Jean-Michel Jarre urges creative industries to embrace AI

At an AI film festival in Cannes this week, French electronic-music pioneer Jean‑Michel Jarre urged the music and film industries to stop “freaking out” about artificial intelligence and start using it, according to The Guardian. Jarre, who helped popularise synthesiser-driven pop in the 1970s and has since worked in rights advocacy, said creators would use AI to make “the cinema of tomorrow” and new genres of music rather than merely produce “fake” songs.

The argument lands in an industry that is simultaneously suing and integrating the same technology. Jarre acknowledged that “AI today is the wild west” and called for rules, but framed the central conflict less as a moral panic than as a fight over control: established intermediaries fear disruption of their business models, while artists will treat new tools as production infrastructure. The Guardian notes his comments contrast with warnings from musicians such as Elton John and Dua Lipa, who have highlighted models trained on copyrighted work without permission or payment.

That split is already visible in how AI value is captured. Training datasets are assembled at scale, often from the open web or licensed catalogues, while the economic upside concentrates in the model owners and the platforms distributing AI-generated content. Rights holders are trying to reassert bargaining power through courts and legislatures; tech firms are trying to normalise scraping as “learning” and to settle on licensing terms that are predictable enough to budget.

Jarre’s own analogy is industrial: he compared AI to earlier breakthroughs such as the introduction of sound in cinema and sampling technology like the Fairlight, which lowered the cost of certain kinds of composition while expanding what could be made. His point is not that jobs are unaffected, but that creative markets have repeatedly absorbed tools that compress labour in one area and create new niches elsewhere.

What remains unresolved is who pays for the input material and who gets paid for the output. As more production becomes prompt-driven and more distribution becomes platform-mediated, the most valuable asset is no longer studio time but the right to train on a catalogue and the ability to reach an audience at scale.

Jarre was speaking as Cannes hosted its second AI film festival. The same week, artists elsewhere were still arguing over whether their work can be used to build the next model without a contract.