Last Updated on July 24, 2026 by Christian Adams
Part 3 of a three-part series on the influence of AI and digital technology in music and the rise of push-button monoculture in the arts.
At the time of writing, there are dozens of dedicated commercial AI music generators available, along with hundreds of smaller, niche, or open-source applications. The industry is dominated by a few heavyweights, categorized by their primary use cases:
- Full song generation (instrumentals, lyrics, and vocals)
- Composition assistance (for creating instrumentals and cinematic soundtracks)
- Background & specialized generators (voice-cloning technology)
Because the market is expanding rapidly, apps are routinely launching for everything from text-based riff generation to customizable, royalty-free instrumental tracks. Consequentially, in my educated opinion, I’d say there’s never been a worse time to be a musician, songwriter, or artist. Medieval bards had a better gig than the average bass player today.
Currently, as in, right now, anybody can open a program and type:
“Write and record an uptempo, electric guitar-driven, indie rock meets R&B song with grungy electric guitars and a psychedelic bridge about two-thirds of the way through the jam. The lyrics should be about parking lots and bird flu. GET ON IT!”
…and 30 seconds later, you’ve got a reasonable assimilation of what you asked for. I think it matters if people still want to be on this planet in 50 years.
You Don’t Even Want to Know What They Do to Those Birds
I didn’t spend the previous two parts of the series arguing that nobody saw this coming. Everybody saw it coming. It was only a matter of time before music creation was reduced to algorithmic, prompt-driven “functional audio” button-pushing that’s got nothing to do with music. It’s like McDonald’s chicken nuggets have very little to do with chicken.1 You don’t even want to know what they do to those birds, man. It’s horrible.
Fast food is engineered to disarm your brain’s natural defense systems. Food scientists spend millions making sure a chicken nugget has the exact ratio of fat, salt, and sugar to dazzle your dopamine receptors without ever filling you up, keeping you on the hook for another hit. Fortunately for you and the corporation, it’s just the push of a button away.
People like predictability. There’s a McDonald’s just down the street from me here in Metro Manila. The nugget and the BBQ sauce taste exactly the same everywhere in the world. Everybody knows this. There’s zero risk involved.
Art is supposed to be risky, dangerous, and/or thought-provoking:
- It forces you to confront someone else’s uncomfortable, sometimes alien perspective.
- Imperfections can be a feature, not a flaw, with weird mixing choices and vocal takes where the singer’s voice cracks because they saw the producer do a line of coke off the mixing desk in the control room.
- It demands your attention instead of filling a vacuum with 30-second hits of media chicken nugget.
Fritz Haber and the “Dual-Use” Paradox
Since I’ve already established the food connection, I want to share an interesting story.
At the turn of the 20th century, the global population was growing too fast for agricultural land production, risking worldwide famine from a lack of natural nitrogen fertilizer. Fortunately, German chemist Fritz Haber invented the Haber-Bosch Process2 in 1909, which successfully fixed inert nitrogen gas directly from the air to create ammonia. It is widely considered one of the most important inventions in human history.3
Today, the process generates the synthetic fertilizer that sustains roughly 48% of the global population. Haber invented the process purely to save the world from starvation by feeding the planet’s soil. He seems like a good guy, right?
Unfortunately, the same chemical infrastructure required to fix nitrogen for crop fertilizers is perfectly suited to manufacture nitrates for high explosives. When World War I broke out, Germany used the Haber-Bosch process to sustain its munitions factories indefinitely, bypassing the Allied naval blockade that cut off their access to natural Chilean nitrates.
Without Haber’s invention, Germany would have run out of gunpowder within months. Instead, the war was prolonged by years, resulting in millions of additional casualties. Later, Haber purposely directed his chemical expertise to develop toxic gas warfare (chlorine and mustard gas), fully turning his life-saving agricultural breakthrough into a ghastly tool of unprecedented destruction.
Technology in human hands often goes too far. The fact that large language models were trained on music created by humans should be enough to end the conversation. But clearly, it’s not.
