They Still Need Us

If you reduce everything to its fundamentals, it’s all mathematics below the surface, whether that’s a beat machine breaking rhythm into pieces, color grading and moving pixels around inside a frame, or simply choosing where to put the camera before you start rolling. Math sits beneath every one of those decisions, whether you’re thinking about it in the moment or not.

None of that is new, either. Sound has always been math. Color has always been math. The contour of a letter on a page is math. Long before anyone was debating AI, all of it was already true, sitting there underneath everything people made.

So what actually changed is only the instrument. The brush, the camera, the keyboard, the pencil in your hand were never the thing itself; they only carry it. What actually matters is the moment you make something, when a spark travels out of you and into the work, then onward to whoever’s waiting on the other side to receive it. That’s the transmission.

So learn the new tools, and use them. I’m not saying not to. Just don’t mistake the tool for what it’s carrying. Technology is going to keep moving forward, because that’s the one thing it consistently does, but every new version still needs a person behind it if it’s going to mean anything at all. The transmission is the experience, and it can only ever come from a person. And this is the part I keep returning to. We can always feel it. All of us know when something is genuine, even when we can’t explain why we know it.

So let’s talk about who is actually afraid right now, and why that is, because this is where the transmission stops being just a personal idea and starts running into something much bigger than any one of us.

It isn’t only you or me feeling that fear. The major companies are afraid too, just in a different register, and when they feel that kind of fear, the only move they seem to understand is buying the whole thing outright and owning it, rather than working alongside it or even sitting at the table with the people actually making the work. From where the money sits, that leaves no space for us at all, and it’s infuriating, because we’re the source. We’re the reason that money exists in the first place. They know that, it just seems they don’t care. There is a caveat for the trade off, for instance, they do offer many things that are not easily accessible, for instance, let take having distribution and reach, something you’d never get on your own, and that matters. But with social media and these new tools that advantage is already leveling off, and once you strip the actual person out of the equation, what’s left behind is their platforms with nothing on it. An empty shelf.

It isn’t only about ownership either, because it’s also about speed. Work that once required ten to fifty people can now be done by one person alone, and that should make you a little uneasy, not because the tool itself is malicious, but because nobody is being given a transition period here. There’s no grace window. It arrived all at once, for everyone, whether you work in music or film or code or anything else. What surprised me most while I was sitting with all of this is that the criticism isn’t landing only on corporations for how quickly they’re moving. It’s hitting the people everyone admires too, the ones who supposedly get a pass because of everything they’ve already built, and it turns out it makes no difference whether they come in loud or quiet, whether they’re for it or against it. Somebody always has an opinion.

Look at Dr. Dre, who said it directly in an interview with the New York Times: the only people who treat AI as a threat are the people who already have trouble creating in the first place. He compared the resistance to the doubt that met drum machines and synthesizers when those first showed up, and there was no apology in that statement at all, which meant plenty of people didn’t like hearing it.

Timbaland’s story is more tangled. He built an AI artist from the ground up, a persona named TaTa, through a company he founded called Stage Zero, and then he was accused of feeding an independent producer’s beat into Suno without ever asking permission, with the original producer’s tag still audible on the finished track. He ended up apologizing directly, saying he should have done his due diligence before using it. Two separate controversies landed on him in one stretch of time.

Ben Affleck’s version looks completely different. He never made a public fuss about it in either direction. Back in 2022 he quietly launched an AI company called InterPositive and kept it entirely out of the news, even while going on Joe Rogan and stating flatly that he didn’t believe AI would ever be able to write anything meaningful, let alone make a movie from scratch. Then Netflix bought the company, and the backlash that followed wasn’t really about the tool itself. It was about the distance between what he’d been saying publicly and what he’d been building in private the whole time.

Three legends, three very different stances toward the same technology, and all three got hit anyway, just from different sides. If you sit with that for a moment, it tells you something, because this was never truly about the tool. It’s about trust: who gets to move quickly without scrutiny, who’s actually paying attention, and what gets left behind while the rest of us sort this out in public, in real time, without any kind of script to follow.

And none of that is really about the transmission either, not directly, but it’s about who gets to be near it. Who’s allowed to touch the thing that actually matters, and who just gets to own the pipes it travels through. And there’s something almost nobody is talking about enough, which is that the machines designed to detect AI don’t really know what they’re looking at either.

Try running Frankenstein through an AI detector sometime. Mary Shelley wrote it in 1818, two centuries before a language model ever existed, and it still comes back marked as partly AI-written. Do the same with Pride and Prejudice and you get the same result. The Declaration of Independence gets flagged too, and so does Hemingway.

A novelist actually lost a real deal because of this exact failure. The detection company Pangram rated her novel as 78 percent AI-generated, and although she denied it, the publisher pulled the book anyway, canceling the U.S. release and pulping the copies already printed in the U.K. A deal disappeared because a machine invented a percentage on the spot.

That’s the real infancy here, and it isn’t the tools producing the language that are still figuring themselves out. It’s the tools built to evaluate that language after the fact. Both sides are guessing, matching patterns against something neither one fully understands, and when the judging side guesses wrong, nobody picks up the phone to explain themselves. The verdict just lands on you, and that’s the end of it.

So when people panic about AI, I understand that completely. I just want us pointing that panic at the right target, because the tools making the work aren’t actually the frightening part. They’re still figuring out what they even are, same as the rest of us. The frightening part is a system designed to determine what counts as human that can’t recognize it even when it’s staring straight at it, whether that’s in Shelley’s writing, in some producer nobody has heard of yet, or in you.

Now I’m only touching the edge of what’s really happening, and I know that. There’s far more noise out there than what I’ve covered here, and much more unfolding beneath it that I haven’t even addressed, but I wanted to name some of these parts of it, because pretending none of this is happening doesn’t help anyone who’s living with the same uncertainty I am, all of it, through the noise and the panic circling this thing, I keep coming back to one idea, which is that we’re still the source. That hasn’t moved, no matter how loud it gets around us.

So keep your head clear through it, keep speaking in your own voice instead of borrowing someone else’s, and keep making whatever it is you’re making, however that shows up for you, because this isn’t even the first time the ground has shifted like this. Sampling arrived decades ago and people insisted it wasn’t real music. Computers entered the studio and the analog purists swore the soul was gone for good. Film gave way to digital, and somewhere, someone promised movies would never feel the same again, but remember the dust always settles, and every time it settles on the same thing: a person making something, sending a feeling out into the world for someone else to receive on the other end. That holds true even with text, even now that a machine can assemble sentences on its own, because somebody still has to sit there and test it. Somebody still has to say this works, this doesn’t, this feels true, this feels like nothing at all. Somebody still has to want something specific enough to tell the machine what that even is in the first place.

They need us. No matter how far they try to push this, no matter what they build next to try to route around it, we’re still at the bottom of the whole thing, holding it up. Every machine they build, every model they train, every platform they stack on top of it is still just a shelf waiting on something to put on it. We’re still the one thing none of it can survive without. The detectors get it wrong. The publishers get it wrong. Even we get fooled sometimes, standing on the outside of something, guessing at what made it. But the person who actually made the thing always knows. That’s something I truly believe will never change. And in the end, that’s what matters

*Post image by digital artist: Cy Teh