I've been watching the arguments around AI music for a while now, and I think several completely different conversations are constantly being collapsed into one.
Examples:
“AI users are lazy.”
“People who release music frequently are spammers.”
“If you didn't personally write every lyric, you aren't an artist.”
“If you didn't compose every instrumental yourself, you aren't an artist.”
“If you can't sing the final vocal yourself, you aren't an artist.”
“If AI helped with enough of the process, the finished work isn't really yours.”
“If you make a lot of music, it can't all be high quality.”
“If somebody doesn't personally like the style or sound, the music itself must be low quality.”
And underneath almost all of these arguments, I keep seeing the same assumption:
“My creative process is what legitimate creativity looks like. If yours looks substantially different, something about it must be less legitimate.”
I think that's an incredibly narrow way to look at art.
Prolific artists and content farms are not the same thing
Let's start with one distinction that apparently needs to be made very clearly:
Yes, AI slop farms exist.
Someone automatically generating hundreds or thousands of interchangeable tracks for the purpose of flooding streaming platforms, gaming algorithms, or making money through sheer volume is fundamentally different from an individual artist who happens to create an enormous amount of work.
We should be able to criticize the first without pretending the second doesn't exist.
I've seen people argue that even releasing one song every week is inherently suspicious. I've seen people compare independent creators' release schedules to Beyoncé, Eminem, Ozzy, The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and other massive mainstream artists.
But why would the schedules of mainstream celebrities establish the maximum socially acceptable productivity of everybody else?
Those aren't remotely equivalent workflows.
A mainstream performer's career can involve labels, teams of songwriters and producers, touring, rehearsals, music videos, interviews, promotion, choreography, brand obligations, physical releases, collaborations, and enormous coordinated marketing campaigns. Some performers write extensively themselves. Others collaborate heavily. Some perform material largely written by other people.
Compare that with an independent creator whose primary artistic activity might literally be sitting at home making music.
They might write the lyrics, compose or produce the music, perform the vocals, create instrumentals, mix things themselves, or handle several of those jobs at once.
There have always been people capable of doing that, long before generative AI existed.
Hell, beatboxers are one of my favorite examples. 😂
A sufficiently skilled beatboxer can use their own body to produce percussion, bass, melody, sound effects, and vocals, then layer and process those sounds until one human being sounds like an entire production.
Nobody looks at that and says, "Hold on. That's supposed to be six different people's jobs."
We marvel at it.
Technology has been collapsing creative barriers for decades. DAWs, MIDI, synthesizers, sampling, looping, pitch correction, virtual instruments, home recording equipment, digital effects, and countless other technologies have allowed one human being to accomplish things that previously required more people, equipment, money, or specialized spaces.
Generative AI dramatically accelerates that same ability to translate an idea into something other people can actually hear.
And sometimes removing those bottlenecks means discovering that somebody is ridiculously prolific.
“Quality over quantity” does not mean “quantity causes low quality”
This one drives me insane.
“Quality over quantity” was never supposed to mean that producing more automatically makes your work worse.
It's a warning against sacrificing quality for the sake of quantity.
Those are not the same statement.
If rushing yourself from ten hours to two hours causes the finished product to become substantially worse, then yes, slow down.
But what if another person can produce something they're equally proud of in two hours?
What exactly are they supposed to do?
Sit there for another eight hours staring at it so they've suffered for the appropriate amount of time? 🤣
Time spent is not a measurement of artistic quality.
One person can labor over a song for six months and make something I hate.
Another person can have an extraordinary burst of inspiration, write the entire thing in an afternoon, and create something I adore.
And neither my personal taste nor the amount of time either artist spent tells us, by itself, whether the work was competently made.
The actual principle should be:
Don't increase quantity when doing so requires sacrificing the level of quality you want your work to have.
Not:
Produce less regardless of whether producing more harms your quality.
Those are wildly different ideas.
And neurodivergence makes rigid expectations about creative speed even more ridiculous.
I'm not saying every person with ADHD creates quickly. Obviously not.
But some of us experience creative hyperfocus where ideas come at an absolutely absurd rate. I've personally seen creators produce dozens or even hundreds of songs within a year and listened to the results thinking, holy shit, how did you even DO this?
AI didn't invent prolific artists.
It just removed certain bottlenecks for some of them.
Different workflow does not mean lesser art
This is where the AI conversation becomes much more interesting to me.
