Abstract

Most accounts of the intersection of AI and culture begin in the Global North and, despite the intensity of current debates and a growing body of scholarship, rarely move beyond its infrastructures, policies, implications, and aesthetics to examine how AI’s futures are being negotiated elsewhere. This geopolitical imbalance obscures how creative producers in other regions encounter and reinterpret AI within distinct socio-cultural and infrastructural realities, rendering artists in the Global South as passive adopters of technologies from “elsewhere.” We address this imbalance by centering Nigeria, particularly its music industry, as a site for understanding how generative AI (GenAI) is contested and localized. More specifically, we examine Korin AI, a Nigerian-owned AI music generation platform, to analyze how AI futures in Nigerian music are imagined, negotiated, and materially organized within conditions of infrastructural scarcity, legal ambiguity, and global coloniality. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Lagos, including interviews with musicians, producers, platform founders, and entertainment lawyers, we argue that Korin AI is best understood neither as a fully realized decolonial alternative nor simply as a case of technological dependency, but as a contradictory and compromised project of future-making. On one level, it embodies Africanfuturist and decolonial aspiration by foregrounding African musical data, languages, and genres, and by insisting that African sounds should not remain absent from AI’s musical futures. On another, it remains tethered to unequal systems of data, computation, law, and capital, reproducing new internal hierarchies even as it seeks to resist external ones. Korin AI thus reveals what it means to build music AI in Nigeria from within, rather than outside, the enduring structures of modernity/coloniality.