To the musicians who fear AI

This one's for you: you've played an instrument for years, played for next to nothing in bars where nobody listened, you know what it takes to get a choir in tune or a horn section tight. And now you look at what I do with a certain suspicion. Or with anger. Both seem understandable to me.

I'm not going to tell you nothing's happening. Something is. Nor am I going to tell you what you do is old hat, because that's a lie and it would be very bad manners.

I'm writing to tell you how it looks from this side, doubts included.

First, the basics, so you know who you're talking to. I write every lyric for PLANETA GAYFOLK, which is queer alternative pop in Spanish. I produce the music with artificial intelligence tools that I direct. The vocals aren't mine; they're made with AI. I don't play any instrument on my songs. I don't pass myself off as something I'm not.

I say that because part of the anger I see towards AI comes from people who use it on the quiet and pin performers' medals on themselves. I share that anger. It's not my case, but I understand that from outside it can be hard to tell the difference.

Your fear has its reasons

There are musicians who make a living recording jingles, making music for corporate videos, small soundtracks for low-budget documentaries. That work exists, it pays rents and it never appears on any chart. It's exactly the work a company looking to save money finds easiest to replace. If that's you, your fear isn't an exaggeration. It's a correct reading of the market.

I don't have a solution for that. I wish I did. It isn't up to me to decide how royalties should be paid, or how these tools should be trained, or what laws are needed. What I will say is that if musicians ever organise to defend those conditions, they'll have my full attention and I won't feel attacked. Using a tool is one thing; not caring who it hurts is another.

What I don't think they'll take from you

Now the part where I gently argue with you a little.

There are things these tools don't do, or do badly. One of them is live performance. A gig is people in a room, sweat, a mistake that becomes the best moment of the night because somebody laughed. Nobody goes to a bar to watch a computer generate a version. And people still pay to be in a room with other people, maybe more than ever.

Another is the hand. Somewhere there's a guitarist who plays in a way that's his alone, with his quirks and his shortcuts. That has a value you can't request in writing. When everyone has access to competent, ownerless music, I suspect whatever does have an owner will be worth more, not less. But that's a suspicion, not a promise.

And a third, which affects me too. These tools have nothing to tell. They've never had a bad day. Everything a song says, someone puts there. In my case I put it there with the lyrics. In yours, you put it there with how you play too.

There's one more thing I want to acknowledge. What I do rests on things musicians like you invented. My songs have a whiff of copla, the old Spanish torch song, and copla was built by writers, orchestras and artists who gave their lives to small stages for decades. The pop I love was made by flesh-and-blood musicians who tried, got it wrong and tried again. These tools learnt from all that music, and I learnt to listen thanks to it. I don't feel above any of it. At most I feel like the last to arrive at a house others have spent a long time furnishing, and I try not to tread on the rugs.

Why I use it anyway

You could ask why, knowing all this, I use AI. That's fair.

The answer isn't very heroic. I have lots of lyrics, far more songs in my head than I could produce any other way, and AI lets me get them out on my own, from Madrid, on my own label. In about two years I've released 273 singles and more than 280 music videos. Without these tools, most of those lyrics would be sitting in a drawer. You may think that's wrong. I respect that. Given the choice between a full drawer and songs released with AI, I chose the second, and I say so out loud.

What I'd ask of you

Just one thing. Don't lump together everyone who uses AI. Some use it to flood the platforms with filler music, unsigned and without intent. And some use it like me, with a full name, with their own lyrics, saying so in the first line. If your anger is aimed at the first lot, we're on the same side. If it's aimed at the second, at least listen to a song before you condemn it. And if after listening you still think it's wrong, I'll be glad you said so.

I'm not going to ask you to like what I do, either. Maybe you think «La dieta del cucurucho» (The ice-cream-cone diet) is daft. I love it, and that's exactly why I released it. What I'd ask is that the argument be about songs and about working conditions, which can actually be argued about, and not about who's a real musician, which is an argument that never ends well.

I'll leave my songs for you at mikesaintlouis.com, in case one day you fancy judging them up close.