I recently had a trip to California, Colorado, and the Southwest that was so hard to book that I literally got the last dates confirmed a week before I left. To say I was behind the curve on artwork is an understatement, but I used AI for the first time to create some of the most well-received concert posters I’ve ever posted. Immediately, I saw comments from several people whom I would consider friends and otherwise who happened to have opinions, very negative, about people using AI to make artwork. My initial reaction was defensive in that I had zero dollars to budget and 24 hours to create the posters and start promoting. If there’s an artist in town who can put together eight different concert posters in a day for zero dollars, please pass along their information to me. This was a record promotion tour with radio shows, record stores, and small venues. I have hand-created most of them before and never gotten a single comment positive or negative or even people noticing them, liking them, and so on. The reaction was tenfold with the AI artwork I created.
So, let me contextualize my opinion as an art major at TCU when Adobe was brand new and the initial digital product it could create was total shit and appeared to pose no threat to the advertising world and graphic art world. I hoped to follow my father. My father has won Emmy Awards and more Addie Awards than any human being I know. He has run the biggest campaigns and is essentially the Don Draper of the 1970s and ’80s and well into the ’90s. He ran campaigns for Willie Nelson and Lone Star beer all the way through commercials with American Airlines, where he convinced Ridley Scott to direct defense contractors, all the biggest, to the tune of $900 million a year in billing. He refused to believe that the digital world of Adobe and Photoshop could ever replace real artists, and he refused to learn and to adapt. By the late 1990s, he was out of a job, picked up work here and there, then landed a job for his last short phase at Lockheed Martin because he was well known in that world. Had I finished my degree at TCU, my degree would have been immediately obsolete and my skill of little use to a rapidly changing industry.
My daughter, Madeline Russell, who is also a musician on tour now in New York City while living in L.A., graduated from Berklee College of Music in 2025 with a degree most associated with the music-business marketing world. It was a tremendous sacrifice for us to pay, but it was one that she deserved and had earned, though 52% of the 2025 Berklee graduating class is still looking for work right now. That is the highest percentage that school has ever seen or recorded. All of this is to say that when I say I believe in human creativity, that it matters, there are few whom you will interview who have put down more at stake than I have. The digital-changing world has cost me already tremendously.
However, I see it as inevitable as the Adobe digital takeover. America only appreciates quick and cheap. We are a boxed-wine society, musically and culturally speaking. That’s fine. We have let this country be handed over to the absolute most elite oligarchs in the world, the tech douche bros, while we squabble over trivial bullshit and we vote for candidates on social feel-good issues, ignoring the corruption and poison of money. Essentially 100% of the country wants the Epstein files fully released — it is probably one of the only things we agree on — and yet money from less than 1% of the population has kept that from happening. Ol’ Donny has IOUs being cashed in now.
I would say that when it comes to AI and songwriting or any other creative endeavor, don’t be a fool. Barring some EMP strikes that would kill off the server farms and throw us back to 1895, your job will not be replaced by AI, but someone who knows how to use AI in your field will replace your job and possibly five others in our lifetime. Does it matter if I like this? Do I envy those much younger than I am, including my daughters, and now three grandchildren, who will have to stare the giant in the face? Avoiding this inevitability is foolishness, and I wish that was not true, but I believe it. In three years’ time, our world will be wildly different, and hopefully by then, we’ll have proven ourselves able to talk like adults for the first time ever, or aliens will intervene and save us from ourselves, which may be the best-case scenario, or we will sideline ourselves and prove to be enemies to a superior race poised to take over as predicted since the 1960s by Isaac Asimov. The important thing to note is that we allowed this to happen based on our sheepish, shortsighted, petty voting predictability and ignorance, so easily distracted from the growing menace while we chase shiny things and squirrels, and we deserve what we get.
Several years ago, after winning a Fort Worth Weekly Music Award, I posted online that I was so thankful and was encouraging people who used to come out and see music regularly to come back out, that we needed to see them and rebuild that community. I finished off the plea with a warning about AI coming to take over music, and everyone claimed I was foolish and that no one would ever listen to AI music. The first time I heard it for myself, this Americana act called Breaking Rust, I could hear a slight tinge of falsehood, an artifact intentionally manufactured to emulate our over-digitized recording processes. By then, the fake band already had damn near a million followers and 5 million spins. Do people really care that music is made by humans? We will see. Based on our eating habits in this country, especially, it is hard to hold out hope that what we allow in our ears will be purer than the shit we will stuff in our mouth.
Courtesy the artist
Will I ever stop making music because of robots? Fuck no.
And next time I’m out on tour, which is now, I’ll spend the time making analog posters, even though no one will give a flying fuck. Trolls only troll to break us down, never to build up. Thanks, Zuckerberg, you fuck monkey.
Sean Russell is a proud Fort Worth singer-songwriter. The lead singer of Cut Throat Finches as well as the Nancys now has a catalog of more than 100 songs released to date and counting.
This column reflects the opinions and fact-gathering of the author(s) and only the author(s) and not the Fort Worth Weekly. To submit a column, please email Editor Anthony Mariani at Anthony@FWWeekly.com. He will gently edit it for clarity and concision.
