Adam Neely on AI Music: My Response as an AI Artist

I just spent two hours watching Adam Neely sit down with Alex O'Connor and talk about AI music. The video is called AI Music Is Not Music, which... yeah, with a title like that you'd expect a hit piece. It isn't one. It's one of the most thoughtful conversations I've heard on this topic in a long time, and I want to walk through it properly, because both of these guys did something rare and I don't think it should pass unremarked.

I'll say this up front. I didn't really know Adam Neely's work in any depth before this. I knew the name, I knew he made music theory videos, I didn't know about his AI stance but wasn't surprised to hear he leans heavily Anti. So watching this, I came in expecting to disagree with him on most points. Two hours later I came out thinking he's the kind of person you want carrying the other side of this argument. The man is a working jazz bassist whose career and craft are materially threatened by the thing he's discussing. He had every right to be emotional, angry, defensive, dismissive. He wasn't. He was calm, articulate, generous with the back and forth, and consistently willing to admit when his framework had a hole in it. That's worth something. That's actually rare.

Alex deserves credit too. He came in as the pro-AI steel man and pushed back hard. The hypotheticals he ran genuinely tested Adam's positions instead of letting them sit comfortable. The two of them together produced a conversation where you can actually see ideas getting tried on, examined, and updated in real time. Goddamn, I wish every discussion could look like this.

I want to do this conversation justice. I'm going to walk through what I think are the seven or maybe eight major points they made, and I'm going to give you where I sit on each of them. I lean toward Alex's side here, with some nuance. I respect a lot of what Adam said and I think some of it is right in ways that are uncomfortable for people in my corner. I also think some of what he said has holes that I want to point at directly. And I want to end on a frame I think the whole conversation was circling without ever quite landing, which is the difference between being specifically a musician and maybe just being an artist. I think there is an important distinction. And until we sort that out, conversations like this are difficult to watch for me.

Let's go.

What This Argument Is Actually About

If you strip the conversation down past the specific examples and tools and YouTube discourse, the underlying disagreement is about one question. Does generative AI music count as music, and if it does, what kind of music, and made by whom?

Adam's position, very compressed, is that AI music isn't music in any meaningful sense of the word, that the tools being used to make it (mainly Suno and Udio, which trained on essentially every recorded song ever) were built unethically, and that the process of typing prompts and selecting outputs isn't a musical action. He's worried about deskilling, about the social fabric of music breaking down, about people losing the embodied craft that connects musicians to each other and to listeners. He sees a bad future and he's pointing at it.

Alex's role in the conversation is to push on the edges of that position. His hypotheticals are sharp. What if you can't physically play an instrument, but you have musical ideas? What if you're a rapper who can't make beats but wants to demo a song idea? What if a human listened to your entire discography and wrote a piece in your style by hand, would that be theft? What if AI is just the next iteration of every disruptive tool that ever came into music? Each question is testing whether Adam's frame holds up at its edges.

The reason this conversation is important, and the reason I sat through the whole thing twice, is that they're both arguing in good faith about something neither of them fully has a handle on. Adam knows he doesn't have a complete theory. He says so several times. Alex knows he's playing a role that doesn't perfectly match his own beliefs (he says explicitly that he agrees AI music is mostly terrifying). What they're doing is the actual work of figuring something out in public. Which is what I'd like to do here too.

I'm going to take their major points one at a time. Some I agree with Adam on. Some I think Alex got the better of him. Some they both circled without landing. Let's start with the one I think is the most important.

Is There Such A Thing As Cheating In Music?

Alex asks this question early. Adam's first instinct is to half-laugh and say something like "well, MIDI is cheating, right, for sure," and then he immediately walks himself back to a position that is actually really clean and worth repeating in full.

I want to sit with this for a second because I think this is one of the most important things either of them said, and it cuts directly against the reputation Adam has online. The man who is known for being anti-AI-music just said that there is no such thing as cheating in music. The bar isn't which tools you used. The bar is whether you're being honest about what you did.

