There’s a shift happening. You can feel it. New tools. New shortcuts. Whole workflows rearranging themselves. I don't find that especially scary... it feels more like when the internet arrived. You could refuse it, but all that really meant was making your own life harder.
I’ve used AI. I’ll keep using it. But I want to be specific about how, because I think the nuance matters.
For music, I won’t touch it. Music feels sacred to me in a way that design doesn’t. It’s where I'm most exposed, most personal, working with something I don’t fully understand yet. The beauty of it — of any art, really — is its human-ness. When I listen to something, I want to feel the soul of the person who made it. The aliveness of it, or the absence of it. That’s what I'm listening for. I don’t want to make music that a pattern-prediction system had a hand in, and I don’t want to listen to it either.
Design is different. It’s always had one foot in logic, one in intuition. I’m not interested in AI doing the designing, that’s still mine. But I’ll use it to find clarity before I start. To think something through. To pressure-test a direction before I’ve committed to it. That feels like using a tool properly, rather than outsourcing the interesting part.
What I do think about is the flattening. Tools training on tools. References recycling themselves. Work that is technically polished but feels oddly interchangeable. A lot of things might start to look and sound “good” in the same way… and that’s where what you bring to your work matters more, not less. Not taste as status. Taste as perspective. As the specific, irreducible way you see things, shaped by everything you’ve lived and noticed and cared about. That’s what you’re actually making when you make something. Not just an output. A point of view.
Access was never the thing that made the work worth experiencing. Anyone can point a camera. Anyone can open a DAW. The digital camera didn't make everyone a photographer. GarageBand didn't make everyone a producer. They just made it easier to make something. What stays with you, what you return to, what moves you, has always been the judgement behind it. The sensitivity. The knowing when something is technically right but emotionally wrong.
That’s still the work. And no tool is coming for it.