AR Rahman reveals the first thing he told Sam Altman and Aravind Srinivas: Don't make people …

AR Rahman has shared insights from his personal interactions with two of the most influential figures in artificial intelligence: ChatGPT-maker OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas. During an appearance on Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath's People by WTF podcast, the music legend said that he has spent a lot of time with them. He also revealed that he stressed a core message to both AI leaders from the very beginning of their conversations. Rahman’s primary concern, which he repeatedly conveyed like a “broken record,” was a cautionary plea: “Don't make people lose jobs.”Instead of focusing on job displacement, Rahman urged them to use AI to “empower people” and address “generational curses” such as poverty, misinformation, and a lack of tools for storytelling and creation. He drew a strong analogy, comparing unregulated AI to a gun, arguing that just as weapons have rules and restrictions, so too must AI be governed by human-set rules to prevent devastating economic consequences and widespread poverty.In the podcast, Rahman said: “My first comment with any AI person is, don't make people lose jobs. Empower people to remove the curses of generational curses, which come to poverty, misinformation, and lack of tools to create stuff, to telling stories, right? From the beginning, I was like a broken record just saying this.If you buy a gun, you've set rules, right? You don't give it to everyone, because they're gonna shoot everybody. They're going to kill people. It's not free to use. It has restrictions. Now you're not shooting people, but you can pull the carpet off, make them jobless. It's like making families go into poverty. So it is the rules. Humans have to set the rules. You have traffic rules. You have immigration rules.”Rahman said he sees AI as an “equaliser” that helps young creators who have “vision but not resources.” However, he warned that using AI without limits could harm working musicians. Apart from this, on a lighter note, Rahman added that Perplexity’s Srinivas is his “son's friend, more than me. Yeah, they hang out.”Speaking about his upcoming “Secret Mountain” project in collaboration with OpenAI, which mixes human creativity with AI-powered workflows, Rahman said: “We use the best of AI, and we use the best of humans.” He noted that the project has been in development for three years. He views it as a potential global IP created in India, and as an example of how technology and traditional music can work together to create new industries and jobs.“He [Sam Altman] was looking at the Secret Mountain, and he was fascinated, I think. He [Altman] said, ‘Whatever help you guys need in technology,’ But I think this is not just…Secret Mountain is about fashion, merchandise, music, wisdom, and entertainment. Quite a big package, and pretty exhausting if you don't have a big team. So that's one of the reasons why we are waiting for the big leap, too, which is preparing all the groundwork on that one,” Rahman added.