Peter Gabriel

Peter Gabriel (born 1950, in Surrey) co-founded Genesis and fronted it through its theatrical prog years before a solo career that produced “Sledgehammer” and its era-defining video, the WOMAD festival, Real World Studios, and the human-rights video organization WITNESS. He has been early to nearly every music-technology wave — from pioneering digital distribution with OD2 in the late 1990s to his tech venture Reverberation.

Dancing with the algorithms

In a March 2023 Yahoo! Music interview, Gabriel laid out one of the most quoted pro-engagement positions in the music-AI debate. He was blunt about the stakes — “I don’t think my job or anyone’s job is safe from AI,” predicting impact greater than the Industrial Revolution — and equally blunt about the response: engage rather than resist. Asked whether machines could ever write songs as good as humans, he answered that “they just need better algorithms,” adding that there would probably be “algorithms for the spirit, too.”

Weeks later he acted on it, partnering with Stability AI on the #DiffuseTogether challenge: hundreds of artists used Stable Diffusion tooling to create AI-generated animations set to tracks from his album “i/o,” with winners announced in mid-2023 for videos accompanying “The Court” and “Panopticom,” earning cash prizes and a commission from his Real World Productions.

Gabriel’s stance is notable for refusing the comfort of half-measures: he concedes the disruption will be enormous, including for artists like himself, and argues for collaboration anyway — a continuation of a fifty-year habit of treating each new technology as an instrument first and a threat second.