AI isn't killing your creativity. Convenience is. — Ioan „Click” Mihalca [Music](https://ioanclickmihalca.ro/en/articles?category=music) · 6 min · 17 August 2026 AI isn't killing your creativity. Convenience is. ================================================= Open letters are being signed against AI. But every genre I make — hip-hop, drum & bass, reggae — was born out of a technology accused of exactly the same thing. I've seen this film three times already. Petitions are being signed. Open letters written. Artists I respect are announcing that AI is the end of music. And I'm supposed to be the one torn in half: by day I build the exact technology they're accusing, by night I work on two albums made the old way — people in a room. I'm not torn at all. Not because I take the threat as a joke, but because I've seen this film before. Three times. Every bit of music I've made over the past two decades exists because the generation before mine refused to believe it. Every genre I make was once accused of killing music ---------------------------------------------------- Hip-hop, drum & bass, reggae — my genres, from Camuflaj, the band I came up with in Romania, to the albums I'm finishing now. Not one of them was born politely, with "real" instruments and the industry's blessing. All three came out of technologies accused, in their day, of exactly what AI is accused of now. **Hip-hop** was born from two turntables and from sampling: you take pieces of old records and build new records out of them. For years, the industry called that theft, not music. In 1991, rapper Biz Markie was sued over a sample, and the judge opened his ruling with the commandment: "Thou shalt not steal." That was the official position on the music I make today. **Drum & bass** is built — the entire genre — on six seconds of drums. The fragment is called the Amen break, and it comes from a 1969 track, "Amen, Brother," that almost nobody was listening to anymore. Producers took those six seconds, cut them up piece by piece, sped them up and rearranged them a thousand ways — and out of them came an entire genre, entire scenes, entire careers. Six seconds, played once by a drummer in a studio, more than fifty years ago. **Reggae** went through the same story with dub. In Jamaica, a sound engineer named King Tubby took the mixing desk — the machine you balance sound with in a studio — and started pulling new versions out of tracks that already existed: no vocals, heavy echo, bass pushed to the front. He invented the remix before the word existed. In his day, "instrument" meant something with strings or keys. He proved that an instrument is anything that gets music out of you. And in case this panic feels new: in 1906, John Philip Sousa — the best-known American composer of his era — warned Congress that recorded music would kill music. The record. The record was going to kill music. The panic in your feed today is older than everyone posting it. The tool didn't replace the creatives. It filtered them. -------------------------------------------------------- Look at what happened every single time, because the pattern is identical. The ones who treated the accused tool as an instrument founded genres. The DJ who saw more in a turntable than a playback machine. The engineer who saw more in a mixing desk than a row of faders. The producers who cut the Amen break in ways the original drummer never dreamed of. The ones who waited for the tool to make the music for them — name one. You can't. Nobody can, because they left nothing behind. The tool didn't replace them; it took out of the conversation the people who brought nothing to the table. That's what any new technology does to art: it doesn't kill creativity, it filters it. And the creativity that gets through the filter moves up a floor. From playing the drum to chopping the break. From singing the hook to sampling it and turning it inside out. I watch the same move happen daily in my other life: I write code with Claude Code, and my job has shifted from typing lines to architecture, decisions and taste. Anyone who thought the job was the typing has a problem. Anyone who knew the job was the thinking doesn't. Where the fear is right ----------------------- I didn't write this to sell you peace of mind, so here's the uncomfortable part, straight up. Yes, the flood of generic content is real and it's already here: tracks generated by the thousand, playlists filled with music made by nobody, for nobody. Yes, part of the paid work musicians live on is being automated — jingles, background, stock — and real people are losing real money. It happened in the earlier rounds too: session drummers lost work when the drum machine arrived. And one more thing, the darkest part of the story above: Gregory Coleman, the man who played the six seconds that drum & bass stands on, died poor, without ever seeing a cent from the thousands of tracks built on his drumming. "Who pays the source?" was a legitimate question then, and it's a legitimate question now, when models train on everybody's work. So no, the friendship between AI and creativity isn't unconditional. The condition is always the same and it's brutal: the tool makes the people who bring something of their own exceptional — and erases the ones who bring nothing. In every round, the work that died was the work anyone could do. What survived, and then exploded, was the work of people who had something to say and a new tool to say it with. The enemy in the title ---------------------- Which leaves the question: if the tool filters rather than kills, then who does the killing? Because artists do burn out and vanish. I've watched it happen. They go out on their own. In every round, the ones who disappeared weren't replaced by the technology — they stepped back from it. They let the tool make the decisions that were theirs, and from that moment on they weren't authors anymore, just spectators to their own name. AI is the first tool that offers you the full retreat, turnkey: it writes your lyrics, composes your hook, even picks your cover art. You can step out of your own art completely and be left holding nothing but the posting. Plenty of people will. Not because the machine forced them — because it was easier. Convenience takes nothing from you by force; it talks you into handing everything over yourself, smiling. I have a rule for this line, and I wrote it out in full in [the article about my albums](https://ioanclickmihalca.ro/ro/articole/ai-albume-oameni): if the process disappears and only the result is left, have you lost something? Promo clips — no, ClipYo cuts them and I don't miss a thing. Songs — yes, all of it. The song is the road, not the final file. The filter is coming either way ------------------------------- When "Altfel" and "Inimă Română" come out, they'll land on a market flooded with generated music. I know that, and it doesn't scare me. The break didn't kill the good drummer. Sampling didn't kill the good songwriter. Tubby's mixing desk didn't kill the singer — it gave the track another life. AI can't kill your creativity, because there's nowhere to take it from: creativity was never in the tool and never has been. It's in what you choose to do when nothing forces you to do anything. Convenience, on the other hand, kills without a sound. It doesn't tear anything away from you — it just convinces you that you're no longer needed. And unlike every technology on the list above, not one petition has ever been signed against it. [← All articles](https://ioanclickmihalca.ro/en/articles) Share If this article was useful to you, pass it on. 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