AI doesn't save me work: it moves it somewhere else

There's an idea doing the rounds that I understand, though I don't share it: that making music with artificial intelligence means pressing a button and waiting. As if the work had vanished. As if I spent my afternoons lying on the sofa while a machine composed for me.

If only. I say that with exactly the right amount of irony.

What's happened in my case is stranger and more interesting. The work hasn't gone. It's moved house. Once upon a time it would have been in some places, and now it's in others, and some of those new places are a good deal more tiring than the old ones.

Where the effort was and where it is now

Picture an old-school musician. Hours spent learning an instrument, hunting for chords, rehearsing with other people, recording the same take again and again. That effort is physical, a matter of hands and ears, and you can see it. Nobody doubts there's work in it.

I don't do that. I write the lyrics, and then I produce the music with Suno, which I direct. That directing is where almost all the effort now lives. And it's effort nobody sees, because it happens inside my head and in front of a screen.

Directing means knowing what you want before you have it. It means listening to a version and deciding within ten seconds whether it's heading the right way or needs binning. It means resubmitting the brief with one nuance changed, then another, then another, until something clicks with the lyric. Often nothing ever clicks and the song stays in the drawer.

That work is more mental than manual. It wears you out differently. At the end of a long session my fingers don't ache; my ability to make decisions does. There comes a point when every version sounds the same to me and I know I have to stop, because if I carry on I'll choose badly.

The lyric weighs more than ever

There's one thing the tool doesn't take off my hands at all, and that's writing. Every lyric is mine. And I'd say I give them more attention now than I would if I had to split my hours between writing and playing.

When the music can take so many shapes, the lyric is what holds the song up. If a chorus is weak, no production can save it. If a title has no spark, people walk straight past. I think of «No quiero otro novio cojín» ("I don't want another cushion boyfriend") or «La dieta del cucurucho» ("The ice-cream-cone diet"): titles that have to work on their own, before a single note plays. Nobody does that for me.

So part of the time I might have saved has gone straight into the notebook. I write, cross out, rewrite. I change a word because it sounds too Spanish or too much like nowhere at all. I read it under my breath to see whether the line can breathe. That craft is the same as it always was, and there are no shortcuts.

What nobody mentions: everything around it

Then there's the part almost nobody associates with music, and it eats half my week. I direct more than 280 music videos. I've released 273 singles in two years. Each one needs a cover, a title, copy, its own page on the website, its own blog entry, its place in a release order that makes sense. There are hundreds of Shorts to prepare. There are lyrics to tidy up so they're complete on mikesaintlouis.com.

My label, MIKE SAIN'T LOUIS, is a one-person company, so there's no department to do this for me. I do it. The tool speeds up one part of the process, and precisely because of that, everything else multiplies. If I can produce more songs, I have more songs to look after. More covers, more videos, more pages.

And then there's the listening. Before release, I hear every song all the way through many times, on headphones, on my phone's speaker and on the computer's, because each one hides different flaws. Nobody thinks about that part when they imagine the famous button.

That's what surprised me most at first. I thought I'd gain free time. What I gained was volume, and volume drags work along behind it, like a dog following you round the house.

I don't want to sound like a moaner. I love what I do, and I chose to do it this way. Without these tools, one person with a notebook could never have put out a trilogy of albums and hundreds of songs. I know that, and I'm grateful for it.

But I'm also wary of the opposite pitch, the people selling AI as an effortless hit machine. That pitch hurts those of us who use it seriously, because it convinces people that what we do has no merit. And it hurts newcomers, who arrive expecting magic and find hours of listening and discarding instead.

The honest thing is to say the work has changed shape. It's less like a performer's job and more like that of a film director who can't act but knows exactly which take works. Or a newspaper editor, who doesn't write every story but decides which ones run and in what order.

Some days I miss a more physical, more visible kind of effort. Something I could show off the way you show off calloused hands. The effort of choosing leaves no marks. It only leaves songs, and nobody will ever hear the ones I threw away. Sometimes I think almost all of my craft is invisible by definition.

And still, it's worth it. When a song comes out the way I had it in my head, with the lyric in place and the tone pitched just right between laughter and copla, I know how many decisions lie behind it. Even if nobody else does.

If you want to see the result of all that relocated work, it's at mikesaintlouis.com.