THE MISPLACED PRIORITIES OF GENERATIVE AI AND THE WAR ON HUMAN CREATIVITY

September 22, 2026 - 04:02 PM

They promised us AI would fix the climate, cure cancer, and end global poverty. Heavy stuff.

So, what did Silicon Valley actually give us?

A bot that writes rap songs about cat food. And an app that turns Uncle K into a Pixar cartoon. Picture this: Aliens land on our burnt-up planet a million years from now. They dig up a dusty hard drive, plug it in, and immediately start nodding along. "Planet’s dead, but this Kasongo meme track slaps." It sounds stupid. It is also completely true. The tragedy isn't that technology is useless. We have pulled off real miracles before. We mapped the human genome, developed vaccines in record time, and put the sum of human knowledge in our back pockets. We know how to tackle big things.

The problem is where the money and energy are going right now. The tech world is stuck on The Jetsons. A bunch of kids grew up wanting flying cars, robot maids, and push-button dinners. Now they run global corporations, and they have used the most incredible tools in history to build a massive, expensive pile of internet memes. We need massive computing power. Use it to fight disease. Model climate solutions. Wipe out child poverty. Instead, tech companies are linking together massive server farms, burning through power grids and drinking millions of gallons of water, to solve a problem nobody had.

Why? So people who only listen to video game music can pretend to be record producers. Real musicians do not lack talent; they lack rent, food, and money for music tours, I mean, the basic stuff. Streaming apps already pay them fractions of a cent, and now we are flooding the airwaves with synthetic noise made by executives who think human feeling is just an algorithm. Investors claim they are helping us create. But art was not broken. It did not need an algorithm to think for us. It just needed better platforms. It needed fair pay for creators, functional markets, and wider access for audiences who actually want to listen.

Over a hundred thousand new songs drop every day. Kids on TikTok invent whole new genres before breakfast. We did not have a supply shortage of human creativity. Why spend billions automating the exact stuff that brings us joy, while leaving the artists themselves broke? Vanity. Curing Alzheimer's takes a decade of hard, quiet work in a lab, no fast praise, no instant headlines. But typing three words into a prompt box to generate a fake Ohangla beat? Done. Instant genius. It burns through real-world resources just so someone does not have to pick up a guitar.

Music is not just data.

It is how we connect. We did not need a machine to write songs for us. We have eight billion humans, and most of us already sing in the shower.

We need to tackle big stuff first.

BY PAPA JUMA (The_Rumba_Commissioner)