources, and the lack of scruples of profit-focused private companies using copyright-protected material to train resource-hungry AI platforms that can generate massive amounts of content that directly compete with the rich tapestry of human-crafted work. Some of the questions motivating this workshop include:
• What are the personal and professional incentives to spend time and money training as a musician or composer in a world where anyone can create commercial-quality popular music simply by feeding textual descriptions to AI music generation platforms?
• How can a human music creator compete in a marketplace inundated with music of the AI- generated sort?
• How can public policy incentivize music training and safeguard the art form?
• Does AI and its application really “democratize creativity”?
• What problems are being solved by involving AI in Music and Art?
• What problems is it creating?
• How should society respond to the encroachment of AI in cultural domains?
• Who bears responsibility for what comes next?
• What comes next?
• What are the ethics of involving AI in Music, Art and Everything Else?
This private event comes after the conclusion of the MUSAiC ERC Consolidator Project (Oct. 2020–Sep. 2025, https://musaiclab.wordpress.com), which critically studied the development and application of AI to music, and ultimately arrived at many more questions than it definitively answered (a feature, not a failure).
Organized by Bob L. T. Sturm, Elin Kanhov and André Holzapfel.
