Not Cheating. Directing.

You're not cheating.

Let's name the feeling.

You spent decades earning your musicianship the hard way.

Calluses, theory, van tours, four-hour load-ins for 40-minute sets.

And now you type a paragraph into a website, a finished song comes back, and there's a voice under the amazement that says, this doesn't count.

I hear from a lot of you that this voice is the whole reason you haven't told anyone about your AI music yet.

Sit with this instead.

This argument is over a century old, and it has never once aged well.

The player piano was going to kill musicianship.

Recording was canned music, and union musicians fought it for decades.

We all know synthesizers weren't real instruments.

Come on, drum machines, they're going to put drummers out of work.

Sampling, sampling, nothing but a theft.

Auto-tune, hmm, auto-tune ended singing.

Every generation's cheating becomes the next generation's instrument, without exception.

There's a real concern buried in there, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't there.

Type sad rock song, hit a button, upload whatever falls out, and you haven't done much.

And it, you know, honestly, it sounds like it.

But that's not what most of you listening to this are doing.

You're writing your own lyrics.

You're making the arrangement calls.

You're fixing the mix.

There's a word for someone who makes every decision on a record without necessarily playing every part.

That word is producer.

Nobody ever accused Quincy Jones of cheating.

You're not cheating.

Let's name the feeling.

You spent decades earning your musicianship the hard way.

Calluses, theory, van tours, four-hour load-ins for 40-minute sets.

And now you type a paragraph into a website, a finished song comes back, and there's a voice under the amazement that says, this doesn't count.

I hear from a lot of you that this voice is the whole reason you haven't told anyone about your AI music yet.

Sit with this instead.

This argument is over a century old, and it has never once aged well.

The player piano was going to kill musicianship.

Recording was canned music, and union musicians fought it for decades.

We all know synthesizers weren't real instruments.

Come on, drum machines, they're going to put drummers out of work.

Sampling, sampling, nothing but a theft.

Auto-tune, hmm, auto-tune ended singing.

Every generation's cheating becomes the next generation's instrument, without exception.

There's a real concern buried in there, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't there.

Type sad rock song, hit a button, upload whatever falls out, and you haven't done much.

And it, you know, honestly, it sounds like it.

But that's not what most of you listening to this are doing.

You're writing your own lyrics.

You're making the arrangement calls.

You're fixing the mix.

There's a word for someone who makes every decision on a record without necessarily playing every part.

That word is producer.

Nobody ever accused Quincy Jones of cheating.