**On Being Told I’m “Cheating” With AI in Music**
**I started making music on a Tascam 4-track cassette.**
**Then PowerPC Macs. EMU samplers. Early Cubase VST when everything was MIDI and syncing meant losing entire days to master clocks and Unicorn midirack.**
**One of the first V-Drums, back when the kick was a reverse pedal trigger.**
**I was online via modem before ISDN existed.**
**I did formal music studies and completed Harmony 3 at the conservatory. Anyone who’s been there knows that’s not a casual achievement.**
**So when someone who isn’t even a musician tells me that using AI is “cheating”, I honestly don’t know whether to laugh or be offended.**
**Yes, I also use AI for lyrics.**
**But pushing one button to generate text is not the same thing as spending an hour dialoguing, refining, rejecting, reshaping, and conceptualizing a song with an AI tool.**
**One is automation.**
**The other is authorship with a new instrument.**
**A tool doesn’t decide what the song is about.**
**It doesn’t choose tone, meaning, restraint, or what gets thrown away.**
**The musician does.**
**Every major shift in music was called cheating. Multitrack recording. MIDI. Samplers. DAWs. Plugins.**
**The pattern never changes: people who don’t make music decide what “real” music is.**
**This isn’t about ethics.**
**It’s about gatekeeping by people who never carried the weight of the craft.**
**Music evolves.**
**The work remains.**
**Only the fear changes.**