He follows that immediately with the qualifier. Music is also a product. People compete. People use tools to sell ideas that aren't honest. Autotune at scale, quantizing every note to the grid, hyperprocessing the humanity out. He's worried about the deception, not the tool. And here's where his actual position lives:

Hold that line up against my project for a second. My artist name is literally an anagram. Aidan Yagu = A Guy And AI. That means it's the same letters, rearranged and on top the name of my Album. My whole identity broadcasts what I'm doing before anyone even hears even one track. I have now written multiple long-form essays about Ai music, my workflow, some of the tools I use, about why I write the lyrics not through an LLM, about the specific parts of the production process that go through Suno. There is no part of my project that hides the use of AI. By Adam's own standard, I'm not cheating. I might be doing something he doesn't personally like. But cheating, by his definition, is not what I'm doing.

And I think this matters because the loudest version of the anti-AI-music position in public is basically "AI music is fake because AI." Adam doesn't say that. Adam's position, properly stated, is closer to "AI music is fine if you're honest about it, but most people aren't being honest about it." Those are very different positions. I'm not sure if he intentionally opens this door, but I'll happily walk through it either way.

Now, where does Adam tighten the screws? He thinks even if you're transparent, the production method itself can violate musical norms. We'll get to that in point when we talk about prompts and slot machines later. But the cheating question, on its own terms, ends with Adam agreeing that the frame isn't useful. "Honesty" always needs to be the actual standard. And that's a standard I'm comfortable being measured against.

On Suno's Training Data

This is something I've been dodging on this blog for a while, and maybe I'll take this chance since Adam handed me the cleanest opportunity to get into that.

His position. Suno trained on essentially every recorded song available on the internet, without consent, with the explicit business goal of replacing the listening patterns of the music it trained on. That, to him, is unethical. The court cases will play out on transformative-use and fair-use grounds. He's not arguing the law. He's arguing the ethics. There was a social contract, he says, when artists released recordings. The contract didn't include "and we will use this to train a competitor."

Alex pushes him with a hypothetical I think is genuinely important. What if a human had listened to your entire discography and written a song in your style, by hand? Would you feel violated? Adam's answer is one of the most revealing moments in the whole interview.

Then he tries to draw the line. The difference, he says, is time. The human had to dedicate finite life hours to learning his music. The music now lives in their body through muscle memory. There's ownership, responsibility, grappling. The machine just brute-forces it. No respect, no time invested, no skin in the game.

And then, to his enormous credit, he immediately concedes that he can see the contradictions in his own position. He says so out loud:

This is where I want to introduce two arguments that I don't think the conversation fully engaged with. They are, I think, the actual answers to Adam's training data complaint. Both of them are uncomfortable for his position. Let me lay them out.

The first argument: when the corpus is large enough, individual contribution disappears

If you train a model on a small slice of music, you can absolutely identify whose work is in the output. That's why "in the style of The Beatles" Suno generations sound like The Beatles. The model has learned a tight statistical pattern that maps onto specific signature elements of a specific artist...and that's bad. I'm not defending it. It's "a good thing" that you can't use Artist names anymore in Suno prompts for that matter.

But hear me out, when the corpus is genuinely massive (every recorded song, billions of training examples, the full breadth of human musical output across decades), what the model learns isn't "Adam Neely's style" or "style of the Beatles." It learns the underlying statistical structure of how music works. What chord progressions tend to follow which others. How rhythm and melody relate. How timbre and arrangement signal genre. How sounds interact with each other.... It learns music theory, empirically derived from observation.

I call it Music theory (I'm unsure if this is true but it's the closest thing to what I'm trying to explain here). This discipline, this arrangement of sounds into harmony has historically been built top-down. A Theorist can analyze compositions, abstract patterns, formalize rules. What a fully-trained Suno actually contains is something different. It contains music theory derived bottom-up, by looking at millions of examples and extracting the patterns that appear across them. Adam Neely's individual contribution to that corpus is statistically vanishing. So is every other individual artist's. What survives is the aggregate structure of how music actually works.

