Ken Déguernel

This paper studies Music Generative AI (MGAI) through Bernard Stiegler's pharmacological approach to technology by considering MGAI as a pharmakon-both remedy and poison. We situate MGAI-as-pharmakon within a long philosophical lineage of the concept from Plato's Phaedrus to Stiegler's technological pharmacology and apply it to the contemporary landscape of commercial MGAI as a sociotechnical object in a complex milieu of human-machine interactions. While commercial MGAI platforms are often promoted as "democratizing" music creation, we argue they primarily foster globalized adaptation: a short-term process of deindividuation associated with proletarianization. This manifests in deskilling interfaces, opaque algorithms, cultural homogenization, and heightened precariousness for musicians, as artistic agency is displaced by corporate infrastructures. These dynamics echo Gilbert Simondon's account of alienation as a loss of knowledge. In contrast, adoption represents a process of individuation that requires a long circuit of knowledge acquisition and experimentation with MGAI, over an extended period, which is hindered by the constant rate of innovation. Achieving adoption demands the development of a technical culture with a participatory ethos, and the embedding of MGAI not just as a functional tool but as part of sustained musicking practices that allow for deep human-machine co-evolution. We conclude that the challenge is not to reject MGAI as inherently alienating, but to create the conditions under which it can become a therapeutic pharmakon. This involves slowing innovation cycles, designing transparent and sustainable systems, and building institutional frameworks supporting critical reflection, education, and care. Only then can MGAI contribute to long-term cultural transindividuation.

This paper studies Music Generative AI (MGAI) through Bernard Stiegler’s pharmacological approach to technology by considering MGAI as a pharmakon—both remedy and poison. We situate MGAI-as-pharmakon within a long philosophical lineage of the concept from Plato’s Phaedrus to Stiegler’s technological pharmacology and apply it to the contemporary landscape of commercial MGAI as a sociotechnical object in a complex milieu of human-machine interactions. While commercial MGAI platforms are often promoted as “democratizing” music creation, we argue they primarily foster globalized adaptation: a short-term process of deindividuation associated with proletarianization. This manifests in deskilling interfaces, opaque algorithms, cultural homogenization, and heightened precariousness for musicians, as artistic agency is displaced by corporate infrastructures. These dynamics echo Gilbert Simondon’s account of alienation as a loss of knowledge. In contrast, adoption represents a process of individuation that requires a long circuit of knowledge acquisition and experimentation with MGAI, over an extended period, which is hindered by the constant rate of innovation. Achieving adoption demands the development of a technical culture with a participatory ethos, and the embedding of MGAI not just as a functional tool but as part of sustained musicking practices that allow for deep human-machine co-evolution. We conclude that the challenge is not to reject MGAI as inherently alienating, but to create the conditions under which it can become a therapeutic pharmakon. This involves slowing innovation cycles, designing transparent and sustainable systems, and building institutional frameworks supporting critical reflection, education, and care. Only then can MGAI contribute to long-term cultural transindividuation.