Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter explains why he’s “not interested in the creative use of AI”

Thomas Bangalter, one-half of the legendary electronic music duo Daft Punk, has weighed in on the use of artificial intelligence in music.

Bangalter has fashioned a post-Daft Punk career that has included collaborations with film director Alfonso Cuarón and German DJ, Rampa. But his collaborations will not include artificial intelligence as he finds the prompt-based process needed to use the controversial tool does not align with his creative process.

He tells Chanel: “My relationship to creation and my relationship to art is mostly happening at a deeper level, which does not express itself through words. That’s probably why I’m not really interested in the creative usage of artificial intelligence for many reasons.

“But the main one probably is because it goes through a verbal expression, which is prompting, and I feel really the most interesting part of the creative process is happening not at all on an intellectual level or on an expressive level, where you’re actually going through a process which is about understanding your feelings, and, and I feel it’s the same, you know, where we’re sitting here [talking] about architecture.”

Later in the interview, Bangalter says that the “unpredictability” of creativity from people is impossible to emulate with an AI tool.

He added: “Unpredictability, I feel. I feel that unpredictability is what will save this society because everything that happens are surprises. There are bad surprises, but it can only happen also through good surprises, and that’s really the complex world today because on one hand, unpredictability and disruption needs to happen to get us all of this mess.

“But it cannot happen from the machine because if you have unpredictability from artificial intelligence, then this is very dangerous. Everything that happened in history is through an impulse of collective derailment from society.

“So it’s complicated because we need to surprise ourself and to be more and more unpredictable, and we can’t have technology do that for us.”