Why the AI boom will boost non-Western markets

AI is now intertwined with all the internet has to offer – be it generated memes, AI music, or (somewhat) helpful chatbots. Seemingly, no proposition can go free of generative embellishment.

Yet as Gen AI proliferates, something is becoming increasingly clear: content written with AI assistance often has a similar voice. Users have noticed various signals, be it the overuse of em dashes, the word “delve”, or tautology. Its images largely depict the same polished TikTok filter aesthetic, and its music has a hard time standing out amidst the approximate 100,000 songs uploaded to DSPs every day. AI can make more of everything, and although making more has become easier than ever, it does not seem to create much that stands out. 

So, is AI imitating life, or is life imitating AI?

As AI becomes more prevalent in use and its quality of replication improves, it blurs those distinctions for the content it is trained on. Everything looks and sounds the same, cut through becomes more difficult, and competition skyrockets.

“First World Problems” 

Here comes the plot twist. ChatGPT is trained on large data sets dominated by the English-speaking world and has largely been introduced as a business solution in Western (white-collar) companies.

Take Suno, a Gen AI music creation program: like most music tech, it is based mainly on Western music scales, timings, and instruments. It can produce an English-spoken pop song with no issue. Ask it to produce a traditional Thai melody, however, and it will struggle – with the notes, the rhythm, and the sounds of the instruments themselves. 

When AI tools are not pre-set for languages or melodies other than English, native artists must get more involved in the process and do more fine-tuning to get the sounds they want. In other words, they must get creative so that the music they make sounds unique and can stand out.

AI is still just a tool, so the importance lies in how you use it. For its target audiences in Western markets, its use naturally encourages leaning back and letting it do all the work. While it can make certain tasks easier, it runs the risk of atrophying creativity.

Beyond generative borders

For markets outside of the West, the advantage goes deeper than local languages eluding AI replication. Japan and China are both tech-forward, with Deepseek, the Chinese LLM, one of ChatGPT’s more threatening competitors. Yet the adoption of AI in these markets seems to be more considered.

When Suno and Udio hit the market, many questioned whether artists were even needed to make music anymore, considering the rise of Japan’s Hatsune Miku, a virtual artist who can fill entire stadiums with fans.

However, Hatsune Miku is the creation of a collection of artists, who work together with fans to develop her persona, animate her performance, and produce her music. The Japanese market’s value on craftsmanship means that a ‘virtual artist’ is a unique curiosity and high-quality performance art; not just a cost-saving measure to cut creators out of the equation. 

Other markets have different approaches to technology altogether. In India, online audiences are tech-savvy and AI forward. However, they over-index most for using AI to help with tasks like work or their studies, rather than for creativity or information gathering (by far the most prominent use case in English-speaking markets). Other markets are more tech-agnostic altogether, with Ethiopia and Jamaica, for example, responding far better to human-driven marketing and relationships than tech-based offerings, according to distributors growing in those regions. 

Much of the AI arms race is being conducted in the US, driven by Silicon Valley’s insistence on ‘build fast and break things’. With so much investment capital tied up into the industry, there is a lot of pressure to find AI use cases, and a lot of marketing around positioning it as the future of everything. 

Other markets, however, do not have the same pressures. Instead, they can regard AI as one tool among many and are less concerned with near-term effects of regulation. Creators have the time to experiment with it as an instrument, rather than simply being handed an end-to-end generator. 

Of course, these are not all hard-and-fast rules – every market has its nuances. There is, however, a clear emerging distinction between Western markets and the way AI is being incorporated in them and non-Western markets. Using AI not designed to compete with you specifically, may yet turn out to be a game-changing advantage.