Should AI Make Art While We Humans Do the Boring Stuff?

The Strange Push to Make AI “Creative”

There was a time when computers were the preserve of geeks like me. Beige towers humming under a desk, tended by those who knew what motherboard jumper settings were. They were workhorses, not cultural idols. Fast-forward to today and they’ve become rock stars, composing and creating music earning millions of Spotify plays. A remarkable promotion for devices that once panicked if you plugged the mouse in the wrong way round.

The current push to put AI at the centre of creative work is everywhere; composing albums, designing logos, drafting novels. But not everyone can agree whether this is innovation or daylight robbery. The music world in particular is having a very public quarrel over what counts as fair use, joining with publishers in establishing the Creative Rights in AI Coalition (CRAIC) and demanding a dynamic licensing model for AI seeking to train on copyright material.

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Do We Even Want AI Rock Stars?

Do we truly need synthetic virtuosos anyway? Will anyone buy a ticket to see an AI perform live? What would ‘live’ even mean in that context? Perhaps you could put a laptop on a stool under a warm spotlight. It might draw a crowd once, as a stunt, but it’s hard to imagine people returning year after year. With so many musicians struggling to have their music heard, it seems a crass use of money to invest it in software engineers to rip off music, resample it into a song about life experiences that never took place and call it Art.

Even so, it would be lazy to declare AI useless for creative work. One CRAIC member, VoiceSwap.ai shows a more interesting approach. The human makes the music, with AI performing the tricky technical task of replacing a vocal stem with a synthetic AI voice trained from a real human artist. It opens new timbres, new textures, new possibilities for artists and producers who want to experiment without auctioning their souls. This approach is about partnership and tooling, not an attempt to automate the human out of existence.

The debate leads to a wider question: should we give AI free rein, or should we keep a human in the loop? Leave models to run fully autonomously and they can wander into territory that blunts value or carries risk. Music is a neat example. A hands-off system can generate a track that sounds plausible, but it won’t know whether the track is legally safe, emotionally appropriate, or merely vapid.

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When AI Creates and We Do the Boring Bits

That pattern repeats across business tasks. When people let AI attempt large jobs alone, the system often completes the showy part but leaves the fiddly bits behind. Draft a blog post and you’ll still spend half an hour sanding rough edges. Ask for a spreadsheet formula and you’ll need to check it actually works. Generate a slide deck and you’ll tweak wording for ages. These models aren’t naturally deft. Ask for a small change and it produces something entirely new. It’s like hiring a decorator who repaints your house every time you request a different shade of blue.

Perhaps this doesn’t save much time at all. You outsource the flourish. Then you inherit the drudgery. All the checking. All the verifying. All the slow but essential work of making things fit the real world. Too many people sit there thinking they’re automating, when they’ve actually taken on a new administrative role. The machines produce slop for humans to mop up.

Why have AI mimicking our creative instincts while we tidy its mess? Why not let AI handle the boring stuff and free us to do the interesting bits?

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The Better Way: Let Machines Handle the Dull Work

Plenty of opportunities already exist for this. You can set a model loose on a monstrous email chain and ask it for a neat, factual summary so you can make a sharper sales pitch or a more elegant legal argument. You can give it a week of customer queries and let it answer the routine ones, leaving your team to handle the subtle, messy human situations that require empathy and judgement. You can plug an AI system into your internal workflows to spot bottlenecks, tag documents, draft responses to simple requests, escalate complex ones, and clear the administrative backlog that soaks up your day.

These don’t remove people from the loop. They give people more time in the loop that matters. Work becomes less of an endurance test. You spend more minutes on the parts where your creativity, instinct and charm actually matter. The machine stops being an attention-seeking soloist and becomes the dependable percussionist in the background keeping time.

So perhaps the new AI wave could return us back to where we started: computers saving us time and money by doing the boring manual stuff automatically, leaving us more time to get our set together for Glastonbury. If that vision resonates and you’d like to explore what true automation looks like for your organisation, give us a call.