My thoughts on AI

TL;DR: every note of my music is 100% human. I use AI as a tool (for code, some graphics help and photo clean-ups), but NEVER as an artist or creative collaborator, and I’ll NEVER use it to generate music or sound in any way.

Every note of music I have ever written is my own, composed and played by a human. Everything you hear on this site was written and played by me, or the brilliant musicians I work with. I don’t use AI to write, generate or perform music, and I never will. That includes sound design and audio of any kind.

“AI” is a huge umbrella. It covers everything from a souped-up spell checker running on my own laptop to tools that churn out whole songs. I’m far more comfortable with AI at the former end of that spectrum than the latter.

I’m not anti-technology, though. I’ve built computers, arcade machines and instruments, and although I’m uneasy with some areas of AI, it is here to stay and I do use it where it’s a tool rather than the artist:

• Code: I build and design my own websites, and AI helps me write and check the code.
• Graphics: some logos and designs are made with AI’s help, usually starting from my own sketches.
• Photo and video touch-ups: cleaning up, sharpening or fixing my own photos and footage. For example, restoring the corner of a cake I’d already bitten before I remembered to take the picture and cleaning up an old VHS tape of one of my first BBC broadcasts so it’s easier on the eye.
• Writing: I was diagnosed with dyslexia as a child. I’ve worked around it enough to get my music degrees, but AI helps with spelling, grammar and organising my thoughts when I need a hand. That’s AI enabling me to be more productive, not me prompting AI to do the producing.

What I will NEVER do is create music, photos or video with AI and pass it off as my own work. I couldn’t ever do that with a clear conscience, even if I wanted to. Personally, I don’t think you can or should claim to have the same skills as someone who is on a lifetime’s journey, learning the craft of musicianship and composing if all you do is tell AI to make you a “sick beat to go with a crime scene… make it like a movie…”. To anyone who gets a kick from feeling they’re creating something, now they’ve discovered what AI can do: grab a free or cheap DAW and start making music yourself, from scratch. It probably won’t be great at first, but after all that work, research, tutorial watching and all those late nights, the first time you finish a track and think “WOW, I made that, I can’t wait to share it”… AI can NEVER replace that feeling of accomplishment.

Some people are calling for a boycott of all AI. I don’t like the price of RAM and GPUs any more than the next geek, but the technology will become more efficient (it has to), and it’s not going anywhere. Having AI investigate a persistent crash in my music software, and pinpoint exactly which part of a hugely complex combination of applications was causing it, in enough detail that we could fix it, would have taken days or weeks without AI. As a composer who’s often up against deadlines, that’s a good thing.

If you work with me, you’re getting a human composer with all the rough edges and imperfections that humans come with, and that make music beautiful. You can try writing me an AI-style prompt, and of course I’m very used to working to a brief, but if I’m excited and have an idea of what might work as well, I’m going to pitch that too.

As for the badge at the bottom of my home page: it’s a scruffy jot of the opening of Elgar’s Salut d’Amour, which I played on the violin as a kid (probably in the wrong key), scribbled by hand on manuscript paper. Elgar wrote it as an engagement present for the woman he loved. That’s about as far from generative AI as you can get.