Decide Which AI Story Belongs to You

My first computer was a RadioShack TRS-80. It plugged into my TV. You wrote programs in a language called BASIC and saved them on an audio cassette, if you were lucky enough to have the specialized audio cassette hardware. I was not. When I was in 4th grade my school bought its own TRS-80. The head of school, my buddy Ari, and I were the only three people in the entire school who had ever touched a computer before. In sixth grade, Ari and I were elevated to the status of school computer experts, a job we held onto until we graduated high school. Being a computer nerd has always been part of my identity. And that’s probably the primary reason I have a career as a musician. I always make the joke that digital audio and I arrived in Hollywood on the same flight.

When I arrived in the fall of 1995, an entirely new category of tools for recording and making music were appearing in the marketplace, software. The transition from analog to digital was hotly debated in the professional recording industry. The sound quality of digital was unusable at first. Digital audio was for making weird noises and effects, not pristine recording. But it got better and better.

While the quality debate was still raging, recording, mixing and manipulating your music on a computer over a piece of tape had such advantages that everyone was realizing you could not stay competitive if you didn’t make the transition. Once everyone was consuming their music on a CD, the first ubiquitous, commercially successful digital audio format, the question of whether or not computerized audio was better or worse sonically was suddenly no longer relevant. Everyone was going to be listening to digital copies of your music. Your music is going to be digitized eventually, and if you do it now, at the beginning, in the production stage, you get lots of advantages. Your competition is doing it. You are gonna have to do it too. Everyone knew they had to do it, but no one knew how to do it.

Enter eager 21-year-old Micha with a degree in audio engineering and a lifelong love of computers. Not only was I unafraid of the software, I was excited by what it could do. That was really my only marketable skill at the time. These guys who knew way more about audio than I ever will suddenly didn’t know how to press the record button. I made a lot of my connections and built a reputation by making myself useful, just being the hands on the computer keyboard for people whose hands were much more used to being on a mixing console. It’s amazing how quickly you can learn from someone when they’re standing behind you, painstakingly explaining to you in detail exactly what they want you to do and what kind of outcomes they expect.

By now those computer skills have become mundane. High school students make music on computers using much more advanced technology than was available to us at the time. But back then, when computers and software were becoming more powerful, being able to ride the wave of the technological revolution set me up for the next phase, when those tools became mundane. Of course, by that time I had decades of experience.

Ten years ago I used to say to people, I don’t think I would have a career if I showed up in Hollywood now, because I don’t know how I would differentiate myself. But here we are again. A new kind of technology has crossed the threshold. AI has followed the same exact trajectory. A fledgling tool that seemed like a toy to the professionals, that was only the purview of a few nerds, grew in power until it became a consumer product used ubiquitously by the public. It grew in power again until the experts had to take notice. The AI flight is landing in Hollywood and frankly everywhere else right now. And the people who know how to show up at the same time will lead us into the next phase.

ChatGPT is the CD. The debate about whether or not the outputs from AI are better or worse is over. It’s been widely enough adopted that it’s here whether we like it or not. And now the professional tools are appearing. Not just the earth shattering generalized tools like chats and agentic AIs, but targeted professional software packages. A myriad of specialized, industry-specific AI tools not just in music production, but across almost every industry.

I remember the people screaming that it was the end of audio engineering. That the computers were going to replace us. And I definitely saw lots of engineers with incredible ears and amazing talent fight digital audio until they became irrelevant. But most people learned the new tools and became better for it. And some of us took advantage of that moment in time to climb a ladder that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to even touch.

We are once again at a great moment of transition. Nobody knows what the future is gonna look like, even in the very near term, but we have had these transitions before and the pattern is predictable. Each time the transition fills the future with something we all rightfully fear, the unknown. Each time the new tools make us all more productive and better at our jobs. We are once again at a time when old jobs are being erased or redefined while new jobs that no one could have imagined even last month are springing up like crazy. These transitions are hard and when it’s all over and we are on the other side, there will be a lot of stories of how people weathered this storm.

I see a lot of people out there telling themselves the story that the computers are coming for them, the story that they’re going to be obsolete. A lot of people live in some kind of generalized fear that “the robots are coming for our jobs.” The truth is, that will be a lot of people’s story when this is all over.

But there are a lot of people telling themselves a lot of other stories right now. They are telling themselves stories about how AI is gonna make their lives easier, stories about how AI will amplify their expertise to help guide us into this next phase. Some people are learning everything they can about AI, being the nerds of their generation, because their story is that they’re gonna be prepared for whatever the hell it is that comes next.

All of those stories are stories people are telling themselves right now and all of those stories will be somebody’s story when this transition is all over. We don’t get to choose which one of those stories we tell in the end, but every one of us certainly gets to choose which version we tell ourselves now. And the story you tell yourself now is the most powerful tool you have to control that uncertain future. We are all living in whatever story we tell ourselves we are. Your internal narrative is the most control you have over the unknown future right now.

Both stories will be equally true in the future. The people who ride this AI transition to success will be telling stories just as truthful as the people who fight it and lose. Right now, you get to decide which narrative belongs to you.