“…he surveyed about 100 people, professional musicians in the industry, successful working musicians. Have you experimented with generative AI? And he thought it would be 20%. It was 100%. All of them had experimented with it and all of them were doing it secretly. … The analogy I use is it's kind of like steroids. They're doping, but they're not telling anyone.”
Suspicious Minds: AI and the Apocalypse · AI Research & Frontier Labs · November 2026
Context
Phillips was describing how musicians are using AI, citing someone who surveyed about 100 working professionals. His point is that the public only hears AI music when it is bad, because skilled users hide their use of it.
Transcript
…and I'm hearing this. I'm like, this is good. And that's actually much scarier to me than if it's just slop. Because if it's just slop, then who cares? You know, just go about your life and say, screw AI. But hearing how good it was, that caused a shift in me and made me have to reckon with it.
…Aside from doing this podcast, I primarily work in the film space. And over the past six months, AI video has gotten really, really good. And the dominant narrative amongst people in the film world is, oh, look at this slop, look at this garbage. And I'm sitting back thinking, this looks great.
If I could hit a button and AI could go back to what it was in 2022 or whatever, like before kind of that threshold was crossed, I would hit that button. Like, so I'm not in favor of these tools, but I think they're a threat. You know, you're not going to be into the new machine that can replace you. Another thing that is happening is that the people who are using it, especially in music, are doing it completely secretly. So, you know, I spoke to someone about a year and a half ago. So I think these numbers are probably even higher now. But he surveyed about 100 people, professional musicians in the industry, successful working musicians. Have you experimented with generative AI? And he thought it would be, you know, 20%. It was 100%. All of them had experimented with it and all of them were doing it secretly. And I think that last point is important. You know, so you're not hearing AI in sort of hybrid work knowing that AI was involved. You only hear it when it's someone who, quite frankly, isn't that good and says, Hey, look what I made with AI. And that's the slop. The analogy I use is it's kind of like steroids. You know, they're doping…
What Mark did hearing something better than he could make and deciding to find out why instead of looking away is rarer than I think it should be. Most of the artists I know are just avoiding it entirely. A guest from our first season actually wrote to me a few weeks ago, worried in a way I hadn't…
That gets to something that predates AI doing your art, your creative pursuit, doing it professionally, you know, where you're selling it as a service because that changes the whole relationship to it. And I'm sure photographers and visual artists and filmmakers, like everyone who has to use their…
One of the things that I thought was interesting was you had a few songwriters sort of saying that the economics of the music business was pushing them to use AI.
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