When people insult your music for being made with AI: contempt, mood and why I keep releasing

Some messages take three seconds to read and three days to leave. They don't need to be long or clever. They only need to land at the right moment, when your guard is down, after you've spent a whole afternoon choosing between two versions of a chorus. You open your phone to see whether anyone liked the new song, and the first thing waiting for you is someone who hasn't listened to it telling you it's rubbish, that you're no artist, that you should be ashamed of yourself.

I make songs with artificial intelligence and I say so from the very first line. The lyrics are mine, and so are the composition and the production; everything you hear, music and vocals included, I generate with Suno and direct myself, one version at a time. That openness has a price, and part of the bill arrives in the comments. I've already written about how I sort them in «Lo que aprendí de los comentarios negativos». This piece goes somewhere else: what contempt does to your mood, how to tell a legitimate argument from an attack, and the practical tools that help me keep releasing music without leaving my health behind in the comment box.

There is a serious debate, and this isn't it

Let me start with what I think is fair to admit. There are important questions about AI in music, and the people asking them are not my enemies. Which songs these tools were trained on, and whether the people who wrote them gave permission or were paid. What happens to musicians who live off small commissions and watch a company decide it can do without them. Whether streaming platforms are filling up with filler tracks with nobody behind them. How authorship is shared when you bring one part and a machine generates another. Whether listeners have a right to know how what they're hearing was made.

All of that can be argued about, and it should be. I have unresolved doubts about several of those questions myself, and I've said so here more than once. When someone writes to me with one of those concerns, even angrily, a conversation is possible. We may not end up agreeing, but we're talking about the same thing.

A lot of what reaches me isn't that. It's something else dressed up as debate. You can spot it because it asks nothing, points to no specific problem and has no interest in the answer. It doesn't say "I'm worried about how these tools are trained". It says you're a fraud, you're disgusting, you should disappear. AI is there as a pretext, and any other topic would do just as well. What actually gets delivered is contempt for the person.

One clue that works for me: criticism talks about the work or the method; hostility talks about you. "This chorus is weak" is an opinion about a song. "This process seems unfair to musicians" is an opinion about a practice. "You're pathetic" isn't an opinion about anything. It's an attempt to make you feel small.

When the insult comes with two labels

One kind of message deserves its own paragraph. It starts out talking about AI and by the second sentence it's talking about me being gay. Or the other way round: it mocks a song about two men in love and finishes by saying it isn't even real music anyway. The two labels prop each other up, as if the tool were an alibi for saying the other thing without looking like what it is.

In «Tan cateto» I wrote about people who point from the outside, and there's a line I repeat to myself when this kind of comment shows up: «No voy a aceptar consejos de ningún espectador» ("I won't take advice from any spectator"). I don't mean it arrogantly. I mean that someone watching your life from the stands, without knowing you, isn't in a position to decide what counts and what doesn't.

This matters for mental health for a specific reason. Many LGBTQ+ people carry a habit of vigilance, often from childhood: weighing what you say, anticipating the reaction, bracing for the blow. Professionals describe it as minority stress, the wear and tear of living in expectation of rejection. When a comment mixes contempt for how you make music with contempt for who you are, it doesn't only hurt because of what it says. It hurts because it presses on a spot that was already tender. If that happens to you too, you're not overreacting. Some wounds react before the mind does.

What hate does to your mood

I'm not going to pretend I'm made of stone. My story is already public: depression, social phobia, anxiety, post-traumatic stress. With that luggage, a cruel message doesn't stay on the screen. You feel it in your body. A knot in the stomach, a racing pulse, a kind of alarm that takes its time to switch off. There are afternoons when a single sentence takes away any wish to open my folder of lyrics.

What affects me most isn't the hit itself but what comes after. The mind picks up the sentence and turns it over and over. Psychology calls this rumination: going over the same thing again and again without getting anywhere, like a scratched record nobody gets up to lift. You catch yourself answering the stranger in your head while you do the washing-up, polishing the perfect comeback you'll never send, imagining what everyone who read it must think.

Then there's negativity bias, which is well documented: the brain pays more attention to what threatens it than to what pleases it. That makes evolutionary sense, because remembering the wolf was more useful than remembering the flower. But in a comment section that old alarm works against you. Twenty kind messages get skimmed; one hostile one is engraved in capital letters.

And there's a subtler effect, which took me a while to see. Contempt can creep into the creative process itself. You start writing with the attacker in mind. You tone down a title, just in case. You hesitate before releasing a song because you know what kind of messages it will attract. When that happens, the insult is no longer on the screen. It's sitting with you at the work table.

