Motivation to create comes and goes for me. Life—house, job, kids, hobbies, relationships—often gets in the way, and it’s easy to make excuses not to put the time into it.
Writing music has never been formulaic for me. Rarely does a piece come to me in its finished form. It takes effort. I overthink things a lot when composing and can get stuck in my own head. I can be my own worst enemy. Sometimes there are stretches—weeks, months, even years—when what I was once passionate about feels like a distant dream or a past life.
Other times, the desire to create hits so hard it’s impossible to focus on anything else. I barely remember to eat.
Creativity is cyclical and mysterious. It doesn’t follow a formula.
There’s also that lurking existential question: why create at all? What’s the point? Why try to make something new when it seems like everything’s already been done?
That question feels even heavier in the age of AI-generated art and music. “If AI can do it for me, why should I?” Every time the AI music generator Suno drops a new update, the internet asks, “Are we cooked?” Then someone plays a track they made with it—and it’s honestly pretty impressive, both lyrically and musically.
When Suno first started making waves, I played around with it and was thoroughly underwhelmed by what it made—at least for piano music. Six months later, I tried it again. Still garbage. There were definitely some cool tracks in other genres, but not for solo piano.
Will it get better? Probably. Maybe they’ve mostly trained their model on popular music instead of the kind of piano music I write. But if it does get better—am I cooked? What if AI could make piano music that sounded like mine? What if it were trained on my own songs?
As a software engineer, I’ve even thought about trying it myself—feeding my own music into an AI model on a GPU instance just to see what it would create. What would it sound like? And if it worked… what would I do then?
It raises an interesting question: would I keep creating if AI could do it for me?
For me, the answer is a definite yes. I’d still create. Because creating isn’t optional when you have that drive. Sometimes it goes quiet, but it never dies. The spark is always there.
I honestly don’t think AI will ever create as brilliantly or unpredictably as humans. What makes human art interesting is its surprise, its imperfection, its risk. AI is trained on what already exists—and I haven’t yet seen it come up with something truly new in the world of art.
More importantly, music is about connection. People go to concerts to feel something with other people—to see their favorite artist, to share a moment. There’s something intangible in music that flows through us and connects us. Just like handmade goods mean more than something mass-produced, people want to support people.
That doesn’t mean there’s no place for AI in music. It’s here to stay. But it takes a thoughtful approach. I use AI plugins to help with EQ or leveling when I mix—but they’re just tools. I still need to understand EQ, compression, gain staging, and so on. I’m not against using AI to save time or money—sometimes it’s just practical. Not everyone can afford to hire an attorney, for example, but AI can be a huge help with legal research or document review.
When it comes to logic and reasoning, AI is already incredible. But when it comes to creativity, there’s an ingredient it can’t learn: the human soul. Consciousness. That spark we call by many names—God, love, the divine, whatever you want to call it. It’s intangible, but it’s real.
And that’s why I don’t think artists have anything to fear. What you create is beautiful because it comes from you—your experiences, your life, your perspective. There is, and always will be, only one you. And that can’t be replicated.
* Artwork created by AI (Midjourney)