Process over product | Journal Entry

Mar 6, 2025 –

Instruments are AI. Vocals are AI. But the finals, the emotion behind the music, that’s all me. In the after hours this week became (with unconscious intent ) about completing the Gates of Okinawa soundtrack.

All 3 additional songs began as incredible AI outputs. Vocally stunning, musically sound, just overall good to listen to.

But I took them all a step further. In some cases I made them worse (I’m not embarrassed to admit) by adding my own 50-50 singing.

Something I’ve learned about working with AI for creative work: as a human I need to be a part of the process.

What does that mean?

All my life, creating has been focused on output. If the picture looks like an elementary school student drew it, or the writing was uninspired and bland, then the creative effort was seen as a waste of effort.

Now with AI, with a functional output almost guaranteed , for the first time, I see how important process is to my existence as a human.

Turns out I don’t need so much to finish creating, but to have created.

This might not seem revolutionary.

But this is a monumental psychological shift.

What will we value in the future?

Does the thousand hour novel matter as much as the “human augmented” one?

In a world of widespread AI tools, I don’t think so. (At least not to the person who’s reading it.)

When’s the last time you thought about how much time went into the last piece of media you consumed?

If it was recent, was it more than just a fleeting thought? I create everyday and truthfully I don’t think about it much.

Yet, as a creator the process is vitally important. That precious unrecoverable time is what allows me to find what I need out of each piece. Sometimes it’s practice, others it’s validation, more and more it’s perspective: about the rapidly improving capabilities of this technology, new ways I can use it to advance my very human-focused mission, and methods of media yet to be crystallized.

In the age of acceleration , output is incidental (even accidental) process is transcendental.

Gates of Okinawa (Original Novel Soundtrack) will be available for streaming on all platforms from March 12 to April 1, 2025.