AI Helped Me Finish My Metal Album

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Henrik Ståhl

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Lampshade of ILLUMINATION

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Do you have the attention span of a Zoomer? Click here to skip to the less philosophically blubbery stuff.

Yeah yeah, generative AI is all the buzz and every desperate content creator out there is trying to make hay while the sun shines (making money on shallow “prompt expertise”). But please hear me out.

Sure, I’ve done my fair share of “funny” ChatGPT experiments. They get old and boring faster than you might think. The problem with AI being all the rage (again) is that it always seems to be about what it can do from 0 to 1 (sorry, that’s just a completely terrible pun).

AI writing code.

AI designing websites.

AI generating images.

AI composing songs.

Having AI create stuff from scratch is, obviously, an extremely impressive technological advancement, but as stated earlier it quickly gets… boring. The reason why it so quickly gets boring most likely has to do with the feeling of disconnection that fills us when putting AI in the driver’s seat. Reducing ourselves to “prompt engineers” (this is an utterly despicable term, by the way) sucks the fun out of creating stuff. Simply put, the whole process lacks soul. And a soulless process is a boring process.

Personally, I’m much more impressed by the mundane and subtle things. Those that all too often fly under the radar, simply because they lack theatrical flair. You know, the things that support a creative process instead of hijacking it. A somewhat mundane AI helped me finish and release a music album.

And that’s what this story is really about.

I’ve been composing music since I was a child. Played in bands since I was around 15. I never really enjoyed rehearsals (although jam sessions are often fun). To be honest, I’ve never particularly enjoyed playing live on stage in front of an audience either. And I’m not a big fan of recording music. It’s just a tedious and rarely satisfying process.