Culture and Policy Still Need Humans: Experts at CultureCon 2025

Draped in colourful handloom and semi-handloom sarees, sit a few people in relaxed positions in the tiered seating at Mumbai's Museum of Solutions (MoS) on the National Handloom Day, discussing the repercussions of the boom in the Generative AI industry on the cultural segments of India, including textiles, music, and other creative fields - all while sign-language experts demonstrate the speeches. 

With its third edition, Culture Con 2025, a cultural conference, ensures that such a confluence exists for two days where cultural entrepreneurs share insights, dialogue, and actions that must be taken to not just drive the change but also help in shaping careers, and imagining new futures, especially in the age of AI. 

How is music changing with AI?

Talking about the cultural industry, music forms for around 53 billion Indian rupees at the end of 2024 and has been estimated to reach 78 billion rupees by the end of 2026. With the advent of technology, undoubtedly, the industry has seen various musicians coming up and creating music with its help it. 

Tejas Nair, who is professionally known as Spryk, and is a music producer and the founder of  Skip-a-beat and EyeMyth Media Arts Festival, highlights that a few platforms are being used for these purposes. "These include Suno, Udio, iZotope, Synplant, Riffusion, Google Lyria," he says. The mentioned platforms perform various functions like text-to-speech output, text to music via spectrogram diffusion model and much more, all of which can bring revolution in the industry. 

However, the question lies, what music is being made for in today's world? "The question we should ask is, is music being made for the algorithm over people or for the sake of music itself?" he asks, adding, "To distribute music, one has to rely on the algorithms. What is scary, as per Nair is the fact that 'every scientist can also make music because it has become a machine-to-machine genre!" 

While the copyright issues over the music being generated for machines have already started, Tejas says that major labels filed to sue AI music generators for up to $150k per infringement. As per the copyright law, it refers to the maximum amount of statutory damages that a court can award to a copyright holder for each work that has been infringed upon, but only if the infringement is deemed willful. As per Tejas, it shall soon be a major problem for the music creators.

'AI will never be representative of local artisans'

The essence of a culture that is deeply embodied in its people is what might not be the case i any cultural industry, even in design, Padmini Ray Murray, the founder of Design Beku, a collective that works with researchers, artists, technologists and designers in design, notes. 

Highlighting how the medium plays a role, she gives an analogy: "We might be seeing a lot of Bhojpuri content on YouTube but not as a medium of news; it highlights the propagation of a local language," she says, adding that the AI, as a medium, for datasets, are not complete. "Due to political reasons, a lot of data is not available for us to work because there is a lot of government pressure," she says, reiterating the limitations of data in the research. 

Citing a reference to 'The Zizi Project', which is an ongoing series of works by artist Jake Elwes that explores the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and drag performance, Padmini Murray highlights how the project is using deepfake technology to create virtual drag performers. "It might be aiming to examine the relationship between AI and gender, but it also takes into account the challenge biases in AI datasets, along with exploring queer futures in digital spaces."

She highlighted the importance of fostering open, inclusive conversations in order to shape policies that genuinely protect and empower artists. She says, “If we are training machines to scrape the internet and to give us a language model, it's not going to be representative.”

The evolution and the prediction for the future

But how easy or difficult will it be to even imagine a future in careers, especially in cultural and creative fields in the age of AI? "The colleges might have to disappear!" warns Shreyas Srinivasan, a computer engineer, entrepreneur, and former Chief Product Officer at Paytm. "I doubt that there will be any requirement for colleges since the AI will do its job," he adds. 

Explaining how the Generative AI works on the concept called LLM, Srinivasan clarifies how Gen AI like ChatGPT does not create anything new but reads the same information that has already been written and exists on the internet and based on the patterns, offers the "next best perspective which is missing from the codes that are given as prompts".

Srinivasan takes into account a detail of the labour cycle, since 1000-1500 AD and how it has evolved from the agrarian society in the era to merchants' slavery in the 1500s to 1750. "Every fifty years has the capacity to change the previous 150 years," he says, detailing how the period 1750 to 1900 brought the industrial wage labour, while another 70 years came with the "unionised regulated work" and the beginning of global trade. 

With hyper-globalisation and flexible jobs beginning in the 1970-2008 era, the years that followed gave more space to the digital infrastructure, Shreyas notes. Similarly, with the Gen AI taking shape, he mentions that a "decline in the white-collar jobs" is likely to be expected in the cultural industry while also emphasising that continuous upskilling is key.