Nov 2025 (revised June 2026)
When creative-types critique AI as soulless or use job-loss/protests as justification against it, I like to ask if they’re also against Skrillex, given synthesizers received many of the same critiques. [1]
With the popularity of electronic music, this usually turns into a fun convo about creativity and technology at best, or devolves into run-of-the-mill tribalism at worst.
But what interests me more is the opposite:
I think AI will give us the Skrillex of movies. And biology. And math.
Skrillex hacked the new musical paradigm
Skrillex’s success wasn’t due to merely using new tools, plenty of producers used digital-audio workstations (DAWs) before him. But he was among the first to fully exploit the medium.
For him software wasn’t a cheaper replacement for a studio, but a new instrument entirely, resulting in a sound near impossible to create in the previous era.
AI promises this for basically every field, so why the doom and gloom?
Narrative is king
Thanks to AI, the poorest kid in India with a smartphone + internet has more access to education today than the richest person in 2021.
Mathematical discoveries, mind-bending music and movies. New drugs and cures for diseases and cancers. Cleaner energy.
These things become more real every day but rarely surface in popular narrative, why?
My theory is unless you can:
- Understand the tech
- Extrapolate to societal effects
You’re limited to trusting people who can, and who would trust Silicon Valley — who’s been saying every startup will “change the world” for a decade even if this time it’s true.
So instead, anti-AI narratives win because they play on real fears and easy villains: job loss, Big Tech, billionaires — converting tribalism and cheap moral superiority into easy view counts and clout.
Sure, I have my own worries about people's jobs (including my own), the future of work, and what will happen to society financially and mentally if occupations no longer exist. These are rational fears and real problems. And there are valid concerns on energy and copyright even if narratives on things like water use are sensationalized.
But in terms of art, I'm excited.
And so are the most creative people I know, who think more about what they can build than protecting their fiefdom of expertise.
Like parents used to lecture “only boring people get bored”, I believe “only uncreative people think AI hurts creativity”.
Somewhere in their mom's basement, the Skrillex of movies is cooking up the film version of Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites ready to take the world by storm.
You can see hints of it, in this cinematic “AI Slop”:
Yes, it still feels like AI. But a cohesive story is told that makes you feel something.
This is what I think is missed, AI will unlock bedroom storytellers, democratizing film production like DAWs did for Skrillex and Mike Posner.
Is scarcity a requirement for value?
Will a lower barrier oversaturate us with content to where nothing is special?
I don’t think so, and I think music is a great example here. Producing professional-sounding music (read: getting the exact sound you want) is actually not that difficult, but crafting a piece that resonates clearly is. [2]
In other words, technical music production was never the secret sauce, but mastering it was table stakes. AI removes that barrier and moves the bottleneck to ideas.
I think bringing film (and everything else) to the same bottleneck will be net beneficial to the world. One of the great tragedies is the number of brilliant people born into poverty (like Ramanujan) whose genius went undiscovered due to circumstance.
Yes, something will be lost if the process of movie creation moves from actors and physical sets to a laptop -- similar to the shift from orchestras to Ableton, or silent movies to sound pictures conveyed in Chazelle’s Babylon.
But you could argue the output is better for consumers. Take movies vs plays -- plays still exist, and there is something unique about them, but is it better storytelling than a movie?
Probably not for most.
It's possible AI improves to the point where we can't tell the difference, and perhaps then humanity's end will be achieved via the "perfect TikTok" doom theory that causes us to not eat or sleep.
But until then, I look forward to the film rendition of Bangarang.
Footnotes
[1] Synthesizers put musicians out of work. In fact there were union protests against this, with a motion for an outright ban even passing in 1982.
[2] This is why I think despite the proliferation (and massive revenue growth) of Suno.ai -- we are not really seeing completely AI-generated slop hit the charts.
Same with Twitter or LinkedIn, AI slop is clearly AI slop.