A few weeks ago I posted a snippet of a track. Handpan and trap. Something ancient sounding laid over something modern — sacred and dirty at the same time. People have laid ancient instruments over modern production for decades — I'm not claiming I invented that. But this specific corner of it didn't have a name, so I gave it one: temple trap.
It crossed 800,000 views. The comments filled up with a sentence I keep rereading: "Where has this genre been my whole life?" People said they'd found their new favorite sound. They felt something. That was the whole point.
And at the same time, another wave came in. Producers calling me a fraud. An "AI artist." Telling people not to support me. Saying I'd deceived everyone.
I've been making music for eighteen years — twenty-thousand-plus hours in the DAW, a long trail of bad records before the good ones, releases signed to established labels, a stretch touring the world. And then I walked away from that career, near its peak, because it had stopped feeling true. I wanted something deeper. So when I tell you this isn't an outsider looking for a shortcut, I mean it. My first instinct was to defend myself. But I sat with it instead, and what I found underneath the noise was more interesting than a fight. It was a real question — the question everyone in music is circling right now and almost nobody is asking cleanly:
Where does creative value actually come from?
This is my attempt to answer it honestly. Not to tell you the right way. To open the conversation, and to take the arrows that come with going first.
The backlash isn't one thing
The mistake most of these conversations make is treating "the AI debate" as a single argument. It isn't. When I read through hundreds of comments, three completely different objections were wearing the same costume:
- "You deceived us." — about disclosure.
- "It has no soul." — about the existential weight of the medium.
- "You're not a real artist." — about obsolescence and identity.
These are not the same objection, and they don't deserve the same answer. One of them is fair. One of them is profound. One of them is, underneath, mostly grief. Separating them is the first honest move — so let's take them one at a time, and give each the answer it actually deserves.
Disclosure: the fair one
I'll give the critics this one cleanly, because they're right.
People want to know what's inside the thing they're consuming. It's the same reason we label food organic. You're not obligated to buy organic — you just want the information so you get to choose. That's not gatekeeping. That's respect.
I never hid that the track was made with AI. When people asked, I said yes immediately, on camera, with nothing to defend. But I also didn't lead with it, because honestly, it didn't occur to me that I had to. This is a brand-new frontier. There are no rules yet. No standard that says you must declare it in the first frame.
But "there's no rule" isn't a good enough reason. Informed consent is the right instinct, and I'm adopting it. Going forward, I label. Not because I was caught — because it's the standard I'd want if I were on the other side of the screen.
That's the easy objection. The next two are where it gets interesting.
Soul: the one that actually matters
Here's why AI hits differently in music than almost anywhere else.
Music has always been understood as soul-to-soul. When a song moves you, the story you tell yourself is that you're touching the inner world of the person who made it — that it came straight out of their soul into yours. So when you find out a machine was involved, something in you recoils. It feels like the line went dead. Like you reached for a person and grabbed a circuit board.
I understand that vertigo, because I felt it myself. The first time I made something with generative AI that genuinely moved me, my immediate thought was: is it weird that I didn't spend months building this from scratch? Right behind it came a second thought: but it's this good — how could I withhold it from the world?
But to explain how I made peace with it, I have to tell you where this sound actually came from — because it didn't start in a prompt box.
It started in a room. I sat down with my friend Taylor Sol, one of the best handpan players I know, and recorded him playing. At the end of the session he threw out a riff so catchy I couldn't stop replaying it — and somewhere in the loop I started hearing a trap beat underneath it, sacred and dirty at the same time. That became the first temple trap song — Celtic Voyage (432Hz). A real instrument, a real player, and me recognizing something and knowing exactly what it needed. That's where the world was born — and I didn't play a note of it either. I heard it.
The track that went to nearly a million views — Ancient Whispers — came later, when I went to push the sound further. I want to be straight with you about this one, because it's the honest center of everything I'm saying: there was no handpan in the room that time. I didn't play it. I chased it through prompts — generating, rejecting, refining — until something came back that stopped me cold. It moved me so much, exactly as it was, that I didn't change a thing. Of everything I've made, it's the piece with the least of my own hands in it. I'm not going to dress that up.
