Why I stop AI from stealing my work

As creative artists, we are not obsolete. Yet.

Not long ago the smartest person I know asked me, “how is AI going to affect you as a musician?” and I didn’t have a good answer. I’d been uncomfortable around the subject ever since I read Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind ten years ago and was disturbed by the implications of its closing chapters. This was, I thought then, not the kind of future I wanted to live in.

But now that future is here. ChatGPT is everywhere. “Have you tried writing programme notes with it?” a friend asks. Another tells me, “it did my grant application.” And yes, I have tried it. And every time I do, I feel hollow.

My experiments with AI have never yet produced a piece of work—be it writing or music or design—that comes anywhere close to something I would be prepared to own. Perhaps AI will get better at what it does soon, and of course, by definition it’s designed to. But I hope not. These days I actively block AI generative tools from scraping any words or music I publish online. It’s a tiny gesture but at least I tell myself that I’m not feeding the beast.

I have no doubt AI will have immense (and potentially worrying) uses, probably in the very near future. My concern and passion, though, is for human creativity. I’m interested in how we imagine ourselves into being. How we create to reflect our inner world and shape our outer one.

Medieval theologians had a concept they called the imago Dei. It’s the idea that God created humankind in the image of the divine. For me, the generative power of creation expressed in that idea is mirrored in our own creative acts. It’s a sort of tryst with something beyond ourselves, however we might conceive of that “beyond”.

My friend, Juliet, who is also a musician, shared this idea beautifully when we were talking about the future of live music in this AI world: “People,” she said, “will always want something in which they can see themselves.” That something is the pith of creative work, giving voice to individuality and community, pain and joy, anger and redemption. Growth.

But the energy of creative power has to be anchored in authenticity, and this authenticity is what I think AI, by definition, can never achieve. Its destiny is to be artificial. Its purpose is the commodification of data. Any data. Words, music, images, ideas. AI learns by copying not originating.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post, On loss and solace, which was, in short, about grief. It resonated with a lot of people because grief and its processes are universal. So perhaps a bot could have written that piece. After all, AI can learn about the relevant concepts and then contextualise them: concepts like “death”, “mother”, “loss”, “sadness”, “time”, “healing”. But could its output ever result in the post that I wrote? I don’t think so.

I don’t think so because no algorithm will ever sit by a loved one as a last breath is taken. A computer will never experience the stomach-punching pain of betrayed love or have its knees give way in the face of shocking tragedy. It can never know the layered depths that lies behind every human experience and therefore behind every word I (or anyone) might write.

If a bot wrote On loss and solace its programming would cause it to write about that list of words: death, mother, loss, sadness, time, healing. But would its sentences be coloured by the kaleidoscope of life’s complexities or the depths unique to every mother-child relationship? Where love can be mingled with hurt, where compassion can be shaded with disappointment, where communication can fail or too much can be said, where truths may be obscured and forgiven (or not). Where there are unresolved endings.

It is that experience which creates the tapestry of every life. That is authenticity, and that is what makes a piece, replete with those unwritten stories, resonate. Anything AI might write, compose, or play can only ever be a simulacrum: pretend memories, emotional fakery.

So where does that leave us as musicians? The power of music lies in its ability to express things that words cannot say. It can hold a space for our emotions, wrap them up in beauty or scourge them with dissonance. It is the voice of our human spirit, crying out as it is dwarfed by life’s challenges and urging us to meet them in whatever way we can. Music makes us feel.

As legendary musician Nick Cave says so eloquently in The Red Hand Files:

ChatGPT rejects any notion of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning. It rejects that there is a collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.

AI tools know nothing of all this.

Recently one of my students had a video muted by Facebook. She was accused by the recording giant Sony (or rather by their AI bots which scrub the internet for copyright infringement) of miming to a recording of Sir James Galway. Victoria Earthey is indeed an excellent player, but she rightly resisted the temptation to flattery and wrote a rebuttal which I think goes to the heart of the problem. Victoria said:

I'd love to think they really thought that [I played as well as Galway], but it annoys me that in reality the algorithm just recognises a series of notes and matches it to a recording in the Sony archives. It just goes to show that AI really cannot compare the differences in tone, phrasing, technique and all the other stuff that makes a recording a) a proper professional virtuoso performance—in the case of Galway—and b) different and personal to every individual who plays it.

And that is the key. If AI cannot discern it, it also cannot reproduce it. For now, as artists, we are not obsolete. But that means the real challenge to us as creators, of any kind, is to keep on producing work that comes from the heart, to create with originality, passion, and personality. That is the work that is needed in this world, and that is the work that only we can do.

This AI generated image of a ginger-haired man with a gold flute is courtesy of my colleague Joshua Jönsson (the ginger flutist in question). Until AI learns what a flute is or indeed how many fingers there are on a human hand, perhaps we don’t need to worry too much. Yet.