At Google’s Mountain View headquarters last week, a man clad in a rainbow-hued dressing gown emerged from a giant coffee cup to give a vibrant if somewhat surreal demonstration of the company’s latest achievements in generative artificial intelligence.

At the event, electronic musician and YouTuber Marc Rebillet tinkered with an AI music tool that can generate synced tracks based on prompts like “viola” and “808 hip-hop beat”. The AI, he told developers, came up with ways to “fill in the sparser elements of my loops... It’s like having this weird friend that’s just like ‘try this, try that’.”