Benefits
- Amplifies Creativity: Choreographers get new ideas or move patterns they might not think of. AI can help fall out of creative blocks
- Democratization: People who may not have formal training can experiment, remix, make routines, share, learn
- Efficiency: Feedback, teaching, practice can be more accessible, less dependent on availability of teacher or studio.
- Interactivity: New performance experiences — dancers and audience, or dancers and AI, interacting in ways previously not possible.
- Hybrid Forms: Combines robotics, VR, motion capture, performance art. Makes dance not just physical but digital, immersive.
But It’s Not All Peaches — Risks, Limitations, and Ethical Issues
- Lack of Human Nuance: Emotions, subtle expression, physical presence are hard for AI to replicate meaningfully. What dance does is more than just coordinated movement.
- Data Bias & Homogenization: Most training data comes from certain styles, cultures, or regions. That limits what AI will generate; potentially erases minority styles or perpetuates stereotypes.
- Over-reliance & Loss of Skill: If dancers depend too much on AI for choreography or corrections, they might lose room for experimentation, learning instinctively, or developing their own style.
- Copyright / Ownership Issues: Who owns dance moves generated by AI? What about choreography derived from a dataset of many human choreographers? Also sampling, motion capture, etc., involve rights issues.
- Privacy & Consent: Using video of people to train models — are they okay with that? Did they consent?
- Quality vs. Virality: Many AI dance tools are used for short videos on social media. The goal becomes what gets views rather than what has depth or artistic merit.