AI & MUSIC

Much of the conversation surrounding artificial intelligence and music begins with an assumption I don't share: that the purpose of making music is to produce music.

I believe the music industry is disconnected from the deeper purpose of art.

Tens of thousands of years ago, our ancestors ventured into the darkness of caves and began leaving images upon the stone walls. What compelled them to enter these mysterious spaces? What were they searching for?

Perhaps the images weren't entirely conceived beforehand. In the flickering firelight, the natural contours of the stone may have revealed forms that seemed to emerge from the darkness. An animal appeared in a shadow, a horse in the curvature of a wall. With a few strokes of pigment, something previously unseen was brought into existence.

Were these ancient artists simply making pictures? Or was something else more profound unfolding within them as they worked?

We can never know what passed through their consciousness. Perhaps these were spiritual encounters, attempts to understand the natural world, or explorations of something they could neither name nor comprehend.

I find it fascinating that these images have survived for thousands of years, while the experiences that gave rise to them remain forever inaccessible.

Perhaps what mattered most was never the image itself, but what happened within the person creating it.

I suspect the impulse to create has always been connected to our spiritual and psychological evolution. Art offers us a way of encountering aspects of existence that cannot easily be understood through reason or expressed through language.

We don't always create to communicate something we already know. Sometimes we create to discover something we don't yet understand.

Art allows us to wander into unfamiliar regions of consciousness, beyond the boundaries of ordinary awareness. It's an exploration without a destination, a dialogue between our inner world and something unknown. The meaning may reveal itself much later, or perhaps never at all.

And therein lies something profoundly human.

What concerns me about artificial intelligence is not what it can create, but what it encourages us to abandon.

We live in a culture increasingly obsessed with convenience, efficiency, and eliminating effort. Technology promises to remove the obstacles between desire and fulfillment. But what if those obstacles are part of the experience? What if the uncertainty, wandering, and struggle are precisely where something meaningful takes place?

Artificial intelligence can absorb the accumulated artistic expressions of humanity and generate endless variations of them. But it has no human life from which to reflect upon existence. AI has no perspective from which the end product emerges. It can imitate the sound of longing without having lived a life of longing.

AI isn't turning to art to understand its suffering, explore its consciousness, or make sense of its existence. It has no personal history to reconcile, no memories to revisit, no mystery of its own humanity to contemplate.

When AI creates a piece of music, what exactly is it communicating to us? Whose experience is being expressed?

Certainly, we may be moved by what it produces. Our response to music is our own, regardless of its origins. But the ability to evoke an emotion is not the same as having experienced something and feeling compelled to explore it through art.

We are beginning to confuse the artifact with the experience that gives rise to it.

Most importantly, AI cannot undertake my inner journey for me.

I find it unsettling that we're increasingly willing to surrender our imagination, attention, and creative instincts to machines, as though these were burdens we ought to be relieved of.

Perhaps the greatest danger of AI isn't that it will replace artists, but that it will persuade people to stop exploring the artist within themselves.

We may eventually inhabit a world overflowing with extraordinary music, images, and stories, while becoming increasingly disconnected from the very experiences that once compelled us to create them.

Would that really represent progress?

I think again of those ancient caves. We can admire the animals painted upon their walls, study their forms, and speculate about their meaning. Yet whatever unfolded within the consciousness of those who created them remains lost to time.

We have inherited the paintings, but not the journeys that brought them into existence.

Perhaps the most meaningful part of the experience was never left on the wall.

For me, picking up an instrument remains an invitation into the unknown. I don't necessarily know what I'm searching for, and I often discover something I could never have anticipated. The music that remains is only a trace of that experience.

I have no intention of using artificial intelligence to make music. Not because I fear what it might create, but because the experience of creating is what matters to me.

Why would I want to automate that part of the human experience?