So where's the soul in a track I didn't play?
It's in the wanting. I could chase that sound through a prompt box because I already knew it in my body — I'd built the world it lived in, in a room, with a friend, with a real instrument. I knew the exact thing I was reaching for, and I knew it the instant the machine handed it back. The tool didn't have the vision. I did. I earned it on the first song and I spent it on this one.
The soul wasn't in the synthesis. The soul was in the wanting — and in knowing it when I heard it. That's the whole distinction, and the rest of this essay is just me making it rigorous.
The map: soul versus quality
The reason these arguments go in circles is that everyone is using a one-dimensional model. They imagine a single spectrum — prompting on one end, "real" musicianship on the other — as if the only thing worth measuring is how much machine was involved.
That spectrum can't explain anything real. It can't explain a beginner with a guitar making something rough but true. It can't explain a twenty-year veteran producing a flawless, completely hollow commercial cut. And it can't explain 800,000 people falling for a track made in Suno.
You need two axes, and neither of them is "AI."
- Soul — is there a genuine why? Real intention, emotional truth, something the work is actually for. Soul isn't technique. It's the human reason the thing exists.
- Quality — how good the final work is: production, arrangement, the emotional landing. This measures the thing itself, not the labor behind it. A track is high-quality whether it took ten years or ten minutes.
Plot those and you get four kinds of music:
- The Seed — high soul, low quality. The earnest beginner, the raw demo, the kid who can't quite play yet but means every note. Not noise — this is where nearly every real artist starts.
- The Real Thing — high soul, high quality. Soul fully realized in a vessel worthy of it. A masterpiece by any method, and the tool used to get there doesn't matter.
- The Hollow — low soul, high quality. Polished and empty. And here's the quadrant that ends the whole debate: the cynical jingle by a twenty-year veteran and the lazy one-line AI prompt land in the exact same box. Both clean. Neither has a why.
- Filler — low soul, low quality. Nothing there and not well made — and notice it has nothing to do with whether a machine was involved.
Look at where AI sits on this map: nowhere. It's not a quadrant or an axis. It's a tool you can pick up at any point on the map and use to make Filler or to make The Real Thing — exactly like a guitar, a sampler, or a million-dollar studio. The moment you split this into "AI artists" and "real artists," you've handed the critics their whole argument. A tool-blind map is the argument.
If that sounds abstract, consider Rick Rubin. He's shaped records across genres that have nothing to do with each other — Run-DMC, Johnny Cash, Slayer, Jay-Z, Adele — and collected the Grammys doing it. Yet he isn't a trained musician, doesn't engineer, doesn't do sound design; he's said himself he has almost no studio skill. By the old definition he barely "produces" at all. His whole value lives on the soul axis — taste, direction, knowing when a thing is true — and his records still land top-right. The market has rewarded soul over labor for decades. AI didn't invent that. It just made it impossible to keep pretending otherwise.
The handpan trap test
Run my situation through the map.
Soul: high — the why, the taste, the recognition were mine, built in that room with Taylor long before any prompt box. Quality: high — the output is professional. Position: top-right. The Real Thing. It doesn't matter that I didn't engineer every element by hand, because the quality axis measures the work, not the hours. That's the scarcity shift made visible: I reached top-right on vision, not on twenty thousand hours of execution.
I got a live demonstration of this, courtesy of a critic. A bass producer went on his story to call me a fake, then video'd himself opening Suno, typing "spiritual handpan trap", hitting generate, and playing the first thing that came out — see, I did it too.
But he proved my point instead of his. He could copy the prompt because he watched me arrive at it — but the prompt was never the vision. The vision was everything that led me to want exactly that sound, and everything I'm building around it. He landed his clip squarely in The Hollow — clean enough, no why — and called it a takedown. The difference wasn't the tool. We used the same one. The difference was that I knew what I was reaching for, and he was reaching for me.
Why the floor moving feels like the sky falling
So why the heat? Why does this particular shift make people so angry?
Because value has always followed scarcity, and the scarce thing just moved.
