Ciauru Wins Reply AI Music Contest with Audio-Visual Project Raw Botanical Data

Italian DJ and producer Ciauru—real name Simone Privitera—has won the Reply AI Music Contest, a competition focused on experimentation at the intersection of artificial intelligence, music, and live performance. The award was presented after he performed at Torino’s Kappa FuturFestival, where he was selected from a shortlist of five finalists by an international jury.

His winning work, Raw Botanical Data, employs platforms including Krea.ai, SeeDance, and Higgsfield to transform video into what Privitera describes as “impossible movements, recursive spatial structures and unstable textures.” He stresses that human direction remained central. “Artificial intelligence is not necessarily a danger or an obstacle. In this case, I used it creatively: everything started from the hand of a human being, who guided 90% of the work.”

The win comes from a producer with established industry ties. Privitera has previously collaborated with Benny Benassi, Don Diablo, and Steve Aoki. His embrace of generative tools sits against a backdrop of sharpening debate. The Association for Electronic Music’s Jay Ahern recently warned of AI enabling “the wholesale ripping of people’s creative works,” while the anti-AI group The Bootleg Velvet Sundown has formed explicitly to reject artificial intelligence in music.

Privitera frames the technology as a practical accelerator. “AI was very useful in speeding up a process that would otherwise have taken me much longer,” he said. “I hope that more and more emerging artists decide to take part, because creating connections with platforms like this through initiatives of this kind is not only possible, but also extremely effective.”