Here’s something a little different from my usual posts, but I need to work through this. I’m dealing with some serious cognitive dissonance right now, working for a pro-AI tech company while wrestling with what AI art generation actually means. Specifically, I’ve come to a realization that’s been eating at me: you cannot separate art from the artist. And ironically, it was AI-generated art that hammered this home for me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what AI art means to me as someone who works in tech and music. This isn’t an attack, just a reflection.
Art Is Manipulation (And That's Not Always Bad)
Art has this incredible power to touch people in ways that are hard to articulate. It manipulates our emotions, and I mean that in the most literal sense. A song in a minor key generally sounds sad. Pair that with the right lyrics, sync it to the right visuals, and you can amplify that feeling exponentially. Music, visual art, writing... they can literally make us feel sad, happy, motivated, energetic. This isn't metaphorical. It's a direct manipulation of our emotional state.
For most of art history, we've been okay with this because there's a human on the other end. An artist pouring their struggle, their perspective, their humanity into the work. We connect with that. We resonate with it.
When The Artist Destroys The Art
Let me give you the example that crystallized this for me: Lost Prophets.
If you're not familiar, they were a massive band in the 2000s. Nu-metal, emo-pop, rock vibes. Their lead singer, Ian Watkins, had this voice that was core to their sonic signature. And then we found out he was a pedophile. Not just that. He was using his fame, using his art, to glamour fans into his sick and twisted web. He was literally using his platform to exploit children, to find like-minded predators, to fulfill nightmare fantasies.
Now, knowing this, I can't listen to their music. It's not just that I don't want to. I can't. It feels like there's this dirty web hanging over every track. The music is tainted. I can sense the corruption in it, even though that might not have been the conscious intent of every song. The artistry became a tool for luring and exploiting. It's gross. It's manipulative in the worst possible way.
And here's the thing that makes it even more tragic: I feel terrible for the other members of Lost Prophets. They had no idea about the dark side of their singer. There was no intent from them. In a way, they were also being used by him, their musical contributions unknowingly becoming part of something horrific. Their art, their genuine creative work, got tainted by association with something they had no part in creating.
But Lost Prophets isn't a one-off. R. Kelly's entire catalog is radioactive now. "I Believe I Can Fly" was written by a man who spent decades grooming and abusing underage girls. Woody Allen's films? You watch Manhattan knowing he married his partner's adopted daughter, and the whole thing feels wrong. Even Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll Part 2," that stadium anthem everyone knew, got pulled from playlists after his convictions.
The pattern is clear: when the artist's darkness is inextricable from the platform their art gave them, the art itself rots. The manipulation that once felt powerful now feels predatory. This is when I realized: you cannot separate the art from the artist. The art carries the artist with it, always.
Look, I'm not saying an AI algorithm is the same as a monster like Ian Watkins. Let's not be ridiculous. The 'crime' isn't the same. But the result for us, the listener? The feeling?
You know how it is... sometimes a piece of music, a phrase, a lyric catches your attention, and you like it for what it is, just for a moment. Then the realization kicks in. You remember who made it, or what made it. And eugh... I just feel dirty now. Why did it have to be what it is?
That's the break. The art gets tainted. The trust is broken. The manipulation that felt like connection now just feels... hollow. Or worse, like a lie.
Enter AI: A Different Kind Of Manipulation
So what does this have to do with AI art?
There's a dark manipulation at play with AI-generated art, and it's subtle enough that most people don't even register it. People naturally want to connect with an artist. They want to resonate with the struggle of composition, the journey of creation, the humanity behind the work. AI art pulls the rug out from under all of that.
AI has been trained on millions, probably billions, of data points. And eugh, even calling other people's work "data" feels fundamentally wrong, but that's literally how AI sees it. All these artists, alive and dead, their life's work reduced to training data.
Now someone types a simple prompt, and the AI Frankensteins together an output by drawing on all those millions of data points. The person who wrote the prompt probably has no idea how their words translate into something that can be powerfully manipulative.
Take some of the AI-generated religious music that's been floating around. There's this fake Justin Bieber song called "Dear Christ" that got over 116,000 views on YouTube. People were leaving comments like "Never thought I would listen to a Bieber song after being a Christian. But here we are" and "Preach it Justin! So proud of you!!" They were genuinely moved, tears in their eyes probably, not realizing they were connecting with a Frankenstein output. And of course it sounds good. It would be surprising for it not to sound good when you're drawing from millions of tracks, millions of real human performances dripping with actual emotion and struggle.
The Deception
But here's where it gets really insidious. There's deception when someone generates AI art and publishes it under an artist name without explaining that it was AI generated. You hear a track, you love it, so you want to check out the artist's story. Who are the different members? What's their background? Who produced the track? Who did the mastering? Who played the guitar, and what guitar did they use? You want to resonate with the musicians, understand their journey, maybe even reach out or catch them live someday.
