AI and Creativity — How Much Is Too Much

We’re about to order the new Roland keyboard that will be going downstairs — it’s going to be a new fixture in the house for writing music (for fun) and for my son to learn to play piano. During the wait, I’ve been reflecting on how I’d like to approach writing, and how much AI assistance should be inserted into the process. It’s a touchy subject in the world right now, and there’s been a heavy amount of conflict in my mind about where I currently stand on the topic. So I thought I’d help clarify it to myself via blog post. Writing is the way that I figure out what I actually think.

Most importantly, I feel that I qualify to have an opinion in the first place, because I spent a number of years writing music for a paycheck, and also had been creating it before tools like Suno had come on the scene. Like a large majority of the musicians out there, I understand the complexity and attention to detail that it takes to create a high-quality piece of music, even if computers and sample libraries were doing a large part of the heavy lifting in music production before AI came into the mix. The bar to entry has been consistently lowered over decades, and what AI has done is nearly lowered it to zero. At least for the production side of things.

Composing music is now a spectrum with extreme possibilities at both ends. At one end, I can write notation, have performers play the music, and be (mostly) in control of the end result. I can then travel down the spectrum and write music that leverages computers, plugins and other tech to do some of the performance and production lift for me. Further, and I can get into having AI assist with parts or layers of what I produce. And at the far end, I can just write a sentence or two and have AI be creative for me. The real argument to be made, I think, isn’t where on the spectrum the ethical place may be in order to call yourself a musician. It’s whether the spectrum matters anymore at all.

In a world where production of expression requires anywhere from 95% effort to 1% effort, how much value should we place on that effort as part of the creative result? Is the real thing we’re afraid of as artists (because production of art is democratized) that the ego of the artist must be decoupled from the skill it takes to create the art? Is the act of striving to express myself no longer part of the value equation? We could go one step further and argue, “Was it ever?” but let’s not get too deep into the weeds.

Of course, while thinking about this I had to fire the question at ChatGPT to see if I’m considering all the angles. I got back some incredibly thoughtful considerations as we chatted. Here is one of my favorites.

AI doesn’t diminish art by making creation easy. It exposes a mistake we’ve quietly made for centuries: confusing scarcity with meaning. When beautiful images, music, and writing become abundant, the value of art shifts away from technical production and toward what only a lived life can provide — perspective, intention, authenticity, and the feeling of encountering another mind. In an age where almost anything can be generated, art becomes less about proving “I can make this” and more about saying, “This is what it felt like to be me.”

As I see the overflow of content rushing out into the world like a tsunami, in my despair I find myself reaching for a floating log or piece of debris — something real in the flood. I hold onto it for dear life and feel its rough edges on my fingertips as we’re forced along a path that neither of us controls. That broken object I clasp onto becomes the most important thing to me in the world. It’s the thing that’s with me, keeping me afloat as everything around us is relentlessly engulfed.

My position on AI in music (and art) is this: I have only failed as an artist if I fail to achieve the expression of what it is like to be me. And strangely, only I can answer the question of whether the production of my expression is authentic. It’s not about how much AI I used … it’s about how much of myself remains. And if I’m fortunate, how much of that expression is witnessed by others who can see me inside of it.