From the Communal Music Making to Deep Learning: AI, Copyright, and the Soul of African Music

Abstract

This paper critically examines the impact of the Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the legal, economic and cultural integrity of African music. It discusses the reciprocity of intellectual property (IP) functionality and undermining of culture in the backdrop of algorithmic datafication. Based on the Postcolonial theory (more specifically, data-colonialism framework), the research analysis focuses on the process in which Global North technology corporations harvest cultural information of Global South producers through the expansion of Artificial Intelligence. Through the legal-ethnographic triangulation of legal analysis of the copyright regimes, together with extensive interviews of Kenyan creative professionals, the study reveals a structural imbalance between western standards of IP laws and African epistemology of oral traditions. Although AI is a source of universal precarity in the global community of creators, the results have shown a particular danger of ontological obliteration of African idioms, which occurs in the form of rhythmic flattening and digital orientalism. Additionally, the analysis also records the techniques Kenyan counter-movements, also known as digital resistance, use to deconstruct algorithmic quantisation and demand creative sovereignty. The paper concludes with an urgent appeal for decolonized IP frameworks, such as communal data trusts, to safeguard the essence, or sovereign intentionality, of African music.