Key Points:

1.      AI isn't just automating routine tasks, it's beginning to replace human creativity where scale and predictability dominate

2.      The future of work hinges on what only humans can bring: meaning, perspective, imperfection, and authentic connection

3.      If efficiency becomes our only compass, we risk building a world rich in content but poor in humanity

When I was in my 20’s, I was the lead guitarist in a regularly gigging and recording rock band. At our busiest, we were performing four to six nights a month while being full-time college students and holding down part-time jobs. We produced an album and two EPs along the way. When you are working that much at your craft while having an incredibly full plate, you always hope for a break. Ours came when our music was introduced to a major record executive.

He enjoyed the album and thought one of our tunes would be an instant radio hit. He suggested that we work closely with a well known hitmaker to punch out more radio friendly versions of our album. But, in the meantime, there was a catch: to be on the label, we were required to have a certain number of followers on MySpace. We came well short of that number, exponentially. It would take us years to achieve that. To say that we were shocked would be an understatement.

That was back in the late 2000s. Today, being a musician is far more difficult. Not only are targets harder to reach as a bare minimum entry point to talking to labels, but now AI has entered the scene.

In a recent Global News article, the famous music journalist and historian Alan Cross speculated a future that may not be far away: record producers have every impetus to remove the artist from art. In other words, AI-driven music could forever change the way people consumer music.

As AI-generated music becomes mainstream, Mr. Cross poses a worrying question: what happens to the human in the creative process? What does this shift teach us about AI, authenticity, and human purpose?

At first glance, Alan’s article is a story about singers, streaming royalties, and rights-owners. But for business leaders, policy makers, and organisational strategists, the underlying theme is deeper: as AI moves from tool to creator, the boundary between human value and machine delivery is shifting.

The Discomfort of AI

As painful as it is for me to admit, in Alan’s dystopic future vision where AI drives content creation, musicians are just not that unique. They’re simply the first creative class to experience what economists have been warning about for years: automation begins where scale and predictability create the highest return.

Let me give you an example. Pop music is formulaic. How many times have you seen this video or one exactly like it? It’s a routine that has been done time again, ad nauseum. But they make a fascinating point. So, if you haven’t seen them, take a minute to watch. It’s very revealing in terms of how much the structure of popular music is replicated over, and over, and over again. This same thing can be said of social media personas and design principles, too. My point is that the more quantifiable and structure-driven human content continues to become, the more likely machines are to inhabit and reproduce human content.

For years, people comforted themselves with a hopeful refrain: AI will take the routine tasks so we can focus on creative and strategic work. This is why Alan’s vision is alarming. It presents us with an existential tension: one where romantic expectations of technology and its actual outcomes forces us to question what happens when efficiency and extraction are prioritized over meaning.

So, Alan asks us to stop and recognize a crossroads in front of us, and he’s asking us to do so by prompting ourselves with a critical question: what do we want human experience to mean when machines can perform the visible parts of it? This question will have different implications for everyone, and they matter in non-music contexts, too.

What AI as a Creator means for People and Organisations

While music is the most visible example, parallel dynamics are already unfolding in marketing, design, customer service, legal drafting, and more. Alan isn’t merely presenting a vision anymore. He’s offering a critical narrative, and it carries three key lessons:

1. Human value must be re-defined. When an algorithm can generate content at scale, cost-effectively, and without human pain-points (sleep, illness, ego, negotiation), the “value” of human labour shifts. It’s no longer just about whether a person can you do the job, but also (a) what unique stance the person brings, and (b) how that person shifts from being a deliverer to a designer of meaning. In other words, business leaders, that treat humans as input-machines are likely to find that they experience a high turnover. If instead they ask: “What does only a human bring?”, they protect and amplify their human capital

   
   

2. Authenticity and trust become strategic assets. Alan’s article raises a paradox: people found AI-generated music more arousing, yet human-composed music was familiar. That suggests a gap between novelty and connection. In a world of AI production, human stories, human flaws, and human context become competitive differentiators. Organizations that lean into their human-identity, align culture, ethics, and narrative, and resist the “machine everything” push will build stronger trust and attachment

   
   

3. Strategy must account for the human-machine continuum, not just the machine. Leaders often frame AI as “how do we use this tool to generate faster/cheaper?” But the music story shows the existential side: “What if the machine becomes creator?” and “What if our work becomes obsolete?” The strategic imperative is two-fold: (a) define how humans and machines co-create value, and (b) define safeguards

What struck me reading Cross’ article and thinking back to that moment in my twenties when a gatekeeper told a young band we needed tens of thousands of invisible followers to be worthy, is that technology has always mediated who gets seen. What’s different now is the scale: we’re not just gatekeeping humans—we’re replacing them in the system.

And that invites a stubborn but necessary question: What role do we want people to play in a world of perfect synthesis and endless content?

If we allow efficiency alone to steer the ship, we will build a culture optimized for frictionless consumption rather than lived experience; a world full of sound, but not necessarily any music.

The point isn’t to fear AI or resist progress. It’s to remember what makes human work meaningful in the first place. Creativity isn’t merely output. It’s the accumulated weight of effort, failure, identity, memory, taste, temperament, private doubt, and public courage. It’s the quiet, unglamorous process of becoming someone capable of expression.

So, as AI becomes a collaborator, producer, and in some cases a creator, our responsibility isn’t to compete with it on volume or speed but do double down on what only people can offer: perspective, dissonance, care, imperfection, and soul. Not to mention, community.