Greed, Progress, and the Looming Threat to Our Livelihoods

September 1, 2026

Ken Shirk  -  AFM International Secretary-Treasurer

I write this month’s column from within the boundaries of a First Nations spiritual ceremony taking place on the traditional lands of the Cherokee Nation. Out of respect for the ceremony and traditions of the people who preserve and carry forward these kinds of ceremonies, I won’t go into detail about it, except to say that my involvement in these ways extends over a quarter century and has created a pathway in life that helps me maintain and strengthen a perspective about life that has been vital to my work in our union.

On many pages of this issue of International Musician, you will see repeated expressions from AFM officers and staff about the challenges that are presented to our profession and to our work at the bargaining table by the development and advancement of artificial intelligence and its evil offspring, generative artificial intelligence. Indeed, one of my earliest columns as secretary-treasurer likened the looming threat of artificial intelligence to the poisoning of our food supply by artificial sweeteners. I’ve also mused about the notion that an attempt to bargain with the recording industry over the impact of artificial intelligence on our profession would be little more than scratching the surface of the problems that AI would present to all musicians’ livelihoods.

As with the advent of synthesized music in the 1980s, artificial intelligence in the hands of a human being in the creative process represents a legitimate advancement of the tools that every artist can employ in the development of their art. In the hands of corporate interests, however, artificial intelligence becomes a catalyst of greed, disguised as progress.

And much has been foisted upon our world under the banner of progress and necessity, but with nothing more than the acquisition of wealth lurking beneath the surface.

Xi Jinping, the leader of China, has taken his country on a quiet mission to buy as much arable land as possible in other parts of the world so his country can control even more of the land that produces the world’s food supply. Much of that land is within the continent of Africa, with the result that the people who actually live on those lands will have less and less control over the production of food upon which those many millions of people’s lives will depend.

Benjamin Netanyahu, with the willing participation of the United States, has been laboring violently to deprive the right of his country’s neighbors to live peacefully on the land upon which they resided long before Netanyahu was born. Vladimir Putin has been waging a war for five years to deprive the right of Ukrainians to benefit from their access to the rare earth minerals below Ukraine’s surface.

Now turning our attention to the North American continent, the president of the United States has already hijacked oil-rich Venezuela, and has made a steady rumble of veiled threats to do the same with Greenland (lol), and even Canada (lol!). And here I stand now in the middle of the traditional lands of the Cherokee people, who US President Andrew Jackson violently pushed out of their homeland in the early 1800s in the name of US expansion and control.

The behavioral pattern is ingrained, it would seem. Throughout history, it’s always been about control of resources, to benefit the power and wealth of a few at the expense of the many. Closer to home, we see digital technology companies energetically working to develop massive artificial intelligence computing centers that will require an enormous amount of electricity and an enormous amount of water in order to function, pitting their narrow interests against the welfare of the people of the communities who would lose that water. But water is finite, and as people of the world, we will need to decide, hopefully in a peaceful way, whether we want water to sustain the exponential growth of artificial intelligence or the continuation of our lives as inhabitants of this planet.

Two generative AI platform companies have now scraped virtually every sound recording in the world that exists anywhere on the internet in order to sell services to so-called creators to make music virtually devoid of human creative juice. That is the potential musical Armageddon that we musicians now face. And you would think that our bargaining partners in the recording industry across the table from us would be allies in a fight against what for them is a similar existential threat. But the almighty dollar apparently outweighs the creative process and overshadows the natural human instinct to produce something good and valuable for posterity, leaving only a corporate exoskeleton operated by lawyers and bean counters who exist to create unearned wealth for stockholders, thus eviscerating what could otherwise be a bright and healthy future for our art.

We work with the tools and resources that we have at our disposal, however, and if the recording industry is insistent on selling its soul to the devil, our place of last refuge resides with those who make the laws of the land, and it will be imperative to put all of our strength behind persuading the governments of our countries to recognize the value of human created music over machine generated music.

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