The Human Touch
Music and technology are quantum entangled, like, technology has always been a driving force since electricity. I’ve used various advancements of tech all my life: analog 4-tracks AND 48-track ProTools rigs. Synths and loopers, plug-ins, et al. I think technology in music genuinely reached the tipping point in the early ’90s, when studio-quality digital recording interfaces went to consumer markets. That’s when the culture of “button-pushing” started to rise. But the Tascam 4-track and early Pro Tools rigs were still just tools. They required the process. The human touch.
If you wanted an overdriven, psychedelic guitar bridge two-thirds of the way through a track, you still had to tune the instrument, figure out the modal modulation to make the bridge work, stomp on the fuzz box, and physically execute the take.
Technology changed the medium, but the human was still in control and fully committed to the process. As argued above, on one hand, yeah, this is what technology does. It gives people agency to create sounds previously unimaginable. And I remember people bitching about synth presets in the ’80s and saying, “That’s not music.”
The bitching about the old versus the new has been going on forever.
We Don’t Even Get the Guy
Engineering advances come from the human mind. When traditionalists cried foul over a Yamaha DX7 or a Roland Juno, they were missing the underlying human labor. A human engineer sat there mapping oscillators, LFOs, and envelopes to create that “Digital Native” patch.
The difference today is intent and development. Those synth presets were programmed by some nerds at a computer, but AI-generated content is trained on music made by humans. It’s not the same thing.
Now, I don’t give a shit if people want to make AI music in their free time. Do whatever you want. However, I can’t say that I think it’s good when you can prompt a machine to spit out a fully realized indie rock track about parking lots and bird flu in 30 seconds. Congratulations! You haven’t made art; you’ve placed an order at a drive-thru. The technology isn’t assisting the artist anymore—the technology is the artist, and the human has been demoted to a supervisor checking the quality of the product.
I mean, I thought it was bullshit when guys started performing solo with a laptop as a backing band. But now, we don’t even get the guy. It’s all laptop. We just need somebody to push the button.
Obliteration of the Traditional Process
The trajectory of music creation:
- Traditional Band: Two or more people collaborating in a tiny practice room, dealing with substance abuse issues and broken strings.
- The Solo Act + Laptop: One person singing, but relying on a digital safety net.
- The Current Horizon: No stage, no person, just an infinite scroll of mathematically optimized audio files designed to kill time.
Historically, art is born directly from a human mind trying to force an inanimate object to match or translate the abstract emotion in their head.
Human Emotion > Skill > Instrument > Technology (Recorder) = Song
There’s a lot of turf to cover between human emotion and technology. Those “skill” and “instrument” sections can be like running a gauntlet.
The prompt-to-song model changes the fundamental nature of art because it eliminates the struggle and the beautiful ugliness of creation.
Human Consumer > Text Prompt > Algorithmic Synthesis = Song
I’m still waiting for somebody to explain how anything has been improved or advanced by obliterating the traditional process.
If People Want to Be On This Planet in 50 Years
AI music platforms are pattern-recognition engines trained on the art of millions of human musicians who lived the life. The concept of AI-generated music treats the entire history of human musical expression as a raw data to be mined, blended, and recycled as an approximation of what “indie rock” is supposed to sound like. It replaces the lived experience with a simulation.
That’s the real stakes of the conversation. It sounds dramatic to people who just see music as “entertainment,” but music is one of the primary ways we document and share the human condition.
By outsourcing our creative expression to machines just because it’s faster and cheaper, we’re changing how songs are made, but, more importantly, we’re actively choosing to do it. We’re choosing dull our capacity for deep feeling, patience, and empathy. We’re trading the messy, glorious process of human connection for the convenience of an infinite, automated drive-thru.
It’s the ultimate cosmic punchline of modern civilization: a closed loop of mutual, abstract promises. When a culture becomes entirely comfortable consuming nothing but fast food, the collective palate is trashed. People start losing the ability to taste for complex flavors. If an entire generation grows up on music with all the human error, struggle, and eccentricities scrubbed out by a predictive model, they lose the ability to comprehend those things entirely. And maybe that’s the point. I just wish it weren’t.
We welcome your comments!