The Curiosity That Survived

“AI can’t do what I do.”

I met these words while talking to a Dutch rapper at a meetup this week. Normally I would have responded that AI can help him write lyrics. Instead I shared an experience I had.

I love the intro theme from Final Fantasy II, “Stones” from Ultima Online, and “Grapevine Fires” by Death Cab for Cutie. I’m an amateur guitarist, and I could hear something in each that I wanted to bring together, but I didn’t know enough theory to know how.

So I asked AI what I could borrow from each, then for some chords and a scale to explore the space between them.

Then it hit me. I wasn’t recounting a creation process.

Often I’ve introduced AI with: look, it can write a song. Look, it can draw. Look, it can code. Where I’m praising capability, the rapper hears encroachment. “Look what it can do” arrives as “Look. You can get something like this without putting in all the time and effort you did.” I’ve insulted people this way: unable to hear what was lost in the imitation, I showed them the imitation and called it equal.

I know the feeling from the other side. I’m a craftsman in software, and the threat I perceive is real. My resistance coexists with genuine curiosity. But once a demonstration makes me defend the value of my own expertise, I’m defensive for the rest of the conversation. Curiosity isn’t impossible, but my self-preservation takes over. We’ve mistaken the most spectacular demonstration of AI for the most persuasive one.

The three songs came in through another door. The pieces were mine. I noticed something in them. I cared enough to ask. I wanted to pick up the guitar. I did ask Suno to make a version, but that didn’t increase my curiosity. It terminated it.

I have abandoned plenty of curiosities at the moment I realized how much I would need to learn just to ask the right question.

The problem is old: you cannot look for what you do not know, because you do not know what to look for. I don’t have the answer, but now I have a strategy. I can bring AI an intuition before I’ve learned how to turn it into a question. I don’t give up as early as I used to. Now I can explore an intuition and give it a voice.

That voice let me hear the intensity of my own curiosity, even if I couldn’t judge whether the theory was right. It fed a curiosity that would otherwise have starved, and the rapper would have asked a better question. His judgment of the answer would have mattered more. AI didn’t replace expertise. It turned my curiosity into experience.

There is a fair objection. I now skip parts of experiences that once required effort, and some of that effort was the point. But I also embark on experiences I would otherwise never have had. This time, the music theory course disappeared, but the playing did not. Without asking AI, I would never have taken this particular musical journey.

We keep asking what AI can create for us. But how can we use it to amplify our own inspiration?

Music was only where I happened to notice the gap: I could maintain curiosity despite not knowing how to follow it.

I started the conversation thinking I was explaining AI to someone who didn’t see its value. His objection showed me what I hadn’t seen in my own use of it. He was right: AI can’t do what he does. It did something I couldn’t. It kept a curiosity alive long enough for me to pick up the guitar.