Thinking beyond "Text to X" workflows & products

The technology of today is like fire — you can choose to empower, or decide to burn everything to the ground. The only difference is that the effects of the burn show up slower in this case. Products made using this technology is more about the choice of what it will be used for, than about the strength of the technology itself.

Anyone running behind the “Text to X” workflows or the product philosophy of “let’s allow creatives to do things quick” without understanding where speed matters and where it doesn’t, is missing the whole point. Here’s a quote I wrote in my journal that you’re welcome to use as a guide:

“If someone is in a hurry to express, they aren’t really expressing, are they?”

In your vision, do you aim to enable artistic expression or content-creation? If former, then the quote above is relevant for you. If content is your sole focus, ANYTHING works.

Content-creation often (at least 70% of the time) involves giving away artistic choices anyway. Now there’s a difference between “efficient” and “fast”. Here are some examples:

• 💡🎙️ Ability to capture the melody in my head into an actual music project — that’s efficient because I might forget the melody in the next second if I don’t capture it. This aligns with expressing MY moments.
• 🎛️ 🔍 Quickly finding a preset that’s close to the sound I have in my head — that’s efficient too because it keeps me in the flow (which is why DAWs that still take long time to load VSTs in 2025 better be banned!), and this also aligns with expressing artistically.
• 🤖 🎶 Making a melody on my behalf just because I was facing a ‘writer’s block’ — that’s fast, but in no way efficient. It’s not my expression. For an artist, writer’s block is overcome by overcoming it! This approach is good for content-creation though.
• 🤖 🎼 Automatically filling the next bar based on what I hand-wrote in the first bar — again, fast, but not efficient in helping ME with the expression. Use it for content-creation.
• 📝 🎵 Text to music — really fast, but absolutely meaningless because it never respected what I had in my mind sonically.
• 🗣️ 🎛️ Text/Voice to DAW edits — now this is efficient, coz it’s letting me stay in my zone of ideas instead of me worrying about the logistics or UI interaction that can lead to me missing the ‘momentarily great idea’. This is similar to how we get amazing ideas in shower/toilet but forget them in the process of after-event activities (no better way to phrase this) and the only way to remember is to keep talking the idea to yourself til the time you’re in a position to write them down 😅
  

If the examples seem unrelated, hire a musician / creative in your team. Your product folks don’t know what they’re doing.

PS: I’m not against products that focus on content-creation. But marketing themselves as “we’re enabling artists express quickly” seems a bit deceiving. "We're helping people create more" is a better translation.

Further reading: AI Art article by The Oatmeal

💬 What are your product / feature philosophies? Comment and let me know, or reach out using the Contact form.