This complicates the "you stole from me" complaint considerably. If the training process dissolves individual contribution into general structure, then asking "did Suno steal from Adam" is a bit like asking "did the field of music theory steal from Adam." His work is in there, in some statistical sense, but it's in the same way every musician's work is in the field's accumulated knowledge of how harmony functions. That's how knowledge fields work. Every musician draws from this, every day to build their own style. "This" happens to be a tool now. You get where I'm going with this.

Adam tried to head this off with his "submarines don't swim" line. He argued that AI's pattern-matching isn't the same as human learning because the mechanism is different. Sure. But the question to me isn't anymore whether the mechanism is the same. The question is whether the output preserves identifiable individual contribution. For sufficiently large corpora, the answer is no, not for general generation. Only for narrow style-conditioned generation does the contribution remain visible. And the narrow style case is also where the worst use of these tools lives. But then again.... how many Indie-Bands do you know that sound essentially the same?

The second argument: public release implies open consumption

Adam's framing is that there was a social contract between artists and the public when records got released. Anyone could listen. Anyone could be inspired. That was implicit. What wasn't implicit, he says, was "and a machine can ingest you for training."

I think this is a position that doesn't actually survive scrutiny. Human listeners have always learned from recorded music without asking permission. Every kid who transcribed a Coltrane solo off a record. Every band that worked out the chord changes of their favorite song by ear. Every producer who studied the breaks of their favorite song until they could rebuild them from memory. None of that asked consent. All of it was learning from somebody's work in ways the original artist couldn't control. By Adam's own admission, that learning is the highest compliment he can imagine receiving.

So singling out machine learning as the uniquely non-consensual form of learning from public music, is a special-pleading move. The standard "you didn't consent to me studying your work" essentially rules out human study too. He can't have both.

There's also the practical reality of public release in 2026. The Age of AI and Automation. Once something is on Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, anywhere with a public stream, the artist has materially given up agency over who listens, who is inspired, and what they do next with that inspiration. The fantasy of selective control over who gets to hear something might have been plausible in the era of physical records and gatekept radio. It is not plausible now. Anybody who releases music is implicitly accepting that the music will be consumed in ways they didn't anticipate and can't restrict.

To me, Adam's training-data complaint is partially right and partially overstated. The output ethics are more defensible than he thinks. The consent at training time is genuinely harder, and I'm not going to pretend I have a clean answer to it. What I can say is that the question is more interesting than "Suno is theft, full stop," and Adam himself acknowledges that when Alex pushes him.

The Slot Machine, And What Iteration Actually Looks Like

This is the section where I think Adam is most right about something and also most wrong about what that something means.

His core argument. Typing into a text prompt is not a musical action. Musical actions are playing an instrument, singing, or going back and forth with a digital audio workstation. When you prompt Suno and reroll generations until you get a banger, you're operating a slot machine. There's no craft because there's no repeatability. A skilled doctor, he says (quoting his Platonist partner) knows whether their actions will cure or kill. A skilled craftsperson knows what their actions will produce. The slot machine doesn't give you that.

Look. He's right about this and we all know the users who mass produce songs for monetary reasons . This version of Suno workflow he's describing absolutely exists. There are tens of thousands of people on r/Suno every day who type a prompt, generate a few versions, pick the one that sounds best, and call it a song. That's the slot machine and it deserves the critique he's giving it. I've called this stuff slop on this blog before. No one who's serious in this field will pretend it isn't out there.

But here's where his argument breaks down. That isn't what serious AI music work looks like today. The slot machine (if you want to call it that) is the first 5% of the entire workflow, and even then only sometimes. The actual work happens somewhere else entirely, and Adam doesn't seem to know it exists. I want to walk you through what my process actually looks like, because the abstract version of this argument keeps going nowhere and I think a concrete walk-through is what's missing.

