Nov 2025 (revised June 2026)
When "creative" friends critique AI as soulless or use job-loss/protests as justification against it, I find it amusing to ask if they’re also against Skrillex, given synthesizers received many of the same critiques. [1]
With a friend group that loves 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.
However, what interests me more is the opposite:
I think AI will give us the Skrillex of movies. And biology. And math.
Mathematical discoveries, mind-bending music and movies. New drugs and cures for diseases and cancers. Cleaner energy. More equitable access to education. These things become more real every day but rarely surface in common 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” even if this time it’s true.
So instead anti-AI narratives, which play on real fears and easy villains (job loss, Big Tech, billionaires) get used to garner easy view counts, clout, and claim moral superiority.
Sure, I have my own worries about people's jobs (including my own), the future of work, and what will happen to people financially and mentally if occupations no longer exist. And there are valid concerns on energy and copyright amid sensationalized narratives on things like water use.
But in terms of art, I'm excited.
And so is every truly creative person I know, who thinks more about what they can build than protecting their fiefdom.
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 to where anyone can do it.
Will this create so much professional 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 to the same bottleneck will be net beneficial to the world. One of the great tragedies is the number of brilliant people (like Ramanujan) born into poverty whose genius was never discovered due to circumstance.
Yes, something will be lost if the process of movie creation moves from actors and sets to a single workstation -- similar to the shift from orchestras to Ableton, or silent movies to sound pictures conveyed in Chazelle’s Babylon.
But you could argue the same thing for 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 people.
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.