Jidenna broke down how AI and culture can collide at the 2025 AFROTECH Conference in Houston.
The musician sat down with Simone Tyler, senior vice president of AfroTech and Live Events at Blavity Inc., for a conversation that treated creativity like a living system. The fireside chat, “The Next Era of Human Creativity with Jidenna,” centered on the idea that technology and artistry are inseparable, and that the people who shape the future will be those who treat AI as a collaborator, not a replacement for human imagination.
Before digging into tools, the audience was shown a video Jidenna created with AI tools to introduce the discussion. To jumpstart the conversation, the vocalist separated today’s AI from the bigger, scarier idea of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI). He acknowledged why people are anxious, then brought the room back to what creators can control right now through process, taste, and workflow.
“I do think ASI has the potential to cause every doomsday prophecy to come true, but I think we have the chance to steer the direction, we in this room. I actually think it comes down to the people in this room, people of color, Black people, to steer. Everybody’s focused on speed and optimization and efficiency, but process is the real meat of life,” the Wisconsin native told attendees. “As an artist, it’s what art is, it’s more process than product. So, I think if you start there and then start to use AI to kind of create a workflow that streamlines the more tedious parts, then that’s where you start to feel AI is an extension of yourself rather than a competitor.”
Jidenna then clarified that he is not trying to follow a trend. Instead, he’s expanding a lifelong practice, drawing on his engineering roots and a family legacy in technology to build worlds, not just songs.
“I’m a world builder. I’ve always felt that I had a world in my mind, you know? Like George Lucas and these people thatcreated entire universes. I went to school for engineering, [and] eventually came out with an arts degree. But my family, my father, was a technologist. He was arguably Nigeria’s Steve Jobs, but underfunded. This is not new for me, but I think it’s new for those who may know me as a ‘Classic Man,'” he shared. “Everyone here has way more dreams in their head and has probably used about 2% to 10% of their mind thus far in their careers, and AI has the ability, or we have the ability with AI, rather, to expand on that percentage.”
Connecting his Nigerian upbringing with a builder mindset and generative tools at his fingertips, he argued that Black creators across the diaspora have a responsibility to shape a human-centered future and not leave it to others.
“The culture is such that you don’t expect for your government to take care of you. So, you take it into your own hands. With gen AI, we’re able to do things ourselves and build things ourselves. I’m definitely an AI evangelist at this point, although I am wary of the future,” Jidenna explained. “The African diaspora has a duty to seize this, this era, this moment, and to create a dream for ourselves and for the world that envisions a human-centered future rather than a dystopian, you know, standard Euro-white, patriarchal world. I wanna see our dreams and our futures, um, and I think we can do it.”
The creative urged creators to start with personal stories and lived experience. The audience data might reward speed, but people still respond to perspective.
“I think that you start with your story and your perspective. Most of what I see online is deepfakes that have nothing to do with the creator. I am, I don’t like the slop,” he said. “It makes my job harder. And remember your childhood dreams. You could do that now. Doing it now because that, to me, is the surest way, the surest bet that you will be in a good place in two years and not worrying about being unemployed.”
The “Black Magic Hour” artist discussed that the protection path isn’t just about sitting out. It involves learning, shaping datasets with our values, and using democratized tools to change how creative industries function.
“The water is scary. The ocean is scary. The swimming pool is scary when you don’t know how to swim. And how do you learn? You jump in it. “We start, hopefully as a larger community, populating the data with the things that we want to see. These are not just tech bros, they’re behavioral architects. The iPhone democratized capture, or digital cameras did,” he said. “Social media democratized marketing and branding. YouTube democratized distribution. Now production is democratized. How can we use this to change how we work? How can we actually build a new music business? How can we build a new film business? How can we build a new financial world and industry? My hope is that the marginalized voices right now, people called it Black people, disabled people, elder people, queer people. These are the people. Women.”
Jidenna walked through a hands-on workflow that any artist can try, from spinning up custom GPTs to choosing image and music generators. The takeaway was confidence and access.
“Any time a new technology comes out, a new platform, I build a GPT immediately. When you’re customizing a GPT, you are taking something like ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude, and you’re localizing it and fine-tuning it for a very specific need. The biggest thing I’ll say is, like, you are smart enough. If you’re an artist, Midjourney, to date is still the best image generator in the world. I use Suno and Udio, um, for music generation. In our industry, 2% of all music that you hear 2% was engineered and produced by women. And that is a crime. It’s not about skill anymore. It’s about taste, vision, and story.”
For the AI enthusiast and advocate, he’s less concerned with perfect detection and more focused on the process. Show the work, not just the output.
“You’re not gonna know it’s real, but you don’t know what’s real in social media. It’s already fake. I’m not a fan of fast fashion literally, and I’m also not a fan of one-prompt artists AI artists that literally just, masquerade, especially if it’s blackface. You look for the people who show processes and not the people who just show products. Because it’s about to be super efficient, we’re going to have to start to gamify how we approach things.”
Jidenna closed out his session by returning to culture as the first technology and issued a clear call to action for preservation, creation, and leadership.
“This is fun, and fun will drive innovation. Remember that myth controls the world. We are still telling stories around the fire. AI is both a divine mirror and a data colonizer, and we have a duty to tell the stories we never got to tell. I can create a workflow to animate 1,001 Igbo folktales,” the innovator noted. We have to do this now because if not, you know what it’s going to be. And that erasure is not something that we can afford now. It’s not something we could afford in the last 500 years. Let us seize the moment to declare our myth and take our rightful space in this new age.”