That's the actual process. Notice what's absent. There is no "type one prompt, accept what comes out." There is no "search for a banger and call it art." There is iteration and intention that demands the same predictability of action that Adam's Platonic doctor demands. There is craft, of a different shape than guitar-craft, but craft by his own definition.

Here's the part that's interesting. If you played Adam a finished serious AI track and walked him through this workflow, I genuinely don't know what he'd say. Because the slot machine objection doesn't apply to it. The deskilling objection doesn't apply because new skills are being developed (knowing how stem swaps interact with vocal lines is not a transferable musicianship skill, but it is a skill). The "no responsibility" objection doesn't apply because every decision in phase three is the operator's, not the model's.

What I think the honest answer is: Adam is right about the worst users of these tools and wrong to assume that's all there is. The slot machine version exists and deserves every bit of criticism. The iteration version also exists, is doing serious work, and his frame currently has no language to describe it. Maybe because he cannot understand why people like me "don't pick up a DAW", the interview leans into that direction, but I honestly don't know. That's the gap I want to flag and walk through, and it's the gap that the rest of this piece is going to keep widening.

Is AI Just The New Sampling?

Alex makes this comparison and I want to engage with it briefly because I think it's both right and wrong, depending on how you're using it.

The argument. Hip-hop was built on sampling. Producers in the 70s and 80s took breaks off records they didn't own, chopped them up, layered them, built collages of other people's sounds and called the collage their work. By any pure copyright logic, that should have been illegal. Some of it was. Most of it became foundational anyway. The form absorbed the new tool and built a generation of art around it. Is AI music doing anything different?

Adam's response is reasonable. He says hip-hop sampling had massive human intentionality. The selection of the break, the chopping decision, the pairing of the sample with the rap, the rhythmic placement. Jay Dilla's catalog is a case study in how sampling expanded what was even rhythmically possible in recorded music. There's craft there, embodied and specific, and the analogy to typing a Suno prompt is not equivalent.

I largely agree with him on the basic point. The slot machine version of AI music is not the next evolution of Jay Dilla. They aren't doing the same thing. The sampling parallel oversimplifies what made sampling musically rich.

But there's a more careful version of the argument that I think still has force. Hip-hop's relationship to authenticity is something I wrote about in depth last week, so I won't repeat it all here. The short version. Conscious hip-hop has always demanded that you internalize the art form deeply, then bring your own perspective.

The line in conscious hip-hop is not "are you using the right tools." The line is "are you bringing yourself in." And by that standard, the serious AI music question is the same question every outsider artist has had to answer: did you internalize the form, and are you bringing your own actual perspective, or are you mimicking the surface of something you have no relationship to?

The slot machine prompter is mimicking the surface. The serious operator who writes their own words and directs the production through hundreds of iterations is engaging with this art form. The tool is just incidental. The question hasn't changed.

Listening To Your Own Music

This is the point where I'm going to pivot more to Adam's side than my own, because I think he's identifying something real that the AI music community is glossing over at large.

His example. He references a post on r/Suno where someone asked the community to name their favorite AI musicians, and the dominant answer was "myself." Followed up by the observation that many heavy AI music users have largely stopped listening to anything other than their own generated work. Because the algorithm of their own taste, applied directly to a generation engine, produces output that matches them more precisely than anything an external artist could. I'm not going to go into detail why asking this on Reddit is bold...the sarcasm being displayed by that user-base needs to be taken into account 's all I say.

Anyhow...Alex pushes back, and the pushback is interesting. He says, isn't this just what any true artist would say? If you ask a serious painter whether they like their own work, of course they say yes. They wouldn't be making it otherwise. The willingness to defend your own work is a sign of conviction, not narcissism.