And then... think again. Rug pull. None of it was real. But you liked it, right?
Well, not anymore. It's hard to articulate exactly why, but I don't want to watch an AI chess match. It might be an interesting match at first, the moves might be brilliant, but the second you find out it's AI versus AI, it just becomes... boring. Uninteresting. There's no tension, no human struggle, no stakes.
Knowing that there are no people involved except the prompt engineer just feels empty. The art loses something fundamental the moment you realize there's no artist on the other end. No one sacrificed anything to make it. No one stayed up late agonizing over whether the chorus should resolve there or somewhere else. No one poured years of practice into mastering their instrument. It's just... probability and patterns.
It's not that AI art can't move you. It's that the movement feels like a trick once you know. No single soul bled for it. No one lost sleep over a bridge that wouldn't resolve. It's emotional resonance without any earned depth.
The Rug Pull
For those of us who value knowing an artist's struggle in composition, in lyric writing, in production, it's like having the rug pulled out from under your feet. Music cannot be separated from the artist. So when your "artist" is AI, or when your artist is someone using their platform for nefarious reasons to exploit fans, it is what it is: you feel dirty and manipulated.
The art is tainted. Just like with Lost Prophets, but in a different way.
As a human, it's hard to connect with content like this. I know some users of the technology like to use their own lyrics and hear them produced in a track, and yeah, this is cool. I get it. I appreciate the time you took to write the lyrics. At least you collaborated in a sense, and hearing it back must feel like magic. I can see why some folks can resonate with this material, because their lyrics, their self-expression, has been brought to life.
But here's the problem: it's been brought to life with god knows who. And when I say that, I mean it literally. Most of these AI platforms have illegally ripped their content, so they can't say who the musicians were, who the vocalist was modeled after, who the mix and master was modeled after. If all the content was sourced ethically, it would be interesting to know how it sourced and formed the output, and then credit those who made the creation possible in the first place.
But they don't. Because they can't. Because it's stolen.
Can It Be Used Ethically?
I've struggled with this question too, especially given my day job. The technology is here to stay. That's the reality. So is there a way to use it ethically?
Maybe as a generic reference tool for composers and artists exploring new ideas? Some AI music platforms can take a performance and translate it to other instruments, which feels closer to existing producer workflows in modern DAWs. That approach might be better. It's still the musician's ideas, still their struggle. It's essentially a faster workflow, similar to using sample instruments today.
Or think of AI as a sketchpad. Generate 50 rough ideas in seconds, then you pick one and sculpt it with your hands, your taste, your story. The output isn't the art, the process is. That feels less like theft, more like a tool.
But even this feels like I'm making excuses.
The Myth of the Prompt Engineer
Here's another thing that bugs me. People talk about "prompt engineers" like it's some kind of skilled craft. Sure, someone who knows how to write prompts can get better results than someone just mashing keys. They iterate, refine, nudge the model toward something usable.
But here's the dirty secret: the same prompt can spit out wildly different outputs. One run gives you gold, the next gives you garbage. It's not mastery, it's curatorship. You're just sifting through randomized recombinations, hoping probability smiles on you.
And this job title? It's got an expiration date. AI systems are constantly learning from bad prompts. Every failed attempt becomes more training data. Soon you'll be able to feed it a sloppy, half-baked prompt and it'll know what you meant. No more prompt-whisperer middlemen needed. The gap between "pro" and "amateur" collapses. The curator becomes obsolete.
It's still just content curation, just with better odds.
The Most Dishonest Argument
Then there's the argument I hear constantly: "People learn the same way as AI."
This is so fundamentally dishonest, and it reveals such a profound lack of understanding. I actually feel some sympathy for people who believe this with such conviction while being so wrong.
Let me give you an example. Right now, I could set myself a completely random task, not based on anything that exists. Make up arbitrary rules for an upward/downward musical scale: it can have X notes going up, Y notes going down. Now improvise something interesting within those constraints. Forced limitations, nothing to reference that's done it before, and yet it's absolutely possible to create something unique and beautiful that's uninspired by anything that came before it.
Now ask an AI to do this. It can't. Sure, you could probably get some algorithmic AI to generate something, but it won't sound like a polished, published piece of music. Because it has no reference point, no training data for these arbitrary rules I just invented.
Humans create from nothing. We impose meaning where there was none. AI recombines what already exists.
Where I'm Left
I don't have a clean answer here. I'm still working through it, sitting with the discomfort of helping build something I'm not sure I believe in. What I do know is this: art and artist are inseparable. And when the "artist" is an amalgamation of millions of stolen voices, or when the artist uses their art as a weapon, something fundamental breaks.
The manipulation that makes art powerful, the emotional resonance, the connection, becomes something hollow. Or worse, 'something predatory.
I'm still figuring out where the line is. Maybe you are too.