When The Tool Becomes The Artist

AI. Let's further discuss it.

My last entry was fairly positive about AI, mostly because I've been using it heavily while building things. A VST plugin. My web app. Systems I actually use every day. I still stand by that praise. AI, as a tool, is insanely powerful. It really is.

But there's another side to this that keeps bothering me. Especially when AI stops being a tool and starts becoming the creator.

A friend sent me a project he's working on with Suno. And as soon as I read it, my reaction was automatic: respectful rejection. I told him, "I use it every day, but not to make music. To me, that defeats the purpose of self-expression."

Right after saying that, another thought popped up: Who am I to even say that?

Because I do use it every day. I use it to help me code. To think. To build. To debug. I used it to help create the very web app where I'm writing this right now. I even use it to help me refine thoughts in these texts, to untangle ideas when my head is already ahead of my words. So why is it okay for me to use AI there, but not okay for someone else to use it to make music or art?

That's where things start to get confusing.

The distinction I keep coming back to is time and merit. And I know even that distinction is fragile, because time and merit will almost certainly lose value as AI keeps advancing. But right now, at least for me, that's where the line still exists.

This web app took me over a year and a half to get to its current state. The plugin I'm building has been in development for three months. Both are full of problems. Bugs. Things I want to change. Things I want to improve.

To get them where they are, I had to actually learn things. How code works. How deployment works. How to get something online. How to connect different services. How to fix stuff when it suddenly stops working for no obvious reason.

A lot of this is manual. Slow, annoying. And sometimes honestly frustrating as hell. But I'm constantly learning.

AI helps a lot, no doubt about that. But it doesn't just spit out a finished product in seconds. I'm still inside the process the whole time. That, to me, feels fundamentally different from prompting something and instantly getting a finished artistic product.

When Suno outputs a track, that output is the art itself. Same with AI images. The thing that comes out is already the finished piece. The output isn't a tool. It's the work. There's nothing else required from you for it to exist as a completed artwork, beyond the prompt.

With code, most of the time, the thing you build isn't art. It's a tool. Something that enables other things.

The web app isn't art. It's a digital space where the art lives. Music is the art. Visuals are the art. Writing is the art. Yes, there's aesthetic intention in the app. There's taste, curation, decisions. But it's still not the same as generating a song or an image and calling that the expression.

That's why, right now, AI coding doesn't feel wrong to me. But I'm not fully convinced either.

What complicates everything is the future. I don't think this distinction will hold for very long. In two or three years, maybe five at most, AI agents will probably be able to build an entire complex app or plugin almost instantly. No bugs. No deployment steps. No linking services. No manual anything. You'll say what you want, walk away, grab a snack, come back and it's live.

When that happens, the exact same argument I'm making now might collapse. People will be making things in a day that took me years. And that's not dystopian sci-fi. It's just where this is going.

The reality is AI is not going to stop or slow down. It's accelerating. You can see it everywhere. Tech giants and governments investing heavily in it. Compute power. Data centres. Infrastructure. Anything that gives them an edge. Everyone racing to build bigger and better models. And the more we all use it, the more data these models get to train on, the better they become. It's a loop.

And yeah, that kind of sucks. Not in a doomsday way. More in an unavoidable way. We're all going there together. No one is really opting out of this future.

That's why I wanted to write this. Because I think I praised AI a bit too much previously, without discussing its potential issues. It deserves praise, absolutely. But it also brings discomfort. Doubt. Discussion. Especially when it comes to creativity.

For me, the process is the whole point. Always has been.

When I make music, I start with an idea, some technical ability and then I struggle. Maybe a sound isn't working the way I want, I play a wrong note or I can't figure out how to transition between sections. Solving those problems, experimenting, making mistakes, then finding creative solutions, is where true expression happens. Sometimes I stumble on a completely different idea halfway through or a misstep turns into the coolest part of the song. Even the hard times, when I'm frustrated that something isn't sounding right, are important. They teach you something or push you to try something new. And in the end, when I finally finish a track, I don't just have a piece of music. I have a whole experience I went through making it. Those moments are the reason I do this at all.

Over time, my relationship with music has changed a lot. Like most people, I used to chase sounds that felt close to my favourite artists. Maybe something that could be a hit. Something people would love.

I've almost done a 180º on that mindset. What matters more now is whether the music reflects where I was mentally and emotionally at that time.

I'm not trying to make hits. I'm not even trying to make money with music anymore. At this point, I'm just cataloguing my existence through sound.

And AI music breaks that for me. It removes the process. It removes the doubts and fears. It removes the slow maturation of ideas. And without that, I don't recognise myself in the outcome. It starts feeling like claiming something else's work as my personal statement.

For instance, I spent almost three weeks adjusting a tiny frequency decision on the master of one track from the "NORD" EP. That's objectively insane. It's annoying. But those weeks mattered. My ears changed. My tolerance shifted. I got used to the sound. I understood it better.

I can't release music in a day or two. Technically I could. Mentally, I couldn't. Every time I've rushed something, I've regretted it. Time isn't an inconvenience to me. It's an essential part of the work.

And it's not just music. In a drawing or design when you put something in the wrong place, you might turn that into a unique element. Mess and limitations become identity.

AI doesn't really have accidents in that sense. It generates what it's trained to generate. You can try to add randomness, sure, but it's not the same thing as your own mistakes that you unconsciously incorporate. The fun is in the struggle and the weirdness of the process.

I worry that, as AI-generated content becomes ubiquitous, a lot of people, especially new creators, might skip the process entirely. Why go through the hassle of learning and struggling if you can just get the finished result? I get the appeal. Not everyone enjoys the grind.

People keep chasing shortcuts, attention, quick returns. I get it. Convenience, recognition, success and fame are seductive. But if that starts erasing the point of doing things at all, then what's left?

At the same time, I'm trying to keep things in perspective. Humans have gone through technological shifts many times before. I really don't want to sound like that "old" man shaking his fist at the future. I'm genuinely not against progress. I thrive on progress. I mean, I'm the guy who jumped on AI to help in my work as soon as I could. I love new gadgets, new tech, new ways of doing things. Evolution and change are natural. So if this is the next evolution of creative work, part of me is curious to see where it goes.

I think it's worth discussing what we might lose, as we also acknowledge what we might gain. All of this leaves me kind of torn.

After laying out all this, I go back to face the thought: Am I just being a hypocrite?

For using AI to build tools while rejecting AI-made art? Maybe. I genuinely don't know. My best answer is that tools and expression are still different things. But I'm very aware that line is getting thinner every year.

I think the nuances I've described, tool vs art, process vs product, are valid and they make me feel like it's not hypocrisy, but rather a reasonable boundary I'm setting. However, I can also see someone coming along and saying: "Dude, you either embrace AI or you don't. You can't have it both ways."

This has been a huge entry. But I needed to get it out, because these thoughts have been circling in my head for some time.

In conclusion - if this even counts as a conclusion - I might just be overthinking all of this or maybe not thinking enough, depending on who you ask. I realize I might sound like I'm against AI creatively, but I'm really not against it in principle. I'm just worried about what it means for authorship, intention and lived experience inside the work.

So, I'll end with this: Perhaps in a few years I'll see this differently. Maybe this is just what it feels like to live through a real shift. It could be that I'm just early, or confused, while the ground keeps moving under all of us.

This is the most honest account I can give of where I stand right now.

Thank you for reading "Inside The Mind Of An Artist".

Until next time,

Vítor