Adam concedes the point partly. He distinguishes between loving your compositions, which is healthy, and only listening to your own work, which is not. He still loves Stevie Wonder. He still studies Victor Wooten. The growth, he says, comes from looking outward.

Here's my take: Adam is right that there's a pattern of AI music users who have functionally stopped engaging with the broader musical world. I've seen it. I felt it happening to myself for the most part of my initial year doing AI music, when I got exposed. I know people who can name dozens of AI music producers but couldn't tell you three living human artists they actively follow. Whose Spotify is 90% their own generations on repeat. Whose "favorite track of all time" was made by them yesterday. That's a real thing and it's a problem. A problem I'm partially guilty of no less

But I want to say two things about why this exists, because I don't think the dynamic is unique to AI music.

First, Spotify's curation model (Hell, all social media channels these days) trained this generation to expect hyperpersonalized listening experience. The Discover Weekly machine taught people to interact with music as something assembled for them by an algorithm rather than something received from artists. IG, Tik Tok and Youtube works exactly the same, if not worse. Generative AI in this context is the logical extension of that pattern, not a break from it. The narcissistic listening was already there. We all live in a bubble these days. Suno in this regard made it very possible to skip the artist layer, yes.

Second, the AI music community has structural reasons to be inward-facing that aren't really about the technology. The platforms haven't fully accepted us. The discourse is hostile in a lot of places (just look at most of the Reddit posts). Communities form defensive postures when they feel under attack, and a defensive posture often manifests as "we only talk to each other and listen to each other." That's not particularly healthy either, but it's not "just" narcissism. It's much more tribal cohesion under external pressure.

Either way, the diagnosis is right. I have written elsewhere about the bubble we built ourselves, how the algorithmic dynamics of the platforms reinforce that bubble, and why the community needs to engage outward rather than inward to actually grow. Adam is identifying the same phenomenon from outside the community. I think that observation should be taken seriously by anyone in this space.

If you're an AI music creator reading this and you can't name five non-AI artists who released something this year that genuinely moved you, that's a signal worth taking seriously. This as much as any art form doesn't grow if we only listen to ourselves.

The Rick Beato Argument

This one I want to flag because Adam introduced it almost as an aside, but I think it's one of the more interesting cultural-historical points in the whole interview, and almost nobody is talking about it.

Rick Beato is a long-time music YouTuber, who as Adam puts it, generally has a reputation as a "kids these days" critic (though Adam clarifies that's caricature). I personally like the guy, even if he probably would not think much of me for making AI music. Rick made an argument a few years back. His claim: The pop music industry, through decades of autotune, quantizing, and hyper-correction, has essentially trained the listening public's ear to accept music with the humanity stripped out. The aesthetic of contemporary pop is already AI-slop aesthetic, achieved through human labor and software, but functionally indistinguishable from what AI generates today. We weren't surprised by AI slop because we'd been listening to a less-automated version of it for a generation.

Adam, to his credit, says when he first heard this argument he dismissed it as a Rick Beato gripe. He's been thinking about it more recently and he's coming around to taking it seriously. He uses a specific example: Justin Timberlake's "Can't Stop The Feeling" from the Trolls 2 soundtrack. As a wedding musician who played that song hundreds of times, he says it felt like AI slop ten years before AI slop existed. The autotune was so heavy, the quantization so rigid, the structural choices so predictable, that the human element was already absent. The song was generated, just by humans.

Here's where this argument is interesting for my/our position. If pop has been aesthetically pre-AI-slop for decades, then transparent AI music that includes genuine writing craft and emotional specificity might actually be more human than current radio, not less. The hyperprocessed pop song has had its humanity stripped out. The AI track with handwritten lyrics, intentional structure, and direction through iteration may have more of a person in it than the hyperprocessed pop song does, even though the pop song was made by humans and the AI track was made through Suno. The intent of that song was, essentially money, not personal expression of the artists involved.

