Hey everyone,
Should AI make art — or make artists better?
I've realized something over the past few weeks that has changed the way I think about StudioOps.
For a long time, I described it as an operating system for artists. That's still true, but it misses the deeper point. The more I've thought about it, the more I've realized that I don't actually want AI to make art. I want it to make artists better. Those are two very different ambitions.
When people hear "AI for artists," they understandably imagine tools that generate lyrics, melodies, paintings, or stories. There's certainly a place for those tools, but they've never been what excited me. What I've always been chasing is something much simpler and, I think, much more enduring.
I've always admired artists like Gord Downie, Jason Isbell, Daniel Lanois, Leonard Cohen, and so many others. Of course I've admired their success, but what I've really envied is the depth of their creative vocabulary. You can hear it in their work. Their songs aren't just collections of clever lines—they're informed by history, literature, philosophy, film, visual art, mythology, and decades of curiosity. They've spent a lifetime building an internal library that allows them to express ideas in ways most of us never could.
I don't envy the books they read nearly as much as I envy what those books gave them.
The challenge, at least for me, is that life rarely affords that kind of wandering. Most artists aren't independently wealthy. They're balancing full-time jobs, families, obligations, and whatever scraps of time remain at the end of the day. The romantic image of spending an afternoon wandering a used bookstore or disappearing into an independent theater for a week simply isn't reality for most people. It certainly hasn't been for me.
That's where I think AI can genuinely help—not by replacing the journey, but by making it more intentional.
What I wish existed when I was younger wasn't something that could write songs for me. I wanted something that knew where I was trying to go and could gently point me in the right direction. Something that could look at an unfinished lyric and say, "Before you finish this, I think you should spend an hour with Gord Downie. Read this passage from Michael Ondaatje. Watch this scene. Listen to the way Daniel Lanois creates space on this record. Then come back and tell me what changed."
That's not cheating.
That's mentorship.
The artist still has to read. They still have to wrestle with the ideas. They still have to internalize them and decide what belongs in their own work. Nothing meaningful has been skipped. The work remains. What disappears is the randomness—the hope that you'll accidentally stumble across exactly the right influence at exactly the right moment in your life.
I think that's the distinction that matters.
For centuries, artistic development has depended on serendipity. Someone happened to meet the right teacher, discover the right novel, hear the right record, or live in the right city. Those moments shaped entire careers, but they were also, to some degree, accidents. AI gives us an opportunity to preserve the apprenticeship while reducing the reliance on chance.
Ultimately, that's why I built StudioOps.
I wanted to expand my own creative vocabulary. I wanted access to the conversations I didn't know I was missing. I wanted someone—or something—to help me connect the dots between literature, music, history, philosophy, film, and art without pretending that the connections themselves were the destination. The destination has always been becoming a more thoughtful artist.
Over the past few weeks, I've found myself coming back to a single sentence that seems to explain everything I've been trying to build:
You cannot intentionally express an idea if you lack the vocabulary to describe it.
That isn't just true for writing. It's true for every creative discipline. Our vocabulary isn't just words. It's metaphors, harmonic language, production techniques, historical parallels, visual symbolism, philosophical ideas, and emotional nuance. The larger that vocabulary becomes, the more faithfully we can express what's already inside us.
That's the future I want for artists.
I want them to read more, not less. To discover more great films, more extraordinary records, more literature, more history, and more ideas than they ever would have otherwise. I want AI to point them toward the conversations that will shape them, not shield them from those conversations.
More than anything, I want artists to say exactly what they want to say, in the most pure way, as intentionally as possible.
If StudioOps succeeds, I hope people never say, "It made my album."
I hope they say, "It made me the kind of artist who could."
You cannot intentionally express an idea if you lack the vocabulary to describe it.
Talk soon,
Todd