AI Versus Artist The Battle for Creative Expression

You talk as if a god had made the Machine… I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that.

– The Machine Stops, E. M. Forster, 1909

The Progressive Spirit Meets a New Machine

Musicians in progressive genres are known for their openness to new ideas, a core principle of the style. Unbound by convention, prog thrives on pushing boundaries and borrowing from the entire musical spectrum. We've seen Meshuggah invent a new rhythmic paradigm that defined a generation of music, and artists like King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard incorporate microtonal elements. This insatiable spirit of innovation is now confronting an idea that could fundamentally break music: Artificial Intelligence.

The rollout of so-called AI has been relentless, impacting our professional and personal lives. While its utility in fields like medicine is debated, its application in art has been swift and chaotic. We've seen AI slop flood social media, from plausible but fake images on Facebook to bizarre AI-voiced cartoon characters on Instagram dissecting prog rock history. This wave of algorithmically generated content stands in stark opposition to the creative impulse, yet even giants of the music world are beginning to engage with it.

The Disrupters and the Illusion of Creation

What is art? As writer Ted Chiang argues in a piece for The New Yorker, most art requires an "intention to communicate." It is the product of countless choices made by an artist—every note, every brushstroke, every word. This communication is what allows a piece of music or a painting to connect with us on a deep, emotional level.

Generative AI, however, minimizes these choices. When you provide a prompt, the AI makes the vast majority of the creative decisions, drawing on massive datasets to produce something plausible based on existing work. Google's music AI, for instance, uses a database of two million sound clips, mostly from YouTube. The result is a distillation, not an invention. It is inherently anti-creative. Mikey Schulman, CEO of AI music company Suno, controversially claimed that making music isn't enjoyable and takes too much time, fundamentally misunderstanding that the process is the point for most artists.

This technology has already infiltrated the prog and metal scenes, mostly through album art. Bands like Barock Project and Advocacy have used it, while death metal veterans Deicide faced controversy over their AI cover. Even renowned artist Hugh Syme, famous for his work with Dream Theater, has been accused of using AI. While it's perhaps understandable for small bands on a budget, it's less forgivable for established acts. Some, like Pestilence, have bowed to fan pressure and replaced AI art.

AI Album Art from Orion, Barock Project, Advocacy, and Deicide.

But album art is just the beginning. Entirely AI-generated musical projects have emerged, such as the uncanny and soulless creations of the now-defunct Rift Reaper Records. The most striking example is The Velvet Sundown, a fake blues band that amassed over 1.3 million monthly Spotify listeners. Their popularity was artificially inflated by seeding their tracks onto popular, pre-existing playlists. The band members, the band photo, the music, and even a glowing endorsement from Billboard are all fake. This is not art; it's a grift designed to harvest streaming royalties through deception, a practice likely bolstered by bot farms.

The Velvet Sundown: a very real band eating very real burgers and fries in a very real restaurant.

Silicon Valley's AI Cult

The tech industry's promotion of AI often carries a quasi-religious fervor. Journalist Robert Evans describes the trend of using AI to mimic deceased artists as "cultural necrophilia." This is happening within a Silicon Valley ecosystem that has fostered cult-like movements built around a messianic belief in achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). From the strange thought experiment of Roko's Basilisk to venture capitalist Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto, a dangerous faith has taken hold. Andreessen claims that any deceleration of AI development is a "form of murder."

This belief has tangible political consequences. The tech industry's recent support for Donald Trump was largely motivated by a desire to avoid AI regulation. The strategy paid off when Trump fired the head of the US Copyright Office after she stated that using copyrighted works for AI training exceeds fair use. A subsequent bill has now banned AI regulation for ten years. This push for deregulation comes from figures like Spotify CEO Daniel Ek and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, who have invested billions and stand to profit from unrestricted use of data. Their claims that AI will help artists are particularly galling, given Spotify's notoriously low artist payouts and the backlash against its own flawed AI features.

Music Icons Grapple with the AI Tool

Prominent figures in the music world have also waded into the AI debate, lending it a veneer of legitimacy. Jordan Rudess of Dream Theater, a known technophile, has enthusiastically endorsed various AI music apps. In an interview with Devin Townsend, he described a future where an AI, trained on his personal style, could generate musical phrases for him when he's "having a bad day." While he frames this as just another tool, he seems to overlook the potential for this technology to be used fraudulently by others to create and sell music based on the work of established artists.

Producer Rick Rubin, a man famously untrained in music production, has embraced AI with his digital book, The Way of Code. In an interview, he described AI as a democratization of art, failing to grasp that handing over creative choices to a machine trained on the work of others is not an act of creation. His statements reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of how generative AI functions, viewing it as a tool for expressing a point of view when it actually regurgitates a distorted reflection of its training data.

A screenshot of page 2 of The Way of Code: The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding by Rick Rubin.

Steven Wilson offers a more cautious perspective. He experimented with using ChatGPT to generate lyrics for a Christmas song, but found 99% of the output to be "generic, clichéd, very banal." He concluded that AI lacks the human soul and the element of surprise he seeks in art. Ultimately, the backlash against this trend is having an impact. Under pressure from fans, Jordan Rudess recently created separate social media accounts just for his AI-related content—a small but meaningful concession.

The Resistance to RoboSlop

This is a systemic issue. Beyond individual artists, an industrial edifice driven by libertarian tech billionaires is attempting to monetize the sum of human culture through what amounts to large-scale theft. The consequences are far-reaching, from the immense environmental impact of AI data centers to the potential for political disinformation.

But people are fighting back. Programmers have developed tools like Glaze and Nightshade, which "poison" images to make them unusable for AI training. The most powerful tool, however, is the law. Major record labels, including Warner, Universal, and Sony, are suing AI companies like Udio and Suno for copyright infringement. As Sony Music's CEO stated, original creators must be fairly compensated if their work is used.

Perhaps the biggest threat to AI comes from within. The industry is bleeding money; OpenAI reportedly lost $5 billion in 2024. The technology is incredibly expensive to run, and user adoption for paid services is catastrophically low. Many employees are actively resisting or sabotaging AI implementation in the workplace. Furthermore, as AI models begin training on AI-generated content, they risk a phenomenon known as model collapse, where they degrade into gibberish—a process some call "Habsburg AI."

While regulation and market forces may eventually curtail the worst excesses, consumers have a role to play. We can inform artists about the harms of AI, refuse to support those who use it, and boycott services that promote AI-generated slop. Protecting the music we love requires us to resist this flawed and immoral industry gambit. So, stay away from the tech bros, support real artists, and make art the good old-fashioned way: with human hands and a human heart.