Humans and new technology

What was discussed

A community that has mostly hosted engineers and founders put its most unfamiliar guest on stage this time. The invitation came out of something the rapper Paloalto said on a podcast: AI already makes music better than humans, you can tell just by using Suno, so there is no reason to avoid it. An artist you would expect to keep AI at arm's length to protect their art took the opposite position.

The qualifier he added was the important part. People do not consume only the music; they consume the story wrapped around it. Which artist made the song, out of what experience and thinking, and how they carry it forward with fans after release are all part of the content. So hand more of the technical production to AI, he said, and have humans go deeper on narrative and storytelling. Software is in the same position. AI does most of the building, so making a product got easier while marketing got harder.

The first question from the stage went at the nature of creation. If AI produces output from training data, could Suno have made jazz if humans had never created jazz? His answer was clear. AI learns what humanity has accumulated and produces results faster than we do, so if humans had not brought jazz into existence, no amount of prompting would produce it. Turn that around and there is still a place for humans in bringing something genuinely new into the world for the first time.

He went on to redefine creation itself. Humans have never made something out of nothing. Musician, designer, developer, it is all something that inspired you as a child or inspires you now, reinterpreted in your own way. Creation is not something appearing where nothing was; it is a question of how far you evolve what you have absorbed and how creatively you express it. He said he feels more when he listens to someone's music and can sense where its roots are and what shaped it.

With AI coding, anyone can build software, and as we move from subscribing to building, the scarcity value of output drops. The same goes for music once you can generate the song you want on the spot. Asked how you then judge what is good, he compared the change to a return to prehistory. We used to accept what brands and companies made for us; now each person can create. Everyone has the instinct to create, so it is natural that it comes out.

His answer was balance. He uses Suno himself, and with a good prompt the brass, guitars, and strings come out with real life in them. But the more widely available that sound becomes, the more a real player stands out, and he expects an era where people are moved more by things that are not too perfect and that carry someone's sincerity. When supply of output approaches infinity, the market starts pricing traces of a person rather than perfection.

If anyone can produce comparable quality, what is an artist's moat? Appeal, character, and the path they have walked. There are people with real skill who are not loved, and that is either an absence of appeal or a place where the public cannot get into the story. He pointed to Kanye West: people are invested because of a pioneer's record of breaking limits, and that accumulated narrative is what makes even a wrong statement get chewed over once more.

This is not only about music. There is Elon Musk behind Tesla, and the story of Steve Jobs starting in a garage, getting pushed out, and coming back carried real weight in how Apple products were marketed. The faster products and technology level up toward the same ceiling, the more a founder's narrative, character, and consistent record become hard to replace.

How he handles AI stood out too. He uses Suno while deliberately trying not to lean on it. He makes music because the process of making it is fun; if this were about making things easily and getting paid fast, he would have handed it all over long ago. His actual use of it is clever. Hip-hop samples older music, and using an original means sample clearance costs and permission. Instead he has Suno produce a convincing version of a given era's sound, takes the stems, and recombines them, saving the cost and getting the sound he wanted.

On a recent collaborative album he fed his own playing into Suno, pulled several versions, and used only the parts he liked. The process of creation did not disappear; its shape changed. He also said AI has helped a great deal with independent work, handling the chores of sending master files to distributors and cleaning up spreadsheets for merch shipping. Reduce dependence at the core of the creative work and use it aggressively for repetitive operations: that was his division.

His career has an unusual shape. He started a label and ran it for ten years, spent time as a signed artist, and is now independent. It looks like moving backward, and it rests on the confidence that comes from having done everything himself, from settlements to issuing tax invoices. When someone said the timing is good for going independent now that AI covers the manager's role, he laughed and said he should have been born a bit later.

The most practical part came out of the global strategy question. Asked what Korean hip-hop needs to go worldwide, he gave the counterintuitive answer that it is better not to try too hard to be global. Hip-hop is a culture Black Americans made, so imitating them only looks silly to them, and you cannot compete on what they do better. So he makes what is native to him, living in Korea, what comes out of the environment he grew up in. K-pop's success, he said, taught him that showing what is Korean is what people abroad find more interesting.