Go back far enough and the scarcest thing was the ability to play — master an instrument and people would gather to hear you, because few could. Then recording arrived and loosened that. Then the DAW democratized the studio you used to need a budget to enter. Then streaming dissolved distribution, the next bottleneck. At every single one of those leaps, the people guarding the old scarce thing called the new tool cheating. Every time.
AI is the same story at a deeper level, because what it makes abundant is execution itself. Professional-sounding output is a click away. AI didn't raise the ceiling — it made the floor sound like the ceiling. Which is genuinely disorienting: if polish is free, it stops telling us anything. So how do we tell the cream from the rest?
The answer is the thing that was never abundant: vision, taste, intention, a real reason for the work to exist. The ability to build a world people want to live inside, to put out a frequency that others recognize as their own and gather around. As AI expands, the human at the center — the why, the presence, the community, the real-world experience — becomes more valuable, not less. The tool raised the floor so high that vision is the only thing left to stand on.
Which is exactly why so much of the resistance isn't really anger. It's grief. A lot of these producers poured years into mastering execution back when execution was the whole game. Watching it commoditize overnight is a genuine loss, and loss comes out sideways as contempt. I don't say that to dunk on anyone — and I want to be careful here, because not all of the resistance is grief. Some of it is principled: real questions about consent, about labor, about what we owe the artists whose work trained these tools. Those deserve answers on the merits, and I've tried to give them. But some of it is grief, plain and underneath — and if that's the ache you're feeling, you deserve to have it named with respect rather than mistaken for an argument. The skill you built was real. It's just no longer the scarce thing, and that's allowed to hurt.
The tool is neither good nor bad
Here's the part that should defuse the whole fight.
The tool has no morality. It's an amplifier. Like money — money isn't good or evil, it just magnifies the intention of whoever holds it. AI is the same. Point it with a thoughtless or deceptive intention and you get thoughtless, deceptive work. Point it with a real vision and you get something that moves 800,000 people to say finally.
That's why intention, vision, and taste aren't soft ideas here — they're the whole thing. The amplifier only ever gives back a louder version of what you bring to it. Which means the question was never "Is the tool good?" The question is, and always has been, "What are you bringing to it?"
But there's one place "neutral" breaks, and I won't hide behind the metaphor. A guitar owes no one; AI does — it can hand me professional-sounding output in minutes only because it learned from an enormous body of human work, most of it taken without asking. That's a real debt, and it's a different question from soul or grief: the fair version of the hardest objection against all of this. Where I land is reciprocity — I want these tools trained on consent, with value flowing back to the people they learn from, and I lean on my own material where I can. But it's too big to settle in a paragraph and too important to wave off, so I'm taking it up on its own: who is actually owed, and how, is the subject of a piece of its own. For here, this is enough — the vision in a track can be entirely mine and the supply chain behind the tool can still be unresolved. Both are true at once.
So: where's your line?
I don't want to end this by telling you the right way, because I don't believe there is one. Every artist gets to find their own line in the sand.
Some artists want zero AI — they want music to be pure human expression, hand to instrument, and that is genuinely beautiful. I want to hear that music. Some artists can't play a note, and AI is finally the door into expressing what's been locked inside them, and that's beautiful too. And there's everything in between. Personally, I live across the whole spectrum: sometimes I write every element by hand, sometimes I sample, sometimes I use AI to shave a harsh frequency, sometimes to spin out variations so I can choose, sometimes to generate a few stems, and sometimes — when what comes out is gold I wouldn't dare touch — the whole thing. None of those is cheating. They're just different points on one line.
The ethic isn't which point you pick. The ethic is: pick yours, be honest about it, and commit. That's the standard that asks something real of everyone — the purist and the prompt artist alike — without shaming anyone for where they land.
So I'm not here to win an argument. I'm here to start a conversation, and to be a bridge while it's still loud and unsettled. The tool isn't going anywhere. It isn't good or bad. It's a mirror with a volume knob.
The question is no longer "Did you use AI?"
The question is "How much of the vision belongs to you?"
That's your creative ownership. And in the world we're walking into, creative ownership is what artistry is going to mean.
Where's your line?