Imagining the Future of Hip Hop and Art in 50 Years

The day after the Met Gala, the Internet was flooded with deep fakes of celebrities who weren't there, wearing things they never wore. Some of them were pretty convincing. The future of art, fashion, and music will see all sorts of disruptions in the coming years from technology like this. Where is all of this headed?

WIRED magazine imagined a vision of the future of hip hop music 50 years from now. The Afrofuturist story that WIRED contributor C. Brandon Ogbunu and Grammy-winning rapper Lupe Fiasco create paints a future where "technology might also provide novel opportunities for exploration, expansion, and even inclusion."

This is the sort of imagining that may end up being the sort of dreamed reality that influences actual reality. Making it a crime for a human artist to portray "a purely AI-created relic as having authentically human elements," or the notion that "human musicians are signed to record labels based on their training data" are fascinating ideas. They both land on what will become the central question for artists and creators of any kind in a generative AI future: what premium value will we place on human creation and what steps will we take to protect it?