Unfinished: The Role of the Artist in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

For most of his career, the Emmy Award-winning composer and producer Lucas Cantor Santiago was a self-described luddite. Technology, he felt, was moving too fast, transforming the world and the arts with no regard for the cost in tradition, hard-won human wisdom, and tried-and-true methods of mastery.

That changed, however, when Cantor Santiago was commissioned by Huawei, one of the largest technology companies on the planet, to collaborate with artificial intelligence and finish Franz Schubert's Unfinished Symphony-a successful experiment that attracted attention throughout the world. Creating music in collaboration with a machine led him to question his long-standing assumptions about what music is, what technology does, and how the two have evolved together over the course of human history, from the first bone flute to today's landscape of constant innovation and change.
Drawing on Cantor Santiago's extensive experience in the arts and tech worlds and his ongoing experiments with AI-powered musicmaking, Unfinished is an engaging and refreshingly optimistic meditation on the role of technology in music and the arts. What is the current state of the art? How did we get here? Where do we go now? This book provides an informed perspective on what is lost but what we also gain when we bring our machines ever further into the creation of art in its many different forms.

Author: Lucas Cantor Santiago
Publisher: Backbeat Books
Published: 12/11/2025
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.19lbs
Size: 10.01h x 5.38w x 1.15d
ISBN: 9798765143179


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 11/10/2025

About the Author
Lucas David Cantor Santiago is an author, producer, TEDx speaker, university guest lecturer, and two-time Emmy Award winner. He's collaborated with artists like Lorde, The Wu-Tang Clan, Spike Jonze, and Michel Gondry, and he's worked with major studios like FOX, NBC, Disney, Netflix, and DreamWorks. His music has reached hundreds of millions through radio, television, major films, and sports television broadcasts (including two Super Bowls). In 2019, Lucas used AI to complete Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony," which is now performed by orchestras around the world. He is a founding General Partner at Mindset MusicTech, a venture capital fund that invests in music technology. He also mentors entrepreneurs through Abbey Road Redd and the British Phonographic Institute, investing in the next generation of music innovation.