If you notice that what you read online regularly costs you sleep, drains your interest in things you used to enjoy or keeps you tense for days, that isn't weakness or a lack of character. It's a sign the load is too heavy to carry alone, and it's worth talking it through with a professional.

My toolbox

Over time I've gathered a handful of habits, some my own and some borrowed from others. They're not a recipe and some won't suit you, but they help you protect yourself without shutting the door.

• Mute before you argue. Almost every platform lets you hide comments that contain certain words. A list of the usual insults means those messages never even reach your eyes. It isn't censorship: nobody is entitled to an open hatch into your living room.
• Block without asking your conscience for permission. Some people feel blocking is cowardly, that you have to put up with it to prove something. There's nothing to prove. Blocking someone who only comes to humiliate you is like not opening the door to someone shouting through it. If there are threats or personal details involved, it's wise to take screenshots first and report it through the proper channels.
• A no-reply window. I stopped reading comments at night a long time ago, and the same rule works for replying: no answers in the small hours or straight out of bed. In the middle of the night any sentence grows like a shadow on the wall. Whatever arrives then can wait until there's coffee and your head is back in place. It hardly ever needs a reply afterwards.
• Not answering isn't losing. Someone looking for a fight wins when you give them a stage. Silence doesn't mean they're right; it means they don't get an audience.
• Hand it over now and then. When a post attracts more noise than usual, you can ask someone you trust to have a look and pass on only what's worth hearing. Seeing your comments through someone else's eyes changes the temperature a lot.
• Keep the good ones. Messages from people a lyric has kept company deserve a place within reach, a note or a folder. Not to show off. To reread on the days when the bad stuff fills the whole frame.

Asking for support isn't making a fuss

There's a very typical temptation for anyone who works alone, as I do: to think this is part of the job and has to be swallowed without bothering anyone. That you can't go and tell someone a stranger's comment upset you, because it sounds like a whim.

It isn't. A repeated attack, even when it comes in scattered messages from different people, affects your mood just as other forms of hostility do. Saying it out loud to a friend or to a family member who wishes you well takes off part of the weight, because it gives you an outside view that hasn't been contaminated. And therapy is a good place to bring it. A professional isn't there to rule on whether the person insulting you is right, but to help you see which part of the distress belongs to the message and which part was already there. In my case, having a good psychologist makes all the difference; I explained some of that in «Gracias a mi psicóloga».

There's also the support you don't see. Under many videos, when someone spills their venom, another person turns up to answer for me, to defend the song or simply to leave a heart. Those people have no idea how much that gesture matters. If you're one of them, thank you. And if you ever see someone getting buried under an avalanche of contempt, you don't need to jump into the mud: a private message of encouragement can be worth more than any public comeback.

Why I keep releasing

I've asked myself that many times, especially in the bad weeks. The short answer is that the songs are mine, and I'm not handing their management over to the loudest corner of the internet.

The long answer has to do with a song. In «El segundo exacto» I put the most common put-downs in almost word for word, and then handed them back a question: «¿Será que podrá la inteligencia artificial escoger el segundo exacto donde rompiste a llorar?» ("Could artificial intelligence ever pick the exact second when you burst into tears?"). That question is still my answer. The tool doesn't decide which life deserves a song, which memory, which joke, which wound. I decide that, with my lyrics, and it's what keeps me going.

There's another reason. I write queer pop, with humour and with flair, for people who have often learned to hide. If I retreat every time someone treats me with contempt, I'm teaching the opposite of what my songs say. I'd rather publish with the protections switched on than vanish for the sake of peace and quiet. And if one day I need to stop, I'll stop without guilt, because looking after yourself is also a way of carrying on.

I haven't made peace with hate, and I don't think I need to. What I've done is move its chair: let it stay in the room if it insists, but well away from the table where I write.

If today feels too heavy

If the messages you receive, for whatever reason, are taking you somewhere very dark, don't keep it to yourself. Talk to someone you trust today and look for professional help, starting with your GP if you don't know where to begin.

• In Spain, if you're thinking about ending your life or you're worried about someone, call 024, the suicide-prevention line: it's free, confidential and answers at any hour, day or night.
• If there's immediate danger, call 112.
• In Latin America and the rest of Europe, dial the local emergency number of the country you're in.

A comment lasts as long as the page takes to load. You're worth far more than that, and asking for help works.

The songs, with their lyrics, are still on mikesaintlouis.com, where you can download them for free, and on Spotify and Deezer too. And in «Salud mental sin tabú» you'll find the full series where I talk about all this more calmly.