The Creative Path to AI Adoption

Theme: Tech → Culture → Adoption

Last week, ElevenLabs announced the release of an album created in collaboration with Grammy-nominated artists. Each produced an original track blending their voice and style with AI-generated instrumentation, enabling new tools to expand their creative process while staying true to their sound.

It is a small moment on paper, but a meaningful one on the road to widespread AI adoption. When emerging tech feels alien, creativity softens the edges of the unfamiliar and gives people a way to understand the impacts before they can make sense of the tech itself.

Signal

We have seen this pattern before. Cell phones appeared in television and film before they felt socially integrated. The internet became intuitive through media long before most people understood how it worked. Social platforms normalized hyperconnected behavior faster than product demos ever could.

AI is following the same arc. The tools are advancing quickly, but emotional adoption lags behind technical capability. When creatives experiment publicly with new technology, they create reference points, surfacing both possibility and tension in ways that are accessible, human, and grounded in the familiarity of culture.

Human View

Creatives have always operated as translators of the unfamiliar. They work at the edge of language, sense, and meaning. They explore ideas that are hard to articulate and give them form others can feel. That makes them uniquely positioned to help society integrate technologies that are difficult to grasp intellectually but impossible to ignore culturally.

Shantell Martin and Moral Turgeman brought this to life beautifully in their recent collaboration with Lovable:

Pulse

• Artist and the Machine featured in new McKinsey report: On what AI could mean for film and TV production and the industry’s future, including thoughts from Dani Van de Sande.

• Liza Minnelli on the Eleven album: Liza is among the artists who collaborated on a new AI-generated album. She notes an interest in how new tools can work in service of expression, not instead of it.

• How artists are leading brands into the age of AI: Paige Piskin, Jason Zada, Natalie Silverstein, and Adrienne Lahens break down the role that creatives play in the new AI landscape.

• AI Storytelling Summit at UCLA on Jan 30: A free event with speakers from Asteria, Luma AI, Promise, CAA and more on how AI is reshaping storytelling.

We hope to see you in NYC on May 14, 2026, where we will continue these conversations on the forefront of AI and creativity:

If you’re creating something aligned with Artist and the Machine or you’d like to recommend work shaping this space, we’d love to see it for the chance to be featured. Reach out to us at [email protected].

Til next time,

Artist and the Machine.

xx