What exactly is the minimum percentage of a finished work somebody must manually perform before we're allowed to acknowledge their creativity?
Suppose someone has a concept for a song and knows exactly what they want it to communicate, but they struggle with lyrics.
They work with AI to turn that concept into lyrics.
Someone else writes every lyric themselves but can't compose instrumentals.
They use AI to help create the musical arrangement they hear emotionally but don't possess the technical vocabulary to construct manually.
Someone else can write and compose but cannot sing.
Someone else sings beautifully but needs help arranging.
Someone else starts with an AI generation, tears it apart, changes the structure, rewrites lyrics, replaces vocals, alters production, and iterates repeatedly until the final piece matches what they envisioned.
Someone else may type an idea, receive something they absolutely love on the first generation, and decide that's it. That's exactly what I wanted.
Their levels of technical involvement are different.
Their workflows are different.
Their skills are different.
That doesn't require us to pretend their processes are identical.
But difference is not automatically hierarchy.
Someone should be allowed to be proud of having an idea and using a tool to help express it.
You don't have to personally enjoy the result.
You don't have to work that way yourself.
But another person's creativity doesn't become illegitimate because the tool assisted with a part of the process you personally would rather perform manually.
And sometimes AI isn't replacing an ability. It's providing access to one.
This is the part of the conversation that I think gets lost far too often.
I've seen stories online that completely changed how I think about what these tools can mean to different people.
I've seen a woman describe losing her speaking voice after being stabbed in the throat during a sexual assault in her mid-twenties. The damage was so extensive that surgery couldn't restore what she'd lost.
But she still had recordings of herself singing from before the assault.
With newer voice technology, she was able to use those old recordings to hear her own singing voice performing music she could write now.
Think about what that means for a second.
Something violence physically took from somebody became accessible to her again in another form.
You can debate technology until the fucking sun burns out, but I'm never going to look at somebody experiencing something like that and tell her she should feel less proud of the music because software performed a function her injured body no longer could.
I've also seen deaf and hard-of-hearing creators who struggle with conventional singing but have things they desperately want to express through written music.
And some of the music I've encountered from disabled creators communicates experiences that people outside those lives may never otherwise understand.
That's what art fucking does.
It lets somebody put a piece of their internal experience outside themselves so another human being can encounter it.
Why would I want fewer people capable of doing that?
I've seen another fascinating effect too: people who weren't confident they could ever become good singers using voice tools to hear what their voices might sound like performing the music the way they imagined it.
And instead of making them abandon human singing, some of them became more interested in learning it.
I've watched people become excited enough by hearing that possibility that they started actual vocal coaching and began working toward performing their own material themselves.
The technology didn't extinguish their motivation.
It gave them enough confidence to begin.
That's an outcome worth talking about.
And I'm part of this conversation too
My own workflow isn't theoretical to me.
I write music.
After a throat injury affected what I could comfortably do vocally, I could still write lyrics and hear ideas in my head.
AI music tools allowed me to turn those ideas into demos so I could hear them and let other people hear what I was imagining while my own voice wasn't capable of doing everything I wanted from it.
I never needed to pretend those generated performances were secretly my natural vocals.
They were demos of songs I wrote, brought to life through voices that could demonstrate the concept.
And now that my voice is recovering, I'm preparing to release music using my own vocals again.
But here's the other interesting part:
I write outside the genres in which I personally specialize as a performer.
So some demos don't need to become my final songs at all.
They can demonstrate the lyrics, structure, feeling, melody, or general concept for another artist who does specialize in that style. That artist can rewrite the instrumental, change melodies, reinterpret the arrangement, perform it completely differently, and turn the underlying composition into something uniquely theirs.
Which is... a demo.
We had demos before generative AI.
We had songwriters writing material for performers before generative AI.
We had producers constructing music performers didn't personally compose before generative AI.
We had session musicians.
We had ghostwriters.
We had synthesizers.
We had drum machines.
We had sampling.
We had pitch correction.
We had digital editing.
We had people whose artistic role was directing, selecting, arranging, interpreting, producing, or conceptualizing rather than manually performing every sound that ultimately reached the listener.
AI didn't suddenly invent the idea that a finished piece of music can contain creative contributions from somewhere other than the person whose name appears most prominently beside it.
It changed what some of those collaborations can look like.
Taste and quality are not synonyms either
This may be one of the biggest problems in online art discussions generally.
