In response to Will I Am complaining about AI's threat to human creativity

In this video, will.i.am takes aim at AI and says we should pay less for AI music because it takes a second to create and isn't made by a human.

Ironic coming from a guy who built a career trying to sound like a robot… That aside...

I was taught a lesson a long time ago: it's not about the time you spend, it's about the value you create.

Imagine I'm an expert construction consultant. I walk onto a building site, spend five minutes looking at the schematics, and spot a fatal flaw that saves the project $10 million. Is that advice worth five minutes of my hourly rate? Or would you happily pay $100,000 for those five minutes because of what they saved you?

Slightly different context, but the point holds: value has nothing to do with time spent.

The music industry is a good example of this. Music has always run on the value-not-time principle. An artist has a spark, spends a few hours on a track, and gets paid for it for a decade. Musicians don't clock in and out. They can toil for weeks and create a flop, or catch a moment of divine inspiration, write a riff in five minutes, and generate a huge hit. Plenty of artists are living off royalties years after the work was made.

When I listen to my Spotify playlists, I often can't name the artist singing the songs I love. I couldn't tell you whether a track was made by a human or an AI — to my unsophisticated ears, it's all the same. I recently heard a UK grime track that was entirely AI-generated, and some of the verses were pretty good. I'd go as far as to say I enjoyed it more than some human-made tracks.

I'd agree with will.i.am if his point was that the artists whose music trained the model should get paid. Quality input should come at a premium. But the value of the output is determined by the market.

The obvious pushback is that AI-generated music puts pressure on artists to make something incredible just to compete. I can sympathise with that. But I don't see why human-made music is intrinsically more valuable than AI music, as will.i.am claims.

I'm a designer. You can ask Claude to generate a website and it'll get you 80% of the way there and if it keeps getting better, as I expect it will, it's on me to work out how to be better than the machine. If I can't, I'll watch my market value drop and I'll be forced to pivot.

"It takes me longer to build a site than an AI does" is not a value proposition. "I can build something better than an AI can" is.

AI raises the floor. Creativity lifts the ceiling. You're not paid for your time, you're paid for the value of your contribution.