Kenneth Glad
Creative work is becoming harder to separate from automated production. That shift is forcing artists and audiences to think differently about originality, skill and performance.
Music producer, educator and YouTube creator Rick Beato says artificial intelligence is reshaping how people judge authenticity in music and online content.
During a recent YouTube livestream, Beato described growing distrust around material that appears scripted or generated.
He said the sheer amount of polished, scripted content online has made him more skeptical of what he sees. When a short video sounds unusually neat or carefully phrased, he often finds himself wondering whether the person is speaking from experience, reading someone else’s words, or relying on AI to shape the message.
Authenticity is becoming harder to judge
Beato said younger listeners, particularly those in Gen Z and Gen Alpha, have shown little enthusiasm for AI-generated music and other synthetic content. He also described a broader mistrust that has developed around videos, writing and music online, where it is no longer always clear how much of the work came from the person presenting it.
He has experimented with AI music himself, creating fictional artists, developing their backgrounds and supplying ideas for lyrics before feeding the material into music-generation software. The results did little to change his mind.
“Everything that I experimented with was incredibly average,” Beato said.
What bothered him was not only the quality. He pointed to the way these systems learn from existing music, absorbing recognizable elements of songwriting, production, vocal delivery and arrangement before generating something new from a prompt.
That has made live performance more interesting to him, particularly at a time when almost anything on a screen can be questioned. A band playing together in a room has to react in real time. Musicians make mistakes, adjust to one another, improvise and make decisions that are visible to the audience.
Beato is building a new YouTube series around exactly that idea. Bands will come into his studio and perform in front of the cameras, with much of the attention going to lesser-known acts that have not yet reached a large audience.
He said he feels some responsibility to use the reach of his YouTube and Instagram platforms to introduce people to musicians who might otherwise struggle to get noticed. Established artists may appear as well, but emerging bands are intended to be a major part of the series.
“Don’t outsource your thinking and your script writing to an AI program. Improvise.”
Musicians still need to practice
Beato went back to the kind of material that filled his YouTube channel in its early years: Ear training, chords, intervals, theory and the practical details of playing an instrument.
He said some of those videos were far more specialized than anything he expected to attract a large audience. Lessons on ear training and even drum tuning eventually picked up hundreds of thousands of views.
His point was that musicians still need to know how to hear what is happening in a song.
He brought up session players as an example. They may walk into a studio, listen to a track, write down the form and chord changes, and then work out a part that fits.
That requires more than following instructions. They have to hear where the singer leaves space, know which notes belong to the chord and decide when to play and when to stay out of the way.
“You have to exercise your brain,” Beato said.
Skills can fade
Beato used his own health as an example of what can happen when the body suddenly stops doing something it is used to.
After heart surgery, he was told not to lift more than 10 pounds over his head for eight weeks. When that period ended, he found that he could barely raise his right arm. Doctors later told him he had developed frozen shoulder, along with a torn rotator cuff.
He said musicians know the same feeling in smaller ways. Guitarists lose their calluses when they stop playing. Technique gets rusty. Things that once felt automatic start taking effort again.
Beato worries the same can happen creatively when musicians rely too heavily on AI to supply ideas.
But he does not object to every use of the technology. He mentioned a successful songwriter who had already written songs on acoustic guitar and then used AI to turn them into more developed demos.
Beato said he had no issue with that. The songwriter had already written the music and was using the software to help with the arrangement rather than asking it to come up with the song itself.
That, for Beato, is an important difference.
Source: Rick Beato/YouTube
