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A few weeks ago, me and my friend, who creates musical beats for a living, where chilling at his house. I was seated on the couch just watching him create and tweak beats. At some point my friend wanted to create a completely new beat from the ground up, but was struggling to translate his ideas into a finished product. That’s when I suggested experimenting with generative AI tools designed for music creation.

We started with Soundful and AIVA, which are tools that use AI to generate compositions and instrumental loops based on genre, tempo, and mood. My friend would give me a rough description of the idea in his head, which was something like “I want it to be ambient, but still with a strong rhythm”. After feeding this to the AI, it produced multiple variations within just a few minutes, which we found fascinating to see. It was pretty impressive how these tools could translate abstract musical ideas into real concrete audio.

This was a fun little side quest for us, but the process was not just about letting AI do the work. It became a collaborative loop. We started to experiment with another tool called Endlesss which let us experiment live and remix beats on the fly. We would choose segments of a beat that were promising and feed it to the AI with adjustments like, tweaking tempo, changing instruments and adding layers. It became a creative parter, not a replacement.

The results were surprising for us. Some of the outputs were exactly what my friend imagined, others pretty unexpected which pushed him to rethink the direction of a beat. It became clear to me that these generative AI tools are a way to expand creative possibilities and are not just for efficiency.

When I look back on the process, I realized that it is no longer just a human crafting art, but rather a conversation between human intuition and algorithmic suggestion. Generative AI has the ability to change this relationship between a creator and a creation. For me, helping my friend with making and tweaking beats was more than just a side project, it gave me a little glimpse into how generative AI tools can transform creative collaboration.

No ratings yet. When people talk about augmented reality (AR), they often think of games like the massive hit back in 2016, Pokemon GO. This was a lot of fun back in the day as it kind of introduced AR to the general public and it was this cutting edge new technology. Today, AR is used for a lot more “real life” things and it will probably be used even more in the future.

One of the coolest examples of AR I have seen is IKEA’s AR app, called IKEA Place. The app let’s you point your phone at for example your living room, and allows you to drop a virtual sofa, table, or lamp right into the space (IKEA, 2017). Next to the visualization, it also allows users to scale the furniture to its actual size so that users won’t end up buying a table that looks perfect online, but in reality blocks your front door.

For IKEA, this is not just a fun and fancy tech experiment. It is a smart information strategy move. The users get better information before they buy something, like how a product fits, matches or clashes in their living room. Next to this, IKEA also installed a chatbot in the app which helps users navigate through the technology. It tells users where to aim the camera and gently corrects users when they are not using the app properly (DesignRush, 2025). This chatbot helps make it accessible and usable to everyone, even if they are not that handy with technology. IKEA Place reduces uncertainty for consumers, builds trust and also lowers the amount of returns IKEA has to handle, which saves IKEA money and probably headaches.

But IKEA is definitely not alone. AR is popping up pretty much everywhere. I have seen AR that lets you try on sneakers virtually and I even read about AR in healthcare, where surgeons overlay scans during operations. But the app from IKEA is a nice example of AR going mainstream, which probably a lot of regular people would actually use and not just tech enthousiasts.

Now I still wonder: how far do we actually want AR to go? I believe it is handy for furniture shopping, but what would happen when every store pushes AR overlays at us? Imagine discounts popping up in the streets or ads floating in the air. These things could turn useful information into irrelevant and overwhelming noise.

Personally, I love AR when it actually solves a “real world” problem, just like the app from IKEA does, but I fear for a future world where reality feels like one big pop-up ad.

So what do you think? How far do you want AR to go? Would you use AR for everyday routines, or do you see it more as a “nice thing to have”?

References:
DesignRush. (2025, July 24). IKEA Place’s eCommerce App Design Brings The Future To The 21st Century. DesignRush. Retrieved from https://www.designrush.com/best-designs/apps/ikea-place

IKEA. (2017, September 12). IKEA launches IKEA Place – a new app that allows people to virtually place furniture in their home. IKEA Newsroom. Retrieved from https://www.ikea.com/global/en/newsroom/innovation/ikea-launches-ikea-place-a-new-app-that-allows-people-to-virtually-place-furniture-in-their-home-170912/