One of the strangest places to arrive at a meaningful insight about human collaboration is while engaging with artificial intelligence. Yet here we are. Like many working musicians, I’ve been paying attention to generative AI not from a place of panic, but curiosity, well i hope that's how everyone's been feeling. I’ve experimented with the tools, listened closely to the rhetoric about “AI taking jobs,” and tried to understand what is actually shifting and how does it affect me and my people, our money and future as creatives. Somewhere along the way, a simple but uncomfortable thought landed: The most dangerous mistake a moderately talented human creative can make is believing they no longer need other humans.

Bands give us an idea of Collective Intelligence.

I’ve been in bands long enough to know my own strengths and limits, and to respect the strengths and limits (if acknowledged😂) of others. I’ve played alongside musicians who are technically better than me in certain areas, and I know there are places where I bring something they don’t. That tension is not a flaw. It’s the design. Bands exist because no single person holds the whole picture (though the multi instrumentalists are trying). Songs get better because ideas collide, weak ideas are exposed early enough, hopefully. Strong ones are refined through friction, no one fully owns the outcome, and everyone shapes it.That, in plain terms, is collective intelligence. What AI has demonstrated so effectively is not “thinking” in the human sense, but an ability to ingest, aggregate, and recombine collective human knowledge and do that  at scale. Generative music systems learn by consuming vast libraries of human, copyrighted work,  and from this producing new melodies, lyrics, textures, and even vocal likenesses. The technology may be neutral, but artists and their livelihoods will depend on the legal, cultural, and economic frameworks  and how they currently respond understanding they are fighting against powerful investors wit hsystems embedded directly into global consumer platforms.

A recent paper titled ""Past Precedent, Future Proof: Toward a New Legal and Commercial Framework for AI-Generated Music" by music entrepreneur Charles Goldstuck puts this plainly: if copyright law, public policy, and industry practice fail to evolve alongside AI-generated music, the creative economy risks being absorbed into an opaque, unregulated system where human authorship is structurally devalued. That framing matters. The danger is not that machines make music. The danger is what happens when music-making becomes detached from accountability, attribution, and negotiated value, while the humans whose work trained these systems are treated as incidental. Goldstuck’s argument is not to resist AI, but to insist that it develops within a multi-stakeholder governance framework - one that protects creative labour, enables innovation, and scales with the velocity of disruption. In other words, coexistence is inevitable, but exploitation is not.

Oh the Irony of it all. 

When I experimented with AI music tools, what surprised me most wasn’t how impressive the outputs were... and impressive they were I must add and has increasingly gotten better in the last few months. The process of using the AI felt familiar. In our reheasal room or over whatsapp... Myself or one of the other songwriters, describing a new song's feel, tempo, style, structure, even sending the pre- pre-produced beat or playing the chords and melody for the other band musicians. This process  is not to present a complete song, and parts for the musicians to mimic. rather its the presentations of an idea, a skeleton with or without musical parts that we can collaborate on, infuse bits of our individualised knowledge (over an unspecified amount of time). ints an invitation to use collective intelligence and hopefully end up with a decent song we can take on the road. Thats Pre-production in a nutshell. Song arrangement decisions without argument but a bit of "contested best practice",  the aesthetic consensus sometimes doesn't need to be discussed, but rather evolves in the process of collaboration, a beautiful surprise. and then the is the inspiration bug known as human error that is a complement to creativity in ways i haven't figured out yet. 

And then it clicked:

My band already did this for me. And I did it for them.

We've been doing this for each other, 

Together, collectively, intelligently.

AI didn’t invent collective intelligence. It gained this superpower, collective intelligence, from us and automated it. Its surface nature appears to want to strip out the social fabric that gives group song-making meaning. No trust. No shared risk. No accountability. No growth, creatively over time. Much of the current conversation among artists is steeped in resignation, a sense that the future has already been decided elsewhere, and it doesn't involve them. Adapt individually or be replaced, compete with the machine or disappear are the avaialble options. That framing is both lazy and dangerous. If AI has revealed anything clearly, it’s that collective intelligence has the ability to sense make and scale. The question is whether human creators will consciously organise around it again, understanding the power of Bands, Collectives, Co-operatives, Scenes., Families and other social groupings. Not as nostalgia, but as infrastructure for resource accumulation and beneficial exploitation. Goldstuck’s work, in his insistence that African artists, scholars, and institutions take their seat at the global AI table, is an important intervention. This is not symbolic, or personal... It’s structural. If AI systems are trained on global culture, then the exclusion or misrepresentation of African sounds, languages, and musical logics becomes a form of cultural erasure. Initiatives like the AI & African Music project at Wits University (supported by Goldstuck, the MIND institute) point toward a different future, one where innovation is shaped also by African creativity rather than merely extracted from it. This protects the past, heritage, IP, while at the same time securing futures.

An Archive Note.

Brown Band Archive exists because bands are evidence. Evidence that creativity has always been collective. Evidence that culture moves through relationship instead of  isolation. Evidence that intelligence doesn’t need to be centralised to be powerful. If AI is holding up a mirror, then perhaps what it’s showing us is not our obsolescence, but our failure to protect and organise the intelligence we already share. There are many questions worth asking, and whether AI will replace musicians is an honest and real one. But another crucial question, in my view, is whether musicians, industries, and policymakers will remember what bands have been practicing and preaching to us all along; the living art of collective intelligence." Read that last sentence again if you must, then go out and live a life worth writing  music about.