I can remember the moment modern creativity clicked for me with total clarity. It was 1985, and we’d just gotten our first Macintosh. I opened MacPaint and started messing around with the painting tools, but what truly blew my mind was the oval tool. In the real world, you could use a compass to draw a circle, but an oval was this weirdly elusive thing. You’d have to fake it with French curves or build it out of lines, and it never felt clean. Then suddenly, with a simple click-and-drag, I could make an oval of any size and shape. It felt like the computer had handed me a new kind of power.
The first thing I made was basically a chaotic pile of ovals, lines, and shapes filled with patterns. The patterns were their own revelation. In physical art, a pattern meant cutting from patterned paper or using rub-on textures, but here it was just selectable. I saved that image thinking it was a masterpiece. Looking back, it was basically litter, but to me it was proof that creativity had changed. Technology was making it easier to create things that used to require real technique and labor.
That’s the thread I keep pulling on. As computers get better, it takes less skill to make something that looks or sounds good. So does that make the creation less valid, less worthy, less notable? Over the last 50 years, I’ve watched this transformation hit three big realms in my life: visual art and animation, programming, and music.
In visual art and animation, the shift from hand-drawn work and physical stop-motion models into computer graphics and 3D modeling caused real controversy. People argued the computer was drawing for you. It displaced skilled specialists and triggered a crisis about craft. Even in the early MacPaint days, one of the biggest creative superpowers wasn’t just the drawing tools. It was saving progress and the ability to undo. Hitting Command-Z and watching a mistake vanish felt like cheating in the best possible way. I remember wishing life worked like that.
Underneath all of it is the bigger question: if something is beautiful, is it any less beautiful if humans didn’t make it? A sunset is beautiful. Fractals are beautiful. Computer-rendered images can be stunning. AI-generated works can be stunning. Are they okay to admire, or do we treat them as less-than because a human hand didn’t physically craft them? Fractals were a huge early example for me. Those endlessly deep patterns felt like a kind of mathematical purity, almost like the beauty of the universe showing its work. Yes, a machine calculated them, but the feeling wasn’t “a machine made this.” It was “this reveals something true.”
Programming has had its own march toward ease and abstraction. It started with flipping switches and binary, then assembly language, then compiled languages, then punch cards, keyboards, monitors, and the miracle of seeing a character appear on a screen as you typed it. Over time, more and more got packaged into libraries so you didn’t have to keep reinventing fundamentals like square roots, drawing circles, or sorting lists. Then came modern IDEs, version control with Git, collaboration workflows, fast compilers, and stack traces that tell you exactly where things broke. Now we’re in the era of AI, where you can describe what you want and have the machine generate a huge portion of the program. People call that cheating, but in a way programming has been heading toward “describe intent, let tools handle execution” for decades.
I felt that shift personally when I moved from Java programming in plain text files into an IDE. I had a variable with a short name, something like “i,” and in a text editor, renaming it would have been a nightmare because that character appears everywhere. With an IDE, I could refactor it and have every instance updated perfectly, instantly. It was eye-opening. It changed how I designed code from the start because experimentation and improvement were suddenly safe and fast. It made me more productive, and it also made me jealous and a little sad for people learning now, because so many things that were brutally hard are now just built-in. At the same time, the bar has risen. Games and software today are insanely complicated. Still, I remember when printing your name to the screen in the 1980s felt like magic.
Music follows the same pattern. I think about the invention of frets. Someone realized you could add notches so you’d hit the same note every time. That made playing more accessible and raised baseline quality, but it also narrowed certain expressive possibilities, like those in-between semitones. It’s the same story: less raw difficulty, more reliable results.
My own musical mind-blow happened in college, sophomore year, working on a project with a music teacher. That’s when I first encountered MIDI sequencers. Suddenly I could build an entire orchestra part by part and edit everything easily. I could move notes left or right, delete a single note, shift pitches, build layers of instruments, sequence drums, and quantize timing. It completely changed what composing felt like. It was like a door opened.
I also can’t help thinking about how absurdly powerful modern tools are compared to the past. Anyone with a laptop now has more sophisticated editing capability than the Beatles had in the 1960s. I remember Paul McCartney talking about making “Strawberry Fields” and the Mellotron, that early synthesizer-like sound, and how unions might have blocked it because it created flute sounds. Before that, you’d have to hire real flute players. So does that make the flute sounds less good? Does it make “Strawberry Fields” less significant because the flutes weren’t performed by humans in the traditional way?
For me, technology has always felt like a new kind of creativity, not a lesser one. And now the biggest philosophical fight among my friends is AI music. There’s a tool called Suno where you can upload a full song you made, and then the AI will cover it, essentially turning your demo into something that sounds like it was produced by a high-end producer with an incredible singer and elite session musicians. To me, it’s magical. It takes my songs where I always wanted them to go, but never had the time or resources to reach. It gives them a life.
At the same time, people look at it and say it was created in seconds, it wasn’t created by humans, it’s built from artificial brains trained on the hard labor and creative output of real musicians, and that makes it a parlor trick or a form of theft rather than true creativity. But I can’t ignore the obvious parallel. Humans learn from what they hear, too. We absorb influences for years, and our sensibilities are shaped by everything we’ve listened to. So how is AI training fundamentally different from human influence?
In my head, it’s similar to taking my song to a producer like Rick Rubin, someone with a deep musical mind built from a lifetime of influence, and then having a world-class singer like Taylor Swift perform it with a legendary backing band like the Wrecking Crew. That isn’t me performing, and tons of musical decisions aren’t made by me, but it’s still my melody and my lyrics. It’s still vital to me.
That’s why I see it as collaboration. And honestly, music already works that way at the top level. You look at songwriting credits now and there are often handfuls or dozens of writers, producers, and teams shaping the final result. The songs are already constructed through layers of contribution. AI just feels like another collaborator.
So the scary, thrilling question becomes: what happens when the barriers drop completely? Maybe someday with something like Neuralink, you’ll just think of a song and it will exist instantly, or imagine an image and it will appear. No years of practice drawing, no discipline learning an instrument. If anyone can create an album in an hour instead of a year, what sets great art apart?
To me, it comes down to the emotional connection it creates. That’s what matters. And right now, this month, February 2026, I’m living inside that feeling. I’m taking demos I made over the years, songs that were never fully realized into final form, and giving them to AI to produce. The results are hitting me with deep emotion. I’m feeling a connection to these songs that’s almost overwhelming. There’s one song in particular, “Mountain Man,” and hearing it realized with a true orchestral arrangement and full production has made me cry over and over again. The melodies cut straight to my soul. They’re melodies and lyrics I created, and AI is helping them reach their full potential.