AI: This Is Existential

Introduction

AI.

We’re told it’s going to be the biggest shake-up of society since the Industrial Revolution. It’s going to change how we write emails, buy, sell, build websites, and communicate...and make music.

The question is: who’s going to be making the music? You? Or the machine?

And if it’s the machine, what does that mean for you? And how do you feel about it?

The Void of the Unknown

Right now, nobody knows what the full effect of AI will be on the creative industries.

So many questions, few, if any, answers. Everybody’s talking but no one’s getting heard. Or so it seems.

Intellectual property court cases are playing out, media speculation is rife, and there’s  continual noise coming from tech companies and governments about how AI will radically alter human society in ways we can barely imagine, let alone plan for.

So there’s a huge uncertainty void. And as humans, when we are faced with a void, we fill it with fear.

But it isn’t just fear spreading through the creative community right now.

There is also anger.

Producers, artists, and musicians are furious. And who can blame them?

We see AI tech giants scanning entire warehouses of books to train computers to create work that directly competes with the original authors.

We watch tech executives admit in court to harvesting tens of millions of copyright-protected tracks straight from the internet.

It's audacious.

What if those same tech companies had their proprietary code stolen? No doubt, they’d be angry too. After all, they worked hard on it. It’s their intellectual property.

I’m not here to litigate the legal rights and wrongs. I just want to point directly to the source of the anger. I want you to know that if you are feeling angry about this: I get it. I really get it.

Beyond Copyright: A Personal Violation

There is also a deeper layer beneath the intellectual property predicament that we should try to understand.

The reason this topic feels so charged, so heated, and so sensitive, is because of the nature of the work we do.

For creatives, art is an expression of the self. It comes from the heart and soul. It is both an extension and expression of who we are as a living, breathing person. Something of your actual essence is captured inside that audio file. It feels deeply personal because it is.

When a tech company helps itself to your work without asking, and then trains their AI on your composition, your production and your mix — this is more than an IP violation. It feels like a personal violation.

For many artists, creativity comes from a highly sensitive place. It’s their quintessential, core-level version of themselves. When you create from that space, the very idea of a machine extracting something from it is painful. This is why the emotional response in our industry is so visceral right now.

The Threat to Identity

Making music isn’t just a career; it is about your identity. It is the lens through which you understand yourself. It is how the world knows and identifies you.

When you meet someone new, you say, "Hi, I'm a music producer." What you do is also who you are.

Years ago, I worked a lot of random day jobs to get by. One of them was a courier job. Whenever I arrived at a delivery spot, people would look up and say, "Ah, the courier guy is here." They referred to me as the job.

Later in life, once my music career was in full swing, someone connected with me on a networking app and called me "The Music Man."

It’s an important distinction. The work you do has a huge influence on how you are perceived and valued by other people, and by the world at large. Making music is a rare skill. Not everyone can do it. It’s what differentiates you from others.

So when AI threatens the economics of music production, it isn’t just threatening your ability to pay the mortgage—though that is a totally legitimate worry. It is also threatening your identity, your sense of self.

This forces a crucial existential question to the surface:

"Without this, who am I?"

If a machine can knock out a track of a quality comparable to yours in 25 seconds flat, it devalues the currency of what you do. So more than a threat to your identity — it’s a threat to your value, too.

The Uncomfortable Question

This next point isn’t easy. But we owe it to ourselves to consider it clearly and carefully.

We spend our entire lives learning how to compose, produce, and mix music. It is a lifelong, gruelling investment of our time and energy.

How do we learn? We do it by studying the works of the masters who came before us. We reverse-engineer their tracks, absorb their techniques, and create original works incorporating the things that we learned.

Now here’s the difficult question:

If an AI learns by studying existing works, and creates an original work incorporating the things it learned, then what is the difference between what we do and what the machine does?

I am not drawing an exact parallel. And I am not saying there is no difference.

I’m just asking the question.

Chances are, the question itself makes you recoil. We immediately reject the very notion that it even could be the same. It’s a reactive, emotional response that prevents us from even finding an answer.

But shutting down the question entirely won't solve our problem.

Finding Space in the Chaos

The surface-level challenges of AI — economics, careers and livelihoods — are all real problems that we must work to solve.

We cannot afford to react purely out of blind panic or raw emotion. We need to think in a composed, strategic manner.

But to handle this moment effectively, to achieve the best outcome for our careers, our art, and our industry, our first imperative is to understand the full nature of the challenge. That means acknowledging the deeper existential dimensions: the fear of devalued rarity, and the fear of losing our identity.

So what’s to be done?

There is a brilliant line I keep coming back to that perfectly applies to this exact moment in music history:

"In between a stimulus and a response, there is a space. And in that space lies our ability to choose how we react. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

Right now, AI is the ultimate stimulus. Too often, our instinctive reaction is fury and shutdown.

My advice? Stay with the question for a moment. Don't rush to an immediate, impulsive conclusion. Give yourself the grace of that space.

If you’re brave enough to do that — to stay with the question — then AI might not be our enemy.

It might just be the thing that helps us rise.