What Happens When We Stop Valuing the Process?
- Rafael Piccolotto de Lima
- Jun 28
- 10 min read
Recently, I came across a statement by Mikey Shulman, CEO of Suno, the AI music generation platform, that made me reflect. The argument was that most people do not actually enjoy the process of making music.
Learning an instrument takes years of practice. Studying music theory is demanding. Becoming proficient with production software requires time and dedication. If a prompt can produce the desired result, why go through all of that?
What caught my attention was the way this argument frames artistic creation. From this perspective, learning an instrument, studying composition, or developing creative skills is no longer part of the value of the experience. It becomes merely an obstacle between an intention and a result.
That assumption brought me back to an old question: what exactly are we valuing when we value a work of art?
When I First Heard This Discussion
During my undergraduate studies, about twenty years ago, I first encountered Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the so-called aura of the work of art.
At the time, the discussion was mainly associated with the transformations brought about by photography, cinema, and technologies of reproduction. A painting had to be seen in person. A musical performance existed only in that particular moment. A work of art carried a special relationship with time, space, and its own singularity.
Technologies of reproduction profoundly changed that dynamic. A recording could be heard thousands or millions of times in different parts of the world. The artistic experience no longer depended on physical presence before the work or the performance.
Even so, something remained relatively unchanged: creation was still scarce. Distribution changed, access changed, and the circulation of works changed, but their existence still depended on people willing to dedicate part of their lives to creating them.
We are facing a different kind of transformation. For the first time, we are beginning to live, on a large scale, with forms of cultural production that no longer depend on human creation in the same way.
This Is Not About Access
Before continuing, it is worth separating a few discussions that often appear mixed together. One concerns access to cultural works. Another concerns access to knowledge, tools, and the development of the skills needed to create. And there is also a third one, which concerns the possibility of obtaining finished works without directly participating in that creative process. Although all of them can be presented as forms of democratization, they represent very different transformations.
When we talk about access, the technological transformations of the last century brought evident benefits. Recordings, radio, television, the internet, and digital platforms allowed works to reach audiences that would never have encountered them before.
Few people would defend a return to a world in which music depended exclusively on the physical presence of musicians, or in which certain works remained accessible only to a small group of people.
As a musician and educator, I have always seen this movement as something positive. Much of my path has been built precisely around the idea of bringing more people closer to music and expanding access to musical knowledge. My concern is not with the democratization of access.
What makes me reflect is another narrative that often accompanies these technologies: the idea that they democratize musical creation. That statement can mean very different things.
There is a sense in which it is true. Expanding access to musical knowledge, creative tools, and opportunities for creative development is something I consider deeply positive. As a musician and educator, that is exactly the kind of democratization I try to encourage. The problem appears when we begin to use the same expression to describe the obtaining of results without that process of development taking place. Learning how to create and obtaining a finished work are not the same transformation.
In the model proposed by many of these platforms, the user does not learn composition, does not develop a language, and does not come to master the means of realizing what they imagine. Their participation consists mainly of describing the desired result so that a system can produce a large part of the necessary decisions.
Composing a piece of music means making hundreds or thousands of decisions. Melody, harmony, rhythm, form, arrangement, and countless other choices are part of the construction of the work. After composition, there are still other layers of decision-making during performance, recording, and the different stages of post-production. In each of them, people make choices that influence the final result.
That is where, for me, the difference lies. Tools have always been part of the making of artistic works, and they can greatly expand the possibilities of creation. What changes now is where the main creative decisions remain. When they are no longer made by the author and are instead delegated to the system, the nature of the activity also changes.
Works Are Life Time Transformed Into Form
When I think about a composition, especially a larger-scale work, I have difficulty seeing it merely as a sequence of sounds organized in time.
A composition represents choices, years of study, references accumulated throughout life, experiences, influences, mistakes, discoveries, and preferences developed slowly over decades. What we hear is only the visible surface of a much larger process.
Behind each work there is an amount of life invested so that it could exist in that specific form. Not only the hours directly dedicated to its creation, but also the years needed to develop the knowledge, sensibilities, and skills that made that creation possible.
A work of art is, in a sense, a materialization of life time.
When we listen to a composition, read a novel, watch a film, or observe a painting, we are facing the visible result of a trajectory.
The work functions as evidence of that path.
For centuries, this relationship was relatively stable. Producing more works required more human time, expanding production required more artists, and expanding the repertoire required more people dedicating their lives to the development of specific skills. That is the relationship now beginning to be questioned.
When the Result Separates From the Process
Today, it is possible to generate music in seconds.
The center of this discussion is the relationship between result and process.
For a long time, they were deeply connected. A work existed because someone had gone through the path necessary to produce it. The result was inseparable from the years of study, accumulated experiences, developed skills, and time invested in its realization.
Now that relationship is beginning to change. The music still exists. The image still exists. The text still exists. What is no longer necessary is the same process that historically made those works possible.
We are facing a transformation different from previous ones. Technologies of reproduction changed the way works circulated. Current technologies are beginning to change the way they are produced as well.
This does not mean that this is the first time technology has altered the relationship between skill and result. In music, technology and creation have always walked together. The very evolution of musical instruments has continuously transformed what was possible to play, compose, and imagine.
The development of brass instruments with valves greatly expanded the possibilities of brass playing. The piano expanded resources that did not exist in earlier keyboard instruments. Electrification, amplification, multitrack recording, synthesizers, and, more recently, digital tools opened new aesthetic possibilities and changed the way musicians work.
In many cases, technology simplifies procedures, shifts stages of the process to other moments, expands human capacities, or makes it possible to realize ideas that would previously have been unfeasible. Tools such as Auto-Tune and Melodyne, for example, also changed the relationship between skill and result by allowing pitch corrections during post-production that previously had to be resolved during performance.
