A Freelance Music Journalist’s Brutally Honest Take on AI –

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock or trying to fully commit to the analog lifestyle trend, you’ll have seen the fresh wave of protestive disdain over AI that has swept through social media lately. It all kicked off after the flood of cartoonish portraits spat out by ChatGPT, which have been plastered across profile pictures as people scramble for engagement or cling to the idea that sitting out a trend means cultural exile. Suddenly, people feel an urgent need to announce their moral objections, purely because you can’t scroll through Facebook without being ambushed by another obnoxious caricature.

Artists from every corner have stepped up to declare how sickening it is to see people bastardising art, but honestly, it barely grazes my nerves. Half the people screaming about stolen commissions wouldn’t have paid for a portrait in the first place (let alone the people creating them!). This particular trend isn’t the reason illustrators or designers are missing out, yet it sits on top of the larger rot spreading through every creative industry. That rot comes from the slow, quiet replacement of skilled people with convenient automated slop. Writers are being edged out by large language models, graphic designers are watching Canva and Adobe Firefly swallow their workload, and streaming platforms are filling up with generic off-the-shelf tracks churned out by Suno and Mureka. The list keeps growing, and every new innovation wipes out another skill someone once relied on to survive.

What’s bleak is how invisible most of this shift feels. For every public meltdown about AI portraits, there are a hundred private decisions made by organisations that want to protect their bottom line and refuse to hire actual humans. Creatives who once lived on commissions or freelance work are watching scarcity creep in, hoping the last few clients who still value humanity over speed don’t vanish.

And make no mistake, empathy is practically extinct. Skilled artists regularly post about being unable to find work after the mainstreaming of AI, only to be told they picked the wrong field or should apply for random jobs they’re wildly unqualified for. With desolation creeping through the high street retail and nightlife venues, there aren’t many fallback options. In Utopia for Realists, the argument was simple: once automation takes over, Universal Basic Income would be our cushion and we’d all breathe easier. That future is a fantasy. It’s not likely that Kier Starmer will push UBI while unemployment climbs. So here we are. Alone with the slop.

My Experience

During the pandemic, I was convinced I’d need to find a sugar daddy. Somehow, the opposite happened. The creative space caught fire as more people wanted press releases, artist bios, and reviews. My inbox overflowed with requests for poetry edits and write-ups. It felt like the world found fresh value in words.

By 2025, that urgency had evaporated. People shed their scepticism about AI and discovered they could get everything they needed in five minutes by asking ChatGPT. Suddenly, no one cared that their bios turned into vapid, empty noise with identical phrasing and lifeless rhetoric. Everything sounded the same. Negating sentence structures everywhere. Emphatic em dashes. Dead-weight vocabulary that makes my stomach drop every time I see it: delve, grit, allure. Once you’ve had enough exposure, you see the seams instantly.

Sometimes artists submit press releases accompanied by AI-generated cover art, AI-generated music, and an AI-generated bio. When that happens, I genuinely spiral. I sit there thinking, what’s the point of this music? Does it have one? Where’s the soul? If the entire project has been fed into a machine to spit out something vaguely cohesive, who is it actually for?

AI Makes Hypocrites of Us All

Here’s the part that catches people off guard. I have a ChatGPT subscription. Save the outrage, because there’s context.

I write for clients outside the music world too. One of them has paid me 1p a word since 2018. In 2025, they informed me that I needed to use AI to speed up my work because faster output meant they could justify paying me less. As if the rate wasn’t already insulting. They still didn’t want it to sound like AI, of course. So they insisted I run everything through Quillbot to scrub the AI tone. Ironic, isn’t it?

After months of wrestling with AI output, I developed an eye for the generic fingerprints. I saw the pattern everywhere. In statuses. In comment sections. In YouTube scripts. Entire corners of the internet now read like copy-and-paste templates. Average readers may think the phrasing sounds intellectual. To me, it screams artificial.

Now that I’m no longer forced into AI slave labour, I’ve looked at my options. They’re fucking slim. Where was the rage for me when I lost work? There wasn’t any. Not really. I’m just one writer. Not thousands of people posting slop portraits and provoking public outrage. The hypocrisy reeks. It reeks even more because the people screaming about how AI replaces people are the type to expect me to work for free.

I’ve spent years fighting for independent artists, showcasing their uphill battles, pointing at the pressures they face. They shout the loudest about AI’s dangers, terrified that it’ll steal their audiences, but I rarely see the same solidarity extended back. Apparently, using AI itself is fine. But watching others do it is cause for war.

Conclusion

People can scream about AI ruining art all they like, but the damage is already done to how we work, create, and connect. The hypocrisy of those who condemn AI while replacing people with it when convenient is the most bitter part of the whole mess.

We’re surrounded by automated noise, and it’s getting harder to hear the human voices underneath. Maybe that’s the real tragedy. Not that AI exists, but that we’ve allowed ourselves to be drowned out by it while pretending the problem starts and ends with a cartoon portrait generator.

Article by Amelia Vandergast