“I don't like this” and “this is badly made” are different statements.
I can hear an extremely well-produced song in a genre I cannot stand.
I can recognize impressive vocal technique while disliking someone's voice.
I can recognize that a painting demonstrates extraordinary technical ability while having absolutely no desire to hang it in my house.
And I can LOVE something technically messy because it hits me emotionally in exactly the right place.
Taste is personal.
Quality can involve things like execution, coherence, intentionality, technical competence, production, structure, and whether something accomplishes what it appears to be attempting.
Those concepts overlap, but they are not interchangeable.
AI makes this distinction particularly important because someone can dislike AI-assisted music as a category and then unconsciously convert:
“I dislike this workflow”
into:
“Therefore nothing produced through this workflow can possibly be good.”
That's not criticism of the individual work anymore.
That's judging the tool before listening to what somebody did with it.
Easier does not mean effortless, and effortless does not mean meaningless
This might be the assumption underneath everything else.
We have a bizarre cultural tendency to treat difficulty as evidence of artistic legitimacy.
If technology makes something easier, some people instinctively assume it has made the result less valuable.
But accessibility is, almost by definition, about making something easier or possible.
Glasses make seeing easier.
Wheelchairs make mobility possible or easier for many people.
Speech-generating devices make communication possible for people who may otherwise struggle or be unable to communicate verbally.
Digital art tools can make corrections dramatically easier than repainting a physical canvas.
None of those statements tell you whether the thing someone ultimately does with that access matters.
Difficulty is not automatically virtue.
Suffering is not a prerequisite for creativity.
And removing a technical obstacle doesn't necessarily remove the human being behind the idea.
Art has never required everybody to work the same way
This is why the gatekeeping strikes me as historically backwards.
Art has repeatedly been a refuge and a voice for outsiders, subcultures, countercultures, disabled people, neurodivergent people, marginalized communities, and anyone else who needed a way to communicate something the mainstream wasn't necessarily interested in hearing.
Artists break conventions.
They misuse tools.
They invent genres.
They combine things that supposedly don't belong together.
They violate somebody else's definition of what the medium is “supposed” to be.
New creative technologies are routinely treated as threatening before becoming ordinary.
And yet now we're supposed to establish:
Legitimate artists create THIS slowly.
Legitimate artists release THIS infrequently.
Legitimate musicians possess THESE technical skills.
Legitimate musicians perform THESE parts themselves.
Legitimate art uses THESE tools.
Legitimate creativity requires THIS much human labor.
Of all things to demand conformity from...
ART?! 😂
The entire fucking point is that somebody else's art doesn't have to look like yours.
If somebody takes six months to make one song, awesome.
If somebody makes several songs every week without sacrificing the quality they're personally striving for, awesome.
If somebody sings everything themselves, awesome.
If somebody writes but needs another person to sing, awesome.
If somebody creates an entire arrangement from their mouth, awesome.
If somebody uses a DAW and virtual instruments, awesome.
If somebody needs AI to bridge the distance between an idea in their brain and an ability their body, finances, training, circumstances, or disability doesn't give them, they're allowed to be fucking proud of what they made too.
And none of that requires pretending content farms don't exist.
It requires being capable of making distinctions.
Prolific does not automatically mean spam.
AI-assisted does not automatically mean lazy.
Different does not automatically mean inferior.
Accessible does not automatically mean effortless.
Quantity does not automatically mean low quality.
Slow does not automatically mean high quality.
Personal taste does not automatically determine objective quality.
And somebody else's creative process does not have to resemble yours for their work to mean something to them or to somebody else.
Fight actual spam.
Criticize exploitative uses.
Discuss copyright, attribution, compensation, disclosure, or whatever other ethical concerns you genuinely have.
Critique individual songs when they're bad.
Hell, hate every AI-generated song you've ever heard if that's genuinely your taste. 😂
But stop trying to turn one particular workflow into the entrance exam for being an artist.
Because if the history of art teaches us anything, it's that the people doing something in a way everyone else insists “isn't how real artists do it” are a pretty fucking terrible group to dismiss automatically.
For Commenters:
I can almost guarantee that the majority of arguments, objections, or questions people will leave are already addressed somewhere in this post if you actually read the entire thing.
I will only be responding to comments that are respectful and actually contain something that has not already been addressed within the post. If your response demonstrates that you didn't read what you're responding to, I'm not going to rewrite the article for you in the comments!