David Guetta

David Guetta (born 1967 in Paris) is one of the world’s most commercially successful DJs and producers, the hitmaker behind “Titanium,” “When Love Takes Over,” and a string of pop-dance crossovers that helped drag EDM into the global mainstream. He has repeatedly been voted the world’s number-one DJ and has built a career on absorbing each new wave of studio technology.

The Emin-AI-em stunt

In February 2023 Guetta played a festival crowd a track featuring a rapped hook in Eminem’s voice — lyrics written by one AI service, vocals synthesized by another. “People went nuts,” he reported. He created it “as a joke” and pledged never to release it commercially, saying he posted the clip “to open the discussion and bring awareness” about what the technology could already do.

On the BRIT Awards red carpet that month he made his position explicit: the future of music is in AI, but strictly as a tool, because “every new music style comes from a new technology” — citing how rock, hip-hop, and house each grew from new instruments and machines. Taste and emotional intent, he argued, remain irreducibly human.

The stunt drew criticism precisely because it used an artist’s voice without permission — the very practice that later spurred lawsuits and legislation, and that consent-based projects like Grimes’s Elf.Tech and Holly Herndon’s Holly+ were designed to solve. Guetta’s framing survived the controversy better than the stunt itself: AI as the newest instrument in a lineage of genre-creating technologies.