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Is AI Ruining Music?

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On this week’s Galaxy Brain, the host Charlie Warzel dives into the state of the music industry, where streaming economics, algorithmic discovery, and generative AI are reshaping how music is distributed, as well as what it means to make music in this environment. The episode traces how playlists and opaque recommendation systems have left many artists feeling like they’re battling an algorithm. With AI-generated songs now flooding platforms, and even in one case landing on a Billboard chart, the episode examines how automation, impersonation, and synthetic “diet music” are crowding into a system already strained by low payouts and creative burnout.

Charlie is joined by Stu Mackenzie, the front man of the prolific Australian band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, to talk about making music in the algorithmic age. From embracing bootleggers to pulling its catalog from Spotify, Mackenzie explains how the band has tried to protect its creative core while the industry transforms around it. Charlie and Stu explore whether we’re witnessing a normal technological shift or something more existential—an era where music is treated as pure commodity.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Stu Mackenzie: This ship has, like, well and truly sailed. I mean, it is totally wack to be able to train the algorithm on artists’ work. Totally wack. Like totally cooked.

Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, a staff writer at The Atlantic. And this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re going to talk about music—making it, the future of it, and the ways that technology has complicated that future quite a bit.

Throughout the last decade I’ve been fortunate enough to meet and interview a bunch of musicians across a bunch of genres and levels of fame. And inevitably, the conversation always shifts toward streaming. You’re probably familiar with the basic gripes: Streaming has atomized a musician’s catalog, prioritizing tracks over albums. The economics stink for artists. Musicians have to get big—like really almost Taylor Swift big—to make big money from the streamers. And in order to get big, musicians now need to play the platform game: the same one that creators and average Joes posting anywhere online have to play. Getting put on Spotify or another streamer’s curated playlists is crucial, but so is navigating whatever proprietary algorithms the streaming service might be employing to surface music for listeners.

And so the result has been the kind of frustration you hear from creators everywhere—it is this feeling of having to shadowbox an algorithm to fight for scraps of attention. And it is here where the conversations tend to get, honestly, pretty dark. The musicians I’ve spoken with describe weird things happening—an experimental song from the end of an album, that doesn’t really sound a ton like them, blows up because it got picked up by an algorithm—and that makes it so the streamer lumps their band in with a genre they rarely play in, and then it is harder for their best work to get discovered. Artists who have viral success on one track can find themselves trapped in the same sound, and they’re just chasing the algorithm, hoping to strike gold again. They describe a pressure to churn out new songs and albums faster and faster every year. And there’s this creative confusion that many record labels don’t have answers for. Here’s what one musician told me back in 2024: “Nobody knows what matters, and it’s just like wandering in the desert.”

And the streaming climate has only gotten more precarious since then. With generative AI, it’s now possible to create entire complex songs with a text prompt, or just by humming into your smartphone. Major record labels, like Warner, have recently partnered with generative-AI music companies, like Suno—whose CEO, Mikey Shulman, said in an interview with The Guardian this year that, “I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.” Now, in the interview he’s referring to the tedious bits of engineering work, but he clearly sees that automating the creative process is a good thing. “It was described to me that we are the Ozempic of the music industry—everybody is on it, and nobody wants to talk about it.”

As it turns out, all that diet music—it’s going somewhere. It’s flooding onto the streamers. For the last few years, across genres, synthetic music has been crowding out human-made music. Chances are, especially if you listen to instrumental music, you’ve unknowingly streamed some smooth jazz conjured by a bot. In late September, an AI-generated song under the [artist] name of Xania Monet became the first to debut on the Billboard radio chart.

There’s other issues, too, like impersonation. The website Rest of World reported last fall, for example, that somebody cloned the voice of reggaeton singer Bad Bunny—perhaps you’ve heard of him—and created a song that reached a top 100 ranking temporarily on Spotify in Chile. That was, before it was removed from the platform.

All of this brings us to King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. For the uninitiated, King Gizzard is a popular and prolific Australian band known for bending genres, ripping live shows, and for putting out dozens of albums in a short period. (For example, in 2017 they released five albums in one year.) In July, the group took its music off of Spotify in protest of the Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s decision to lead a nearly 700 million–dollar investment in a German company that makes military drones and AI-defense tools. “Can we put pressure on these Dr. Evil tech bros to do better?” That’s what the band wrote on their post on Instagram.

