Why AI Will Never Replace Real Songwriters
On Struggle, Sacrifice, and the Act of Becoming
It’s 9:18 AM on a snowy Sunday morning.
My coffee’s gone cold, untouched since the first sip.
I’ve been sitting here for the past hour wrestling with a single line in a song.
It’s a situation I know all too well.
Sometimes it makes me wonder why I feel the need to write songs in the first place.
But I wouldn’t trade this struggle for anything.
Because sooner or later I will fall under the spell of the muse.
And that’s when time disappears.
There’s a lot of talk these days about AI replacing songwriters.
And I get it.
It scared me too, at first.
The technology is advancing faster than we can think.
You can generate a fully produced track with a single prompt.
But here’s what I keep coming back to:
If you love music, if you’re compelled to make music, if you feel the need to share your songs with the world…
then you’ll never want to write that prompt in the first place.
You’ll want to make it yourself.
Because love requires sacrifice.
And when you love music, you feel compelled to interact with music.
You sacrifice yourself for the act of creation.
And that sacrifice transforms you.
The hard work, the struggle, the hours spent staring at the blank page…
That’s not the barrier to creation.
That’s the act of creation itself.
A real artist doesn’t want a shortcut.
Not because they’re noble or traditional.
Because the shortcut bypasses the very thing that makes them an artist in the first place.
Music is a physical act.
To sit with the guitar.
To wrestle with the lyric.
To spend hours on a melody that might not even be anything at all.
That’s where the growth happens, for you and your music.
A truly great artist doesn’t want to bypass that.
Anyone willing to press a button and call it done was never chasing greatness in the first place.
They were chasing something else:
fame
money
validation
And here’s the thing:
AI didn’t replace them.
It just exposed that they were never real creators to begin with.
A creator is someone who needs the struggle.
Someone who can’t not make music.
Someone who wakes up at 5 AM because something inside them is yearning to be let out.
AI can generate songs.
But it can’t replicate the relationship between creator and creation.
It can’t give you the transformation that happens when you sacrifice yourself for something you love.
Here’s what I think will actually happen:
AI will become a filter.
Not a replacement, a reveal.
It will separate the people who love to make music from the people who love the idea of making music.
And that’s good news for real creators.
Because when the noise gets filtered out, the real stuff stands out.
Authenticity becomes more obvious.
The artists who are willing to do the work will rise to the surface.
The market will correct itself.
Not because AI failed.
But because love can’t be automated.
So no, you don’t have to worry about AI if you’re a real songwriter.
Because if you’re compelled to make music, you’re not looking for a button to push.
You’re looking for a guitar to pick up.
A page to fill. A melody to sing.
The struggle is the point.
Through sacrifice there is growth.
And growth is what makes you a creator.
So keep showing up.
Because that’s what real creators do.
And they don’t just want to, they have to.
AI can never replace that.
Because it’s not about the song.
It’s about who you become as you write it.
If you enjoyed reading this, the highest compliment I can think of is if you restacked it or shared it with one person who you think it would help.
AI doesn’t have a soul. Usually our favorite music is what we relate to as a human being. It can pump out shallow pop copycats, but people will crave connection eventually.
Well said, Matt.