Now, I'm not saying my work is more human than Justin Timberlake's. I'm saying the production process is not the only signal of humanity in music. The writing is. The intent is. The structural choices are. If those are present and specific and rooted in actual lived experience, the track carries something. If they're absent and the track is hitting marketing-research-derived emotional beats with machine precision, the track is hollow regardless of who or what generated it.

The flip side of this argument, which Adam also lands on, is interesting. He thinks the next generation of music might consciously bring imperfection back. He points to Angine de Poitrine.

What Adam saw in them, and what I think is correct, is that the audience is now hungry for music that hasn't been polished to mathematical perfection. Microtonal, weird, raw, unpolished, with real risk and real failure modes. That's what's breaking through right now. I don't know if it's because of the lack of polish , or if it's just as well a cultural reaction against algorithms these days but Adam thinks this is the antidote to AI slop. I think he's somewhat right, but I want to believe there's a version of AI music that fits the same category. Transparent process, weird structural choices, deliberate imperfection, specific perspective of the individual artist.

Funny enough, just yesterday I saw this IG post where someone ran a small social experiment:

Someone took a picture of a Monet painting and claimed in a social media post that he generated a Monet-like painting with as much detail as possible and then asked his audience what they think make this painting inferior to the real thing. The answers showed a level of pretentiousness that was honestly mindblowing. Claiming it was "A mess", "feeling flat" and that it "lacks coherent composition", going as far as to say the brushstrokes don't look like Monet. Funny enough when the guy came clean about the experiment, most of the comments got deleted right away. This definitely shows that this isn't about the art and the final output as much as it is about the entire process. These kind of people will dislike us on principle, no matter how much effort we put into this and that is a sad reality right now.

The next generation's job, in Adam's words, is to put the humanity back in. I don't think AI music is necessarily excluded from that project. The slot machine version is. The folks of us who take this serious and make a new art form out of it, may have a rough couple years in front of us.

The Part Adam Won

I need to flag this next section explicitly because I don't think I have a clean answer to it.

Adam makes the case, late in the interview, that live music is going to become a class signifier in a future increasingly dominated by AI-generated entertainment. He cites a creator named Magic, a DJ, who has talked about the "chronically online underclass," people who consume AI slop because they have no access to live music, no community to share music with, no embodied cultural participation. The implication: human-generated music, especially live, becomes a premium experience reserved for people with time, money, and physical proximity to scenes that produce it. Everyone else gets the Coca-Cola commercial soundtrack on infinite generated repeat.

This is a sociological argument, not a musical one, and I don't think the pro-AI position has a good answer to it. Or at least I don't. Live music is genuinely something AI cannot replicate. Not the recording, the room. The physical co-presence. The girlies running back from the bathroom because their song just came on at the wedding (Alex's example, which I love because it's perfectly mundane and perfectly true). The community at the jazz bar Adam describes in Nashville. The post-lockdown concert in Tennessee he calls one of the most electric experiences of his life because everyone had been starved of it. None of that lives in headphones. None of that lives in generated audio. It lives in shared physical space, between humans, in real time.

And the class point is....I don't know. The claim is: The people consuming the most AI-generated content are likely the people with the least access to live music. That's maybe true? But also not...? It's not true for me and a lot of folks from the scene I hang out with. It probably is true for non-western countries. But I can't argue both ways right now, I simply don't know enough and didn't have enough time to do my research yet. The future Adam describes (where being humanly-musical becomes a marker of class and access) is not a future I want, but I can't argue convincingly that it isn't coming.

The best response I can give is this. Whatever AI music turns out to be, it shouldn't be a substitute for the live, embodied, communal forms of music that have always mattered most. I make music that lives in headphones. I am not pretending it replaces a jazz bar. That's irreducible. If anything, the rise of AI music should clarify how essential they are, because anything that AI cannot do is the thing humans should be most committed to protecting and showing up for.