Technology often moves stages of the process to other moments, simplifies procedures, transfers part of the work to tools, and, in some cases, begins to compensate for skills that once needed to be present in people.
Even so, in most of these cases, creation remained connected to people developing specific knowledge, making aesthetic decisions, and doing the work necessary to transform ideas into works.
The difference today lies in the scale of that transfer. We are not only automating stages of execution or production. We are beginning to automate parts of the creative process itself.
The Value of the Path Taken
If the question involves the relationship between process and result, it also involves the value we assign to the path taken in order to create. In my case, that path shaped some of the most important choices of my life.
I have spent much of my life organizing my choices around music. Fifteen years ago, I left Brazil to study in the United States because I believed that certain experiences, people, and opportunities would help me become the composer I wanted to be.
Then came the master’s degree, the doctorate, thousands of hours dedicated to study, composition, rehearsals, recordings, and so many other activities that are part of a composer’s formation, along with a succession of decisions that, from the outside, did not always seem like the most logical ones.
Many of them certainly were not the most comfortable. Leaving family behind, building a life in another language, starting over in another country, and betting on a field in which financial stability was never exactly a promise.
Even so, those choices made sense because there was something I considered valuable on the other side: the possibility of developing my own artistic language, creating something singular, hearing my music performed by large orchestras, working with extraordinary musicians, and participating in an artistic tradition I admired long before I became part of it.
Later, when I moved to New York, there was a very clear reason for that choice: the possibility of participating in a very specific ecosystem of musicians, composers, and artists. I wanted to be present at rehearsals, readings, concerts, workshops, and other situations that would hardly have been part of my routine if I had been somewhere else.
Many of the opportunities that most shaped my trajectory came precisely from that possibility of participation. Some came from performances and recordings. Others emerged from encounters, conversations, collaborations, and relationships built over the years with people I probably would never have met had I not made that choice.
Along that path, I also developed a growing interest in recording and music production. Anyone who works with large ensembles knows that performances and recordings of this kind rarely happen by chance. Bringing dozens of musicians together, rehearsing complex repertoire, and bringing a work to life requires resources, coordination, and time.
Many times I knew that certain moments were unrepeatable: an orchestra reading, a premiere, a recording session, or the specific encounter between particular musicians. Learning how to record them became a way of preserving something that would hardly happen again in the same way.
Current discussions about artificial intelligence have made me think a great deal about value, beyond the technology itself. Much of my life was built around the idea that certain experiences mattered precisely because of their rarity, because they required dedication, knowledge, coordination, and human time in order to exist.
I wonder how I would have made those same decisions if I had grown up in a world where that entire path was considered irrelevant. If learning, practicing, developing a skill, and dedicating years to an artistic activity were seen only as disposable steps between an intention and a result.
It was that set of choices that made possible the professional life I have built.
What Happens When the Value of Creation Changes?
There is one aspect of this discussion that rarely appears. When we talk about art, there is often an implicit expectation that artists create only for the love of art, as if recognition, career, compensation, and prestige were secondary concerns, or even inappropriate ones. But that has never corresponded to reality.
The great artists we admire did not only want to create. They wanted to be heard, read, presented, and to build a life around that activity. They wanted recognition, relevance, and the possibility that the dedication invested in their trajectories would find some form of return.
This does not diminish the value of art. It is part of the human condition.
Most artistic professions have always involved an implicit agreement. Those who chose this path generally accepted greater financial instability, more uncertain trajectories, and less predictable economic prospects than other careers. In exchange, there were other forms of reward: recognition, prestige, admiration, cultural status, the possibility of producing something singular, occupying a valued position within culture, and, in some cases, building a comfortable life around what one loves to do.
The reduction of the economic value of artistic creation would already be, in itself, an important transformation. But there is also the possibility that the artistic act itself may begin to lose part of its symbolic value. This change deserves attention because these two forms of valuation do not always move together.
Even in periods when art paid poorly, there was still cultural value associated with the act of creating. Composers were admired for composing, writers for writing, instrumentalists for playing, and painters for painting. Rarity was part of the value assigned to these activities. When that perception changes, we are not only altering markets. We are altering systems of incentives.
What Happens to the Incentives?
A great soloist is not admired only for the result they produce. They are admired because they can do something that few people can do. The same applies to composers, writers, visual artists, scientists, athletes, and so many other areas of human activity.
There is a deeply human desire to develop rare capacities, create something singular, and be recognized for it. This is not only about personal expression. Ambition, recognition, prestige, and admiration are also part of the reasons that lead people to dedicate decades to developing a skill.
Choosing to study music professionally has always been a bet. A bet that it would be worth investing thousands of hours in the development of a personal language, building something that few people would be capable of doing, and finding recognition precisely because of that.
For centuries, society created mechanisms of recognition for people whose production was perceived as singular. These mechanisms were not always fair, nor did they distribute recognition evenly, but they helped sustain entire ecosystems of creation, transmission of knowledge, and artistic development.
The Question That Remained
I could end this text by trying to predict how these transformations will reshape artistic creation or by proposing some optimistic conclusion about the future.
I prefer to return to the question that motivated this reflection.
What happens when we stop valuing the process?
This is a question that will continue to deserve attention in the coming years. It goes beyond what artificial intelligence will be able to create. It concerns the value we will continue to assign to life time, dedication, and human capacities invested in the creation of what we consider special. It also concerns how willing we will be to consume and value works that are not the result of a singular human trajectory.
Sobre o Autor
Rafael Piccolotto de Lima é compositor, arranjador, diretor musical e educador. Além de sua atuação artística, desenvolve atividades de ensino, mentoria e formação de músicos nas áreas de composição, arranjo, criatividade musical e desenvolvimento artístico.
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