But, as the newsletter Platformer reported last year, some King Gizzard fans noticed that several tracks were still available on Spotify. It wasn’t King Gizzard’s actual music, but a kind of ringtone, Muzak-style cover of their songs with similar artwork and information attached. It was only when people clicked on the track that, according to Platformer, it redirected to a different page for a different instrumental-cover artist. The fake King Gizzard songs reportedly had more than 10 million streams. When alerted, Spotify got rid of the fake songs. But the debacle illustrates what artists are up against. Staying on the platform can mean having to play this unwinnable game. But leaving has its challenges, too—losing discovery and, perhaps, having to fend off squatters.

Here’s where I should note that we reached out to Spotify about the King Gizzard situation and AI impersonation in general. A spokesperson acknowledged that “AI is accelerating problems that already exist across the music industry, including impersonation and fraud.” The company shared a series of new policies it announced in September, including “stronger rules requiring artist authorization for vocal imitation and standardized AI-disclosure credits developed with industry partners.”

They continued: “Bad actors can sometimes exploit gaps to push incorrect content onto artist profiles. We are testing new prevention tactics with distributors, investing more resources into content-mismatch review, reducing review times, and allowing artists to report mismatches even before release.”

A spokesman also countered a claim you’re going to hear later in the episode, which is that Spotify pays worse than other streamers. “Every other streaming service pays less than Spotify. Spotify paid out $11 billion to the music industry last year,” they said.

That’s Spotify’s perspective. But what have streamers done to music? What does it mean to make art and music online in 2026, and how can people stay sane and navigate this ecosystem? I figured there was no better person to talk to about this than the front man of King Gizzard: Stu Mackenzie. Stu joined me recently from Melbourne at 3 a.m. my time to help me understand if we’re all, in his own words, “cooked.” Here’s my conversation with Stu.

Warzel: Alright. Stu, welcome to Galaxy Brain. Thank you so much for joining me from Australia.

Mackenzie: What’s up? Yeah, welcome from the other side of the world.

Warzel: It’s summer there, right? You’re, like, actually living the dream there instead of the crushing fatigue of winter that we’ve got going.

Mackenzie: It is a dream, and it is always summer in Australia. Not really, but you know, it is if you believe it is. It is if you’re living in the dream.

Warzel: Love it. It feels like it. I want to start out just by asking: We’re kind of a similar age; you’re an extremely creative and artistic person. What’s your relationship to the internet and technology? Is it an engine of creativity for you? Is it a hindrance? Some of your past interviews about recording—it suggests like even some of that, that you did was a bit analog in nature. But what is your relationship to internet technology and all that as an artist?

Mackenzie: I’m probably going to give you an answer which is probably typical of someone who’s 35—i.e., me and people of our gen—in that it’s incredible. And that it has allowed me to have access to so much music, but also art and culture and everything that was just not accessible to people of 10 or so years before us. And you have to pay that. You have to just go, Fuck, this shit is amazing. You know, like, I hate my phone. I want to fucking throw this shit off a bridge. I want to throw it every single day. At some point, I want to throw my phone into a body of water. But I also just think it’s incredible. You know, like look at this thing—what this shit does is amazing. We’re talking to each other, you know, on the other side of the world, like pretty fucking seamlessly. That is cool.

Warzel: I’ve heard in interviews you say when the band was really starting, it was, like, MySpace days. Obviously things look a lot different now. And I was wondering if you could trace a little bit of that change for me and how it feels from your perspective: evolving as a band and just having the ability to reach people and share your music changing so much. How has that looked and felt to you? Net positive? Sort of net negative? Where do you come out on that?

Mackenzie: I’ve probably got a perspective on this that I’m not sure a lot of my sort of peers or buddies would have the same one as, to be honest. Because for us—the band, I mean—King Gizzard had started in this kind of beautiful, low-pressure scenario. It started in this way of it being a side project, and it worked because it was easy, actually. Not easy in a work sense, but easy in an it fit sense. We did what we wanted to do. From the beginning, it was baked into the whole idea of it, because people didn’t feel pressured to be in this band. It was this weird side-project thing that people weren’t supposed to be paying attention to. So it let us kind of just do whatever we want and not worry about it. But I think when for whatever reason, some people started to support the band, and it kind of got to a point where it felt like maybe we should sort of put some more time and effort into this thing. I think we probably quite sensibly realized that that was actually quite a seed, or DNA, to what the band was. And I think we’ve been pretty good at holding onto that.

