A little while ago I made an Instagram post explaining all my work is fully Human made and why. And I wanted to expand a little bit on it here.

All my music and everything you’re hearing in it is fully human made. There’s NO so called “AI” involved in any part. There’s NO “AI” technical help involved and certainly NO generative software. Everything comes from my own technical skill and creativity. This is because of 3 reasons:

1. Almost all “AI” software, especially the more well known ones, are trained on copyrighted works without consent. I can not in good conscience condone or use it.
2. I love what I do. From tinkering with sound design to composing, arranging, mixing and mastering. Everything has a purpose, everything is a translation of what’s living inside my soul and emotions at the time of making it. Using “AI”, which would do the work for me, would completely defeat the purpose of me making music.
3. I use my intuition to create original works. “AI” is inherently incapable of that because it is not alive or conscious. As software and hardware disconnected from the aether it can only regurgitate what is has analyzed before, albeit in possible unexpected combinations. Since originality is extremely important to me, the use of “AI” still wouldn’t do me any good even if you wouldn’t count my previous two points.

What does the makeup of my music look like then? Pads, Leads, Bass, Subs, that sort of stuff; for the overwhelming majority of the time sound design by me. Sometimes a pre- or post-edited preset. Kicks, Snares, Claps, HiHats, Cymbals, Toms, percussion can either be samples from the daw or an outside source (always licensed), synthesized by me, or a combination of the two. Sounds that sound particularly realistic, like a physical instrument, is mostly either a rompler or a synthesizer. And recently I started recording my own sounds as well. In all cases, everything is Human made.

“Aren’t you afraid you’re going to be left behind by those who are using AI?” If you need to ask that question at all you haven’t really understood what music and music making is about. Being left behind is only possible when you’re in a race or a contest of some sort. I am not in a race and I am not in a contest.

People and certain company CEO’s also like to say “AI” is the future. But lets be specific here. There are different kinds of “AI” and different fields of work it could be applied to. “AI” could very well be the future for administrative work for example. Because that is completely 100% logical work. And logic is a matter of analyzing and calculating, which any computer can do. Creative work however, is much more than that. It requires intuition and emotion. You can not create intuition or emotion out of nothing by writing lines of code. If that would be possible, intuition and emotion would be linear… they’re not. They are multidimensional. It requires consciousness. And a computer, even a quantum one, can not suddenly become conscious by upgrading its software. Software, due to its very nature, is linear. That is a brick wall you’ll never break through no matter how many ‘lines’ of code you write.

So technically speaking, when it comes to creativity and “AI”, not only is there no future, there is no present or past either. All generative (generative! Not creative!) software does is analyzing what already exist and combining it in an unexpected way, which can be done fully by logic, depending on the prompts you write.

Lots of people using it to generate music is not the same as it being the future of music, because the reason music exists is because at its core it’s a translation of multidimensionality – of what lives in your soul and emotions. Everything else is inauthentic and a distraction.

If you made it this far you might also start to understand why I am putting “AI” in quotation marks all the time. Especially if you got a holistic view of the world. I sometimes call it “Artificial Incompetence”, but joking aside; “Artificial Intelligence” is a misnomer. Intelligence requires feelings as much as logic. If there are no feelings involved it’s called ‘intellect’.

Using “AI” is one of those things that is profoundly distasteful to me. The Human element and originality will always take the top spot.