That's not a defense of AI music. That's an acknowledgment that the conversation about whether AI music is "real" needs to be separated from the conversation about whether live music will survive as a shared human practice. Both can be true. Honestly, if anything, here is something I wish will come true one day: Maybe once the friction between my camp and the "real" musicians becomes less, we can enter a world of mutual respect. I would love nothing more than be approached by a real musician, who loves my work and would like to play some of it live. I'll be in the audience that day crying all the way through the performance. AI music can be a legitimate art form and live music needs to remain irreplaceable. Adam might disagree with the first half. I don't disagree with the second half.

I'm Not A Musician. I Am An Artist.

Here's the move I think the whole conversation was circling without ever landing on. I'm going to land on it now because I think it's the thing that would actually make this argument resolve, or at least make it possible for the two sides to talk to each other instead of past each other.

Adam is using the word "musician" the way it has always been used. A musician is someone with embodied craft. Hands on an instrument. Voice trained over years. Ear connected to muscle memory connected to instrument connected to room. That's what musicianship has meant for the entire history of music. He's not wrong about that. He's not gatekeeping by using the word that way. He's using it correctly.

And here's what I want to say very clearly. I am not a musician. I do not have the embodied craft Adam is describing. I cannot physically rap (no one wants to hear that). I cannot play an instrument at any "meaningful" level anymore. My body is not a musical instrument the way Adam's body is. If you put me in a recording studio with a microphone and a band, I would be useless. By Adam's definition of musicianship, which is the historical one, I am not a musician and I have never claimed to be.

But the word "musician" has been doing too much work in this conversation. Adam keeps using it as a stand-in for "person whose musical output is legitimate." And that's where the slippage happens. I know labels are important for people so maybe, just maybe let me just use another word, with a long and respected history, that describes what I and other serious AI music operators are actually doing.

Let me just be an artist.

This is not new and I'm not inventing it. Let me walk you through three places it shows up clearly, because I think this is the strongest move available for the AI music conversation and it's strangely never mentioned.

Sol LeWitt. American conceptual artist, 1928 to 2007. LeWitt produced roughly 1,350 wall drawings during his lifetime. He drew almost none of them himself. He wrote instructions and other people executed them, sometimes years or decades after he wrote them, sometimes after his death. His most-quoted line, from 1967, is "The idea becomes the machine that makes the art." When asked about the role of execution, he explicitly compared himself to a composer writing a score for others to perform. The work was the concept, the instruction, the vision. The execution was somebody else's hands. And nobody serious in the art world has ever disputed that LeWitt was an artist. His work hangs in MoMA, the Whitney, the Guggenheim. He is considered one of the founders of Conceptual Art and Minimalism.

Note carefully what's happening with LeWitt. He didn't have the embodied craft of drawing. He couldn't (or wouldn't) execute the work himself. The work was instructions plus delegation to a system that would realize them. That system happened to be other humans rather than a generative model, but the structural relationship is the same as my relationship to Suno. I am writing an idea and directing a system to realize it. If LeWitt is an artist, I have at least a serious claim to be one.

Brian Eno. Producer, ambient composer, the man behind the sound of U2, David Bowie's Berlin trilogy, Talking Heads, dozens of foundational records. Eno is not a virtuoso instrumentalist. He has been open about this his whole career. What he is, indisputably, is an artist. He coined the term "producer as auteur" specifically to describe a kind of creative work that didn't fit the old musician-as-performer model. The producer shapes the sonic vision, makes structural decisions, selects performances, builds the architecture of a record. The musicians execute parts of that vision. Both are doing creative work. They're not doing the same kind of creative work.

