AI Is Not the Enemy of Music
There is a strange fear running through the music business right now.
Artificial intelligence is going to destroy music. It’s going to replace musicians. It’s going to eliminate producers, engineers, songwriters and artists.
But musicians have seen this movie before.
And apparently, so has Dr. Dre.
In a recent interview, Dre made a comment that will probably upset a lot of musicians:
“I think the only people that see AI as a threat are the people who have trouble creating.”
That’s harsh.
But I understand exactly what he means.
We’ve Been Here Before
I’ve spent most of my life making music.
I’ve written songs, toured in bands, recorded musicians, edited performances, mixed records and produced artists. I’ve watched technologies come and go, and I’ve watched musicians panic almost every time something new arrives.
The drum machine was going to replace drummers. Synthesizers weren’t real instruments. Sampling wasn’t real music.
Digital recording was going to destroy the recording studio. Plugins weren’t as good as hardware.
Now it’s AI.
Dre makes essentially the same historical argument. The people terrified of AI today sound a lot like the people who were terrified of drum machines and synthesizers when they first appeared.
The technology changes.
The argument barely does.
A Tool Doesn’t Have Taste
AI can generate things. That doesn’t mean it knows what should exist.
Rick Rubin has been talking about something very similar. His view is that AI is another creative tool, but as the technology makes it easier for everyone to generate things, human taste, curiosity and individual perspective become even more important.
Rubin also makes an interesting comparison to punk rock.
Punk lowered the technical barrier to making music. You didn’t have to be a virtuoso. You didn’t need years of formal training or an enormous recording budget. You could learn a few chords, start a band and make something.
What mattered was whether you had something to say.
Rubin sees something similar happening with AI. It can remove another layer of technical barriers between an idea and the ability to actually make it.
Making something easier to execute doesn’t automatically make the resulting art less meaningful.
The question is still what you do with it.
Give ten people the same guitar and you get ten different results. Give ten producers the same Pro Tools session and you’ll get ten different mixes.
Give ten people the same AI system and you’ll hear ten different ideas of what a song could become.
Because the important part isn’t the tool.
It’s the person making decisions.
What do you keep? What do you throw away? What feels wrong? What feels exciting?
That’s taste.
And taste is the most important things a producer develops.
What Else Could This Be?
Interestingly, that’s close to how Dre describes using it. He makes something first, then asks AI what it would do with what he created.
Pete Townshend recently described another version of the same idea.
Townshend has hundreds of pieces of unreleased music sitting in his archive. Some are songs he says simply didn’t work because he didn’t get them right the first time.
Rather than throwing them away, he’s interested in feeding some of those old songs into an AI music system and seeing what it might find in them.
This is Pete Townshend. The problem isn’t that the guy who wrote Tommy and Quadrophenia suddenly can’t write a song.
He’s curious.
He’s looking at something he created years ago and asking a new tool:
What else could this be?
Create something. Interrogate it. Try something else. Compare. Learn.
Then make another decision.
AI becomes another set of ears in the room.
Not the producer.
The Producer Has Always Used Other People’s Brains
Record production has never been about doing everything yourself.
Great producers use musicians, engineers, songwriters, arrangers, session players, mixers, mastering engineers, assistants and technicians.
The producer’s job isn’t necessarily to personally perform every task.
The producer’s job is to know where the record needs to go.
Dre’s entire career demonstrates that idea. His work has involved collaborations with artists, musicians and producers, and one of his great strengths has always been knowing which people and resources to bring into the process.
AI is another resource.
A very strange and incredibly powerful one.
But still a resource.
AI Is Actually Most Interesting When You’re Already Good at Something
People assume AI is most powerful in the hands of someone who doesn’t know anything.
I think the opposite may be true.
If you understand songwriting, you can recognize when an AI songwriting suggestion sucks. If you understand harmony, you can manipulate what it gives you.
If you understand recording, you know what’s physically possible. If you understand mixing, you can evaluate its recommendations.
And if you’ve made records for decades, you have thousands upon thousands of creative decisions stored inside your head.
AI doesn’t erase that experience. It gives that experience leverage.
In a strange way, Townshend digging through unfinished songs and Rubin talking about the increasing importance of taste are examples of the same thing.
Experience doesn’t become less valuable because the machine gets better.
It may become more valuable.
A beginner can ask AI for an answer.
An experienced person can argue with the answer.
The Real Opportunity Is Analysis
One of the most interesting possibilities with AI isn’t actually having it generate music.
It’s having it analyze yours.
AI can look at something you’ve created and identify patterns that are difficult to see from inside your own work.
I’ve spent years thinking about why records feel the way they do. Why does this chorus explode? Why does this mix feel intimate? Why does moving one instrument suddenly make another instrument feel louder?
Why does this lyric work when another technically better lyric doesn’t?
Imagine having another analytical system available while you’re thinking through those questions.
Not to tell you what to do.
To give you something else to think about.
But There Are Real Problems
None of this means every criticism of AI is stupid.
There are legitimate questions about training data, copyright, consent, voice cloning and compensation.
Using an artist’s work without permission is a fundamentally different issue from whether AI itself is a useful creative technology.
Many of the strongest objections aren’t really about the existence of the tool. They’re about how it’s used, who gets asked and who gets paid.
Those are conversations worth having.
If someone clones a singer’s voice without permission, that’s a problem. But that’s an argument about ethics.
It isn’t proof that the technology itself has no legitimate creative use.
Those two conversations keep getting mashed together.
They shouldn’t be.
You Don’t Have to Use It
I also don’t think every musician needs AI.
If you want to make a record with four musicians standing in a room playing into microphones, beautiful. Do it.
If you want to record to two-inch tape without a computer anywhere near the building, fantastic.
Do it.
And if you want to use AI extensively, that’s another creative choice.
What I don’t understand is the idea that everyone else has to follow your rules in order for their work to qualify as art.
Music has never worked that way.
And thank God for that.
The Human Still Has to Care
This is ultimately where I land.
AI can generate a thousand ideas. I still have to care about one of them. AI can suggest twenty arrangements. I still have to choose one.
It can analyze a lyric, but it doesn’t know why that lyric reminds me of someone I loved twenty years ago.
It can generate a technically perfect performance.
I may still prefer the shitty human take where the singer’s voice cracked.
Because music isn’t a contest to determine who can generate the most correct information.
Music is communication. It’s taste, memory, personality, imperfection, judgment and emotion.
And decisions.
AI can participate in that process.
But somebody still has to decide what matters.
Have Something to Say
So no, I’m not particularly worried about AI replacing me.
I’m much more interested in what I can do with it.
I have decades of musical experience behind me. AI doesn’t suddenly make those years worthless. It gives me another incredibly powerful tool to apply them to.
That’s why Dre’s comment resonated with me, and why I find it interesting that people like Rick Rubin and Pete Townshend are experimenting with these ideas too.
These aren’t people who suddenly need a machine because they’ve run out of creativity.
They’re people who are curious about a new tool.
The people who are confident in their ability to create don’t necessarily look at AI and see a competitor.
They see possibilities.
The drum machine didn’t kill drumming. The synthesizer didn’t kill the piano. Pro Tools didn’t kill musicianship.
And AI isn’t going to eliminate creativity.
It will change the tools. It will change the workflow. It will probably destroy some jobs and create others, just as disruptive technologies always have.
But the fundamental job remains.
Have something to say.
Then use whatever tools you have to say it.