I’m an Artist, and I’m Not Threatened by AI
Artificial intelligence can't compete with human creativity.
Twenty years ago, while noodling around in my band’s rehearsal space, we stumbled upon a cool idea. We realized that the verses of “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” by The Police shared the same chords as another song we loved: “Knife Prty” by Deftones.
Naturally, we decided to see what happened when we mashed them together. We took the lyrics from The Police and set it to the much heavier music from the Deftones song, and lightning struck. Putting those distinct vibes together created something really interesting—a groovy, ethereal metal song that paid homage to bands we loved and was also a lot of fun to play.
As we dug in, we found more similarities between the songs, more subtle references and musical quotes we could incorporate from one to the other, and more areas where we could get creative within that framework. After a few sessions, we had put together a mashup cover that sounded fresh and interesting even though it came from two existing pieces of music.
Hearing this in 2025, however, you might not be all that impressed. After all, whether you’re a musician or not, you can do the same thing in about ten seconds. If you want to hear what Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” would sound like as yacht rock, or how Freddie Mercury might sound covering Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” all you have to do is a quick Google search or run a new AI music generation app and you can instantly hear it for yourself.
Or, can you?
For some, this newfound capacity of AI algorithms represents the death knell of human creativity. After all, if an AI can instantly compose a song, draft a novel, or create visual art tailored precisely to our whims, flawlessly executing artistic ideas without the talent, skill, and practice that humans require to do the same, what incentive remains for us mere mortals to even bother creating?
But I think this profoundly misunderstands the purpose of art and creative expression. What was happening in that rehearsal room back in 2005 wasn’t a mere mechanical blending and regurgitation of existing material. We were exploring, interpreting, and expressing ourselves through that act of creativity, fueled by a love of the music we were playing around with, and enjoying what was coming out of us as a result.
There are no public recordings of my old band playing that Police/Deftones mashup, but the song still exists—in our memories, and whenever I play it myself on guitar for fun. What’s more, the process of putting it together still happened, and the enjoyment and catharsis that came from it is still part of me today. We learned lessons while crafting that cover: about songwriting, about our musical tastes, about our continuing evolution as artists. And we had fun doing it.
That’s irreplaceable.
Sure, it’s fun to hear an AI churn out a Metallica song in a different genre, but there is simply no comparing that to Metallica themselves making that attempt, or a yacht rock band doing a cover of “Enter Sandman” to suit their style. What makes art so interesting and boundless is that if you got ten yacht rock bands together tasked with covering “Enter Sandman,” you’d get ten different yacht rock songs. Each would have their own particular interpretations of and deviations from the original, born from the individual perspectives and creativity of the people in those groups. If you mixed and matched the musicians, you’d get yet another version that was unique to them.
That, fundamentally, is what art actually is: human expression, an exploration of the human experience, and the result of human creativity, manifested through these mediums. That simply cannot be replaced by an algorithm, because an algorithm isn’t human.
Whether that actually matters to us is another story.
We live in a culture hyper-focused on surface-level entertainment and constant consumption. The moment a movie premieres, we eagerly begin anticipating its sequel. When a musician releases an album, we instantly wonder when they’ll be dropping their next one. In this landscape, art has very little time or incentive to breathe, to introduce depth and nuance, or to experiment with form and function. Long before any of that has had the opportunity to sink in, people will have moved on to the next thing.
To me, this reveals what I think is the fundamental issue undergirding our current technological upheaval. The conflict isn’t really between art and AI. It’s between product and process. It’s between art and content. And in our culture, we value content far, far more.
Pop music, for example, is and has always been rigidly structured, formulaic, and meticulously composed by a handful of songwriters to please the layperson’s ears for three and a half minutes. And the results are as cookie-cutter as you can imagine. In 2015, the YouTube channel Sir Mashalot created a very telling example. He stacked six country rock songs on each other to show how seamlessly the intro of one would flow into the verse of another, crescendoing perfectly into the chorus of another before switching to the bridge, guitar solo, chorus, and outro of yet three more.
If you weren’t told beforehand, you’d have thought it was one song, because their structures were identical. Not even the lyrics would really give it away.
This is the stuff that’s topping the charts. It’s musical junk food, offering instant gratification, and we eat it because we like it.
If all we want or expect from our AI tools is shallow, superficial content, then that is all we will get—and it’s all Hollywood, publishing, and the music industry will give us. But if we recognize that art is something much deeper, that it’s something quintessentially and inescapably human, then no technological advancement would ever supplant it. It couldn’t, because art’s most critical element—the process of emoting, expressing, exploring, and communicating—would be missing. And the product of that would be something else entirely.
This is true no matter how sophisticated these technologies get moving forward. It’s entirely possible that in a few years, some AI algorithm will be able to produce an essay like this one, in my voice, making arguments I might make. It may even do it in a way so convincing that even I might wonder if I actually did write it despite having no memory of it.
But it will never be an essay that I actually wrote, with an argument I considered, thought about, and refined, and which communicates what I am currently thinking about a particular issue worth commenting on. No matter how good an AI gets at reproducing me, it will never be me. And there is far more to being me, and to the art I’m able to create, than reproduction or imitation.
As always, the choice is ours. AI can be the death of art, if we forget what art is ultimately for and about. Or, it can be a powerful new means of creation, the way the invention of the camera opened up new avenues and opportunities for creative expression. It can also push our existing mediums to new, innovative heights, and allow us to create completely new ones. Rather than extinguishing artistic expression, it can actually be a tool that helps us produce more artists and more art.
That is, as long as we actually have something we want to express—and audiences who value that expression enough to support it.
Angel Eduardo is a writer, musician, and visual artist based in New York City.
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I think you're conflating art as a process that humans engage in with art as a product that people consume. I think it would be more precise for you to say that, "AI can't replicate my artistic process because it isn't me, therefore my artistic process isn't threatened." This is different from whether or not art as a whole is threatened, or whether or not it can match human creativity in general, especially for people whose main source of income is art.
I think human creation of art is different from creativity where AI can't match the former because humans are identical with themselves by definition, but can match the latter because creativity doesn't depend on a substrate like the human brain. To say that human art creation isn't replicable as an activity because AI isn't human is sort of trivial in that sense. I think for people who depend on art for their income, AI is and will be a significant threat. This is important for a variety of reasons.
One, our standards for what counts as art worthy of consumption are pretty low at this point. See this article https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-36391761
Two, I think the jury is out for how to account for the human mind, and to conclude that humans are special when it comes to any cognitive task presupposes a conclusion that we don't have evidence for yet. In fact, we have a whole history of creating things that perform the same task as human brains do without being biological.
Three, I think proving that it is impossible to replicate human creativity with technology would be a pretty consequential result in biology, computer science, and philosophy because of what it would imply about cognition.
Finally, art is many things, and AI will transform it in many ways that are consequential beyond just our enjoyment of creating it, because art has functional roles in civilization. I think we should seriously consider whether that's an outcome humanity wants beyond just whether or not it personally affects a given individual.
We, as humans, can be wrong and still move the creative process forward. Can AI, as the creature of algorithms, ever be wrong.