Rick Rubin. Maybe the cleanest case in modern music. Rubin doesn't play instruments on the records he produces. He doesn't write the lyrics most of the time. He sits on a couch, listens, and makes suggestions. "The vocal there is a bit nasal, can you fix it." "I think the bridge should come in earlier." "Try it without the guitar." That's his entire method. He is responsible, in a vision-shaping sense, for the sound of records by Johnny Cash, Slayer, Adele, Kanye West, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jay-Z, and dozens more. He is one of the most decorated producers in music history. He is unambiguously a musical artist. He is also, by Adam Neely's definition, probably not a musician.

Notice the pattern here. The art world figured this out sixty years ago. The music industry figured this out forty years ago with the producer-as-auteur framing. The distinction between "person with embodied craft" and "person who shapes a vision through a production system" is not new. It is, in fact, well-established. What's strange about the AI music conversation is that everyone keeps trying to evaluate AI music operators on the musician track, when the artist track is sitting right there and fits the actual work much better.

I am not saying I am at the level of Sol LeWitt or Brian Eno or Rick Rubin. I am saying I am operating in the same category they are operating in. The category of artists who direct rather than execute, who shape rather than perform, whose craft lives in the writing, the structural decisions, the iteration, and the vision rather than in the physical relationship to an instrument.

By that definition, I am also a writer (the lyrics are not generated, they are written, and writing has always been artistry). And I am a director of a production system that I have learned over hundreds of hours how to push, correct, and shape. That's two legitimate artist claims on the same project. Neither of them requires me to be a musician. Both of them are sustained by my actual work.

And here's the thing I want Adam, or anyone in his position, to hear if they ever read this: you don't have to dissolve your definition of musician to make room for AI music operators. The definition of musician is fine. I'm not asking to be let in. I'm asking for the second word, the one that already exists, to be applied where it actually fits. Artist. The category that's been waiting for this work since Sol LeWitt wrote his first set of instructions in 1968.

Once you make that distinction, most of the conversation resolves. The slot machine prompter is neither a musician nor an artist. They're an end-user of a consumer product. The serious AI operator who writes, directs, and iterates is an artist by the same definition that has always applied to LeWitt, Eno, Rubin. The traditional jazz bassist is a musician by the same definition that has always applied to musicians. Both can be doing valuable work. They aren't doing the same work. They were never going to be.

Where I Land

Adam Neely is not our enemy. Adam is doing important work. He's articulating, in public, the deep concerns that anybody serious about music has about what's happening right now. The deskilling concern is real. The narcissism concern is real. The class concern is probably real. The training data concern is partially real, even if I think it's less clean than he presents it. I needed and will continue to engage with this conversation because all of those concerns deserve engagement, not dismissal.

What I'd like to see, on the other side, is for the anti-AI position to update on the existence of serious work in this space. Not the slop. The slop is real and the slop deserves the contempt it gets. Since I started this blog I have now written more about why AI music slop is bad than most anti-AI commentators have, because it's coming from inside my own community and I have skin in pushing it back. But there is work in this space that is not slop. Work that involves months of writing, hundreds of hours of iteration, deliberate structural choices, specific perspective, transparency about process. Its communal, it's collaboration, it's human to the very core. That work exists and it deserves to be evaluated as itself, not collapsed into the worst examples of the form.

The musician/artist distinction is, I think, the actual frame the conversation needs. It preserves Adam's definition of musicianship entirely. It doesn't require him to admit people like me to a category they don't belong in. It opens a different category for us, one where the work I and others are doing actually still fit.

And maybe, with that frame in hand, the next two-hour conversation about this can move past the question of whether AI music is music and onto the more interesting question of what kind of art it can be and what it's for. I have my own answers to that. I've written most of them on this blog already. I'm tired of arguing whether I get to be at the table. I'd rather argue about what we're going to put on it.

If you watched the interview too, I'd love to hear what you took from it. The comments are open. If you haven't watched it, do. It's worth the time. Adam handled himself with a generosity and rigor that I'd want from anyone on the other side of an argument that matters this much. I'm glad I sat down with it. If you want to support me and this project, consider a coffee. Link below.

Cheers,
Aidan

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