Greetings, fellow humans (and maybe a few clever bots lurking in the corner). It’s me, your slightly frazzled feline friend from Scared Cat Music, where the leftfield grooves are still 100% human-made. I’m not here to purr you a lullaby today. Instead, I want to meow a warning. AI is coming for human creativity, and while it might sound like sci-fi fear-mongering, I’m genuinely worried this isn’t just a dystopian bedtime story.
The Capitalist Engine Feeds the AI Beast
AI isn’t inherently evil—it’s just a tool. But when a tool is wielded by the relentless gears of capitalism, it transforms into something else entirely: a machine optimized for efficiency, profit, and scalability. Creativity, however, thrives in inefficiency. Real art—whether music, painting, or writing—is messy, deeply personal, and often impractical. It’s not something you can automate and churn out at the speed of a silicon chip.
Enter AI: the darling of Big Tech and big business. AI tools like ChatGPT (not throwing stones, but you get the drift) or MidJourney can generate music, art, and even novels in minutes. Capitalism loves this because it cuts costs. Why pay a composer, an artist, or a copywriter when a bot can spit out 100 variations of something for free?
The scary part? The market follows where the money goes. As AI-generated content floods the world, the demand for human creativity could shrink, not because it’s inferior, but because it’s more expensive. “We’ll always have a market for real art,” they’ll say. But when it’s niche, boutique, and reserved for the super-rich, what does that mean for everyone else?
The Human Spirit: Resilient but Outnumbered
There’s no denying that human creatives will fight back. We’ve always been scrappy little underdogs. From the Luddites resisting industrialization to punk rockers flipping off the music industry, creators have a history of saying, “No thanks, we’ll do it our way.” And that’s inspiring.
But let’s be honest—AI has a lot of firepower. It learns faster, scales infinitely, and doesn’t need coffee breaks. The odds are stacked against human artists, not because we lack talent or passion, but because we’re up against a system designed to maximize profit, not humanity.
“The machine will take over, not because it’s better, but because it’s cheaper,” writes Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of virtual reality and a critic of AI’s impact on creativity. Lanier warns that we’re at risk of becoming mere “content filters,” curating what machines generate rather than creating ourselves.
The thought makes my fur stand on end.
A Future for the Rich and Their Cats
In the end, human creativity might not disappear entirely, but it could become a luxury good. Imagine a world where bespoke, handcrafted music or art is like a rare bottle of vintage wine—expensive, exclusive, and inaccessible to most people.
The rest of us? We’ll be surrounded by algorithmic creations. Music tailored by Spotify’s AI to keep us streaming. Artwork designed by neural networks to fit our Pinterest boards. Stories written by bots who’ve analyzed every bestseller trope. It’ll all be… fine. But will it move us? Will it make us cry, laugh, or rage against the dying of the light?
Why We Fight
At Scared Cat Music, we’re clawing against this tide because we believe in the raw, imperfect beauty of human-made art. Sure, we’re terrified, but we’re also hopeful. There’s something irreplaceable about art made by human hands and hearts.
AI might win the war for the mainstream, but as long as there are weirdos, rebels, and scared cats like us, there will always be a pocket of resistance. We can’t stop the machine, but we can choose to support human creativity where it still thrives.
So, let’s hang on to what makes us human. Let’s keep creating, even if it’s messy and impractical. Because in a world where AI tries to automate everything, art might be one of the last things that reminds us what it means to be alive.
