Musings

Art and AI

January 16, 2026

There is commercial content, and there is Art.

AI will dominate commercial creative work because it generates cost efficiencies humans cannot match. A major studio will increasingly find it cheaper to have interstitial and emotionally-triggering music generated by AI than to hire composers, orchestras, and studio time. The modes, rhythms, and dynamics that provoke emotional responses are known variables—the same tools human composers use. AI simply deploys them faster and cheaper. As long as profit motivates these decisions, this trajectory is unstoppable.

Yes, human "managers" will oversee corporate asset generation. But headcount will shrink. This isn't new. What AI accelerates, digitization already began: professional positions in creative fields have been declining since the late 1990s. U.S. music industry revenues collapsed by half between 1999 and 2009. The jobs that remain are increasingly precarious.

Art as mass-produced commodity is barely 150 years old—beginning with Edison's phonograph, then exploding via the long tail of bedroom production. Basic economics: when supply massively outpaces demand, value collapses to near-zero, until worth is assigned by the consumer rather than the market.

But Art—real Art—will remain human. Art emerges from a persistent emotional need to create and share uniquely human experience. This won't change. There will always be desire to experience art—music, performance, presence—as there was before commoditization, when music lived in churches, community dances, and family parlors.

Who knows where this will all lead. When societal decisions are driven exclusively by profit, with disregard for human and environmental needs, the results tend toward sociopathy. Profit knows no empathy. It is terrifying to watch the status quo upended—yet change is life's only constant, as surely as the Earth spins around its exploding star. But if history is any lesson, the greater the existential need or threat, the more likely people are to band together and overcome. Survival is the most innate human instinct, after all.