In early October, when Israel began bombing Gaza, Bangladeshi photojournalist Shahidul Alam was busy co-curating a planned photography exhibition in Germany.

Feeling worried, he took a break from his work and took to social media to decry Israel’s attacks on the densely populated Palestinian enclave.

Alam is no stranger to human rights abuses and speaking his mind.

In 2018, he was celebrated in Time magazine for his decades-long career documenting political unrest in Bangladesh. That year, he was detained for more than 100 days, accused of “false” statements after criticising Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in an interview.

Since the onset of Israel’s war on Gaza, Alam has posted about the conflict dozens of times on Facebook to his 114,000 followers.

On October 8, one post read: “The news of semi-naked Israeli bodies being paraded is horrendous and cannot be justified … I feel for all Palestinians and Israelis lives destroyed.”

Another, on October 29, said: “This weekend’s horrific violence is the ugly reality of Israeli apartheid, the rotten fruit of decades of occupation of a stateless people divested of basic rights and freedoms.”

On November 21, the German Biennale for Contemporary Photography dropped the veteran shooter, accusing him of anti-Semitism.

“Various posts by Shahidul Alam on his Facebook channel after October 7 have given a platform to content that can be read as anti-Semitic and anti-Semitic content,” it said.

Alam’s two Bangladeshi co-curators, Tanzim Wahab and Munem Wasif, resigned in solidarity, prompting organisers to scrap next year’s exhibition tour of three German cities.

They said that among the allegedly anti-Semitic posts were an “uncommented interview by Shahidul Alam with the Palestinian ambassador to Bangladesh, a comparison of the current war with the Holocaust, and accusations of genocide by the state of Israel against the Palestinian population in Gaza”.

They also complained that Alam had not deleted “racist and other comparable comments” against Israelis from his page, ostensibly made by some of his followers.

Alam, Wahab and Wasif deny the allegations.

“We have a moral responsibility to decide which side of history we will stand on,” they said in a statement on Tuesday.

Alam told Al Jazeera: “I am an anti-Zionist which means I am against colonialism, settler colonialism, against racism, against apartheid and genocide.

“I am not an anti-Semite, and it’s most unfortunate that Germany chooses to conflate the two, [as this] serves and furthers the white supremacist agenda.”

The episode is one of many high-profile fallouts across the Western arts world in recent weeks over the Middle East war, focused on accusations of anti-Semitism.

Several tense cases are focused in Germany, which has a special responsibility to Israel given its history arising from the Holocaust. However, artists, protesters and activists say Berlin’s crackdown confuses criticism of Israeli policies with anti-Jewish racism.

‘Extremely distressing’

Israel began bombing Gaza after Hamas, which governs the densely populated Strip, attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping more than 200. To date, Israel’s strikes, officially aimed at crushing the Palestinian group, have killed more than 15,000 people, among them many children.

In the wake of the Hamas attack, the Frankfurt Book Fair “indefinitely postponed” an appearance by Palestinian author Adania Shibli, who was due to receive a prize for her novel Minor Detail on October 20.

On November 13, Haitian-born curator Anais Duplan was left “speechless” after his Afrofuturism exhibition at Germany’s Museum Folkwang was abruptly cancelled by the museum’s director Peter Gorschluter.

Gorschluter said Duplan’s social media posts “do not acknowledge the terroristic attack of the Hamas and consider the Israeli military operation in Gaza a genocide”.

Meanwhile, several artists have resigned from their posts at the renowned German modern art exhibition, Documenta, in a showdown that has dominated Europe’s cultural headlines for weeks.

On November 16, most of the exhibition’s six-member finding committee quit in solidarity with Ranjit Hoskote, who had quit days earlier after a German daily, Suddeutsche Zeitung, revealed that he had signed a 2019 letter published by the Indian arm of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

That letter prompted German accusations of anti-Semitism against Hoskote, a writer and curator.

Earlier, the managing director of Documenta, Andreas Hoffmann, publicly condemned two Indonesian artistic directors of the last Documenta in 2022 for allegedly liking, and then unliking, an Instagram post in support of Palestine.

The pro-Palestinian post had been published by British artist and activist Hamja Ahsan, who took part in Documenta’s 2022 edition as a solo artist. Ahsan’s Instagram account username, realdocumenta, was later suspended. He alleged that Hoffmann had complained to the social media platform citing a trademark violation.

Ahsan told Al Jazeera he believes Hoffman’s complaint was a pretext to censor his pro-Palestinian content, as he described the episode as “extremely distressing”.