And I say that because I think, for the most part, we operate exactly the same as we did even when we had a MySpace. It was kind of just like: We don’t engage super deeply with social media. We don’t create content. But we don’t do anything that’s tough. We just sort of make albums at the pace we want to, and we put out music at the pace we want to. And we still work with the same people, the same sort of small team for the most part. We just have kind of not stopped doing. And I think a lot of the things around us have changed. We’ve tried really hard to stay the same on the inside. And I know that that is so lucky, and I know that we’re very grateful to be able to do that. And it’s weird, but I do truly, like—we’ve grown as people individually in our own ways, and the six of us in the band have grown up with each other and while doing this thing. But when we’re together, it’s still the same. And I’m quite protective of that.

Warzel: That’s really lovely, and something that I think is really rare. But also, I think that’s a good vein for this conversation, in a way: to talk about how you’ve gone about protecting that a little bit, or how you’ve gone about using that to your advantage as a band in this information hellscape, to some degree, or just like chaos. And so I’m curious: Can you talk to me a little bit about the bootlegger stuff, which to me feels really of the spirit of the internet in the good way, and what that is exactly. And why you decided to start doing that—not just like giving the music away, but giving people authorization to press their own albums, sell copies, and things like that.

Mackenzie: Explaining the King Gizzard version of bootlegging is weirdly hard, I think. Let me give it a go. So basically, quite a few years ago, we noticed that people were sort of making, I mean, what I would have described at that time as bootleg copies of our albums. And this was at a time where a lot of our early material had only ever been pressed physically one time: at the very beginning when we released those earlier albums. In quite a few of those first ones, we’d never toured outside of Australia. So we might have pressed 200 or 300 copies, and they had all sold to our friends and our friends’ friends, basically. And then we started to become an internationally touring band and doing all these bizarre things that we never thought were supposed to happen to us. Then, you know, all these other people, and all over the world were like, Hey, can I get a copy of them? One of those records? And we’re like, Oh, really? We’re making this other stuff now. I don’t know. We just didn’t really prioritize looking backward at all. And so I suppose because of that, people started building their records. And then concurrently to that, people started taping our shows. And that was also just a deeply strange and foreign concept to see that, because I didn’t grow up with that culture in any way. I just thought that was super weird. But I suppose I started thinking about that a lot, and how I kind of just actually thought that was very cool. I thought the bootlegging thing was always very cool because we—I never had a problem with people doing that—because they weren’t accessible anyway. I was just happy for people to be listening to the music. And at the beginning it was like, Why don’t we just give them a few albums that they can just do whatever with? Why don’t we just let them do whatever with a few albums? And that’s what we did. We also did this album called Polygondwanaland, which was sort of a prog-rock studio album, I guess.

[Music]

Mackenzie: And we released five albums in that year. And it did start to feel a bit, sort of, capitalist of us, maybe against some of our core values to continually ask people to buy our shit.

Warzel: Five albums in a year is a lot, yeah. I get that.

Mackenzie: Yeah, exactly. So the fourth of the fifth, which was Polygondwanaland, we just made for free. You know, we thought, Well, we should really make this free. Like really free, you know, like this is not just a free download. Like, this doesn’t belong to us. It was like: This is free. You know what free is? This is free. So it was kind of like, you can put it on your movie soundtrack. You can put it on your—you can put it anywhere. Whatever you want. You can take it to the pressing plant and make 1,000 copies and start a record label. You know, you can do anything. This was back in 2017. Looking back after a year of that or something, it was like all these record labels had started up. And all this, sort of, a community of people sprung up around this album. And it did feel like—it just felt so beautiful. It felt kind of like creating life. And it just felt so kind of contrasting to so many of the annoying things about being in a band, where you have to kind of sustain yourself and you have to be a business. So that’s just so annoying. Fucking play music. And it just felt so in line with all of that. But yeah, now we do—just tons of our music is just bootleggable. Just do whatever you want. You can listen to it or download it for free or do normal-people stuff. Or you can do crazy-people stuff and make record labels and shit.

Warzel: And people have, right? Record labels have come out of that, right? It’s wild.

Mackenzie: Yeah, it’s like … it’s so cool. It’s amazing. Yeah.

Warzel: So what I think is interesting about that, is: I want to talk to you in a minute about some of the Spotify stuff. Some of the stuff that has been hard and squeezing artists to some degree. And some of that all comes from this idea, right, of: You