Hmm. I seem to spend more and more of my time on admin these days. It is definitely a sign of where I am in my career, but it is still something that has crept up on me unexpectedly and which was not necessarily in my sights. Five years ago, before all of that pandemic stuff happened, the idea was to emerge from my sabbatical as a fully-armed composer, pencils at the ready to enter Act III of my life.

Well, it did not quite turn out that way, although I always remember that I had nowhere near as terrible a pandemic as many did. Even so, the opportunities that fizzled away over those years (yes, it lasted years) meant that the landscape had changed fundamentally by the time we all emerged into the new way of things.

Since then much has continued to change apace on the writing front., and I do look nervously sideways at all that AI stuff and wonder if it really is just about to make creative endeavours more or less redundant. I do not for a second believe that AI can do things better, because it imitates rather than innovates, but I do suspect that the bottom line, which has been evident for years in things such as the rates Spotify pays its artists, will, as so often, come to mean that cheaper is better. Pay a composer, sit around for a year, maybe get something on time…or get the AI to spew out something a little less individual, but a great deal more newsworthy and essentially for free? Not really a tricky decision for some, I suspect.

More importantly, will a general audience even notice in a world where impact is everything, where the lack of a distinctive first impression, however worthy the opus, means that a second impression might never be forthcoming? In other words, what is it all for? Can a composer, a writer, an artist express in a vacuum?

I decided to turn the tables just a little on AI at the start of last week, to get it to do some of the heavy lifting for me, and prompted it to throw some ideas in my direction, and if there is a way forwards then it is to make AI part of the creative toolbox, to use it to do the heavy lifting. but to keep creative control of everything that comes out. As I read recently, I don’t want AI to make art so that I can spend my time washing the dishes and cleaning the house – I want it to wash the dishes and clean the house so that I can make art.