Hoffmann said that Ahsan’s username “infringed the trademark ‘Documenta’ … Based on its terms of use, Instagram came to the conclusion that the account had to be blocked.”

‘Propaganda against Palestinians’

Cultural sectors from the United Kingdom to the Netherlands have been impacted, too.

Earlier this month, several filmmakers withdrew from the world’s leading documentary festival, held in the Netherlands, after organisers criticised a pro-Palestinian protest on opening night during which activists raised a banner on stage reading “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”.

The artistic director of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), Orwa Nyrabia, initially applauded the protest, but later condemned the slogan.

Palestinian filmmaker Basma Alsharif, who was among those to abandon the festival, accused Nyrabia of peddling misinformation.

“This kind of propaganda against Palestinians of being anti-Semitic is the thing that has been used widely against us for a long time,” Alsharif told Al Jazeera of the “river to the sea” slogan, which is deemed a rallying cry by pro-Palestinian protestors, but a call to destroy Israel by supporters of the Jewish state.

“There have been decades of fighting to get that [misinterpretation] cleared up and clarified but it’s very clear that it’s not working, because [accusations like this] are being used very aggressively against us right now.”

Nathan Thrall, an acclaimed American author based in Jerusalem, was looking forward to the London launch of his book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story, on October 12, but the event was abruptly cancelled by police on security grounds.

The Palestine Festival of Literature, which was set to host him, announced the measure, which London’s Met Police force did not deny; “We do not comment on security advice given to individuals,” they told Al Jazeera.

Thrall’s work of narrative non-fiction details the challenges faced by Palestinians under Israeli occupation.

He told Al Jazeera that his London appearance had been the “biggest event of my book tour”.

“This was a time when the atmosphere in the UK was very [politically] hostile to expressions of sympathy for Palestinians,” said Thrall.

The writer, whose US book events were also cancelled, added, “Obviously, I wouldn’t want to hold an event if there really was an issue of safety” but questioned whether “events centred around a pro-Israel book would have had the same safety concerns”.

After almost two months of cancellations and condemnation, pro-Palestinian creatives in Europe see an uncertain future.

“Being an artist is already so precarious,” said Alsharif. “So how is it possible that someone’s personal political view on something in the cultural sector [can be] punished?

“That’s a very dangerous precedent. And if you don’t stand up then it means that anything [you say or do] can be scrutinised if it doesn’t fall under an agenda.”

BIG CYPRESS, FL – The Seminole Tribe of Floridas Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum will participate in Miami Art Week, showcasing a special pop-up exhibit at the Seminole Okalee Indian Village & Venue in Hollywood, Florida on Saturday, December 2. The exhibit marks a milestone for the museum as it debuts at Art Basel for the first time, presenting the exhibit “EeLitchKo” under the category of cultural institutions. Art enthusiasts holding a 2023 Art Basel VIP pass can access this exhibit for free, featuring the latest works from Seminole artists like Samuel Tommie’s dynamic acrylics and Durante Blais-Billie’s intricate natural fiber art. “EeLitchKo” offers a unique chance to engage with Indigenous Floridian artists and their creations. For further details, visit the museum’s website at Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum Pop-up.

In addition to the Art Basel participation, the museum will host two holiday markets. The first, the Hollywood Holiday Marketplace, will take place on Saturday, December 2, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Seminole Park, located at the Seminole Okalee Indian Village. Following this, the third annual Big Cypress Holiday Market is scheduled for Friday, December 8, and Saturday, December 9, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day, at the Museum Festival Grounds. These markets will feature a wide array of Native arts, crafts, clothing, and jewelry for sale, along with Seminole food vendors.

Admission to both the holiday markets and the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum will be free, offering a perfect opportunity to experience and purchase authentic Seminole creations.

When Canadian producer Jordan Young started playing around with AI voice-cloning technology — ultimately creating a fake Kanye West song that sounded, well, just like Kanye West — it immediately prompted him to think about the ethical implications of the technology. 

“As soon as I made it, I started to think … if anybody can make music with anyone’s voice, what does this mean for artists? What does this mean for music?” said Young, who has worked with Beyoncé, BTS and Dua Lipa.

He and his company Hooky recently developed a technology that could make an artist sound like they were singing in a different language from their own.

That resonated with American pop singer Lauv, who at the time had just finished a Korean tour and wanted to find a meaningful way to thank his fans. Why not develop a new version of his song Love U Like That, transformed to make it sound like he was performing in Korean?

The process began with Young’s company tapping Kevin Woo, a South Korean singer-songwriter who is fluent in English and Korean, to rewrite and sing the song in a new tongue. That interpretation has to capture the nuances of the Korean language, explained Young.

“It’s not just, throw it into a translator website and whatever it spits out, that’s your song. You have to be artistic about it,” Young said.

The recordings also had to match musically. For example, if Lauv sang in falsetto on a few bars, Woo did the same in his Korean-language demo.

Enter artificial intelligence.

The technology is trained on “every corner” of Lauv’s voice, as Young puts it — from the highest frequencies and tones to the lowest — to build a comprehensive model of his vocals.

The Korean-language demo written and sung by Woo is then combined with the AI model of Lauv’s voice, creating a Korean-language song that sounds like it’s sung by Lauv.

WATCH | The Korean-language version of LAUV’s Love U Like That: [embedded content]

It’s been a year of reckoning for creative industries wrestling with artificial intelligence.

The music business in particular has seen an explosion of AI-generated songs made to sound like the world’s most popular artists — such as the viral track Heart On My Sleeve, which featured computer-generated vocals that sounded like Drake and The Weeknd.

Some artists are fighting the non-sanctioned use of their voices and likeness, while others like Grimes, John Legend and Demi Lovato are embracing the tech to varying degrees. 

“At minimum, we should give artists control over how their voice is used,” said Young, who is from Toronto, noting that’s where the idea came from to use AI to change languages.

“It was about creating a control mechanism for artists to be able to manage their likeness in a world where AI can totally disrupt that.”

Other companies are working on technology that focuses on music and translation.

AudioShake, a San Francisco company that specializes in audio separation, isolates a song’s vocal track from the music, then uses AI to transcribe and translate the song, building technology that maps the original English with the new language so that fans can follow the lyrics of the original song in their language. Pop singer Sia is one of their clients.

Meanwhile, South Korea’s largest record label HYBE used in-house AI technology so that its artist Lee Hyun, known as MIDNATT, could record his song Masquerade in six different languages: English, Korean, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese.

The singer recorded his song in each language, which was then combined with demos of native speakers reading out the lyrics. Hyun speaks Korean as well as limited English and Chinese.

“It’s a scary thing that people don’t fully understand, and often AI is portrayed as this monolithic thing, and it’s not,” said Young.

“AI is actually many different technologies that can come together in many different ways.”

Artists already trying to reach international fans

Even before AI came to the forefront this year, artists had already been trying to use different languages to target fans, according to Kristin Robinson with Billboard Magazine.

She points to Despacito, a 2017 song by Puerto Rican singer Luis Fonsi and Puerto Rican rapper Daddy Yankee, that saw its remixed version featuring Justin Bieber become a huge hit. 

“Having Justin Bieber hop onto a Latin track is not something I would have ever anticipated. Having Beyoncé try to sing in Spanish is not something I had on my bingo card for Beyoncé to do.”

But with AI now factored into this already successful trend, Robinson says people will likely have mixed feelings about “the authenticity” of the process.

It remains to be seen if this type of music will be well received. Robinson says that using the technology in a way that is both ethically and culturally appropriate is an important part of the conversation.

That was reflected in some of the online reaction to Lauv’s Korean-language version of Love U Like That. 

Some fans said they were “obsessed” with the new version, while others questioned the optics of a white artist using technology to insert his voice over a song sung by a Korean artist. Still others suggested different ways to have Lauv and Woo sing on the same track.

Getting ‘nuance’ of language important: Toronto artist

Toronto jazz vocalist and songwriter Jacqueline Teh hopes to incorporate her family’s language — Hokkien, a Chinese dialect from the Fujian province — into her future projects. As a multilingual artist, she can see the benefits and the downsides of using AI to create songs in different languages.

She says the technology seemed exciting at first, adding that it can be a “great springboard” for artists to access other languages.

But she says credit and agency are incredibly important to artists — and that she wouldn’t want AI to come between a potential relationship with a language that’s new to her, or with a person who speaks a language different from her own.

“I think with language there’s so much nuance and there’s so much slang and there’s so much that can’t really be translated just through technology,” she said, which is why working with a native speaker makes the song more meaningful to her. 

She says as long as artists aren’t using AI to bypass the hard work that goes into creating meaningful relationships with fans and other artists, “there’s so much that is accessible to us with technology.”

Young, the producer, is working on a new translation project — potentially with a Canadian artist. He says now that the genie is out of the bottle, the industry has to figure out how to steer the tech in the right direction.

“I’m never going to build something that removes the human being from the creative process,” he said. “And there are lots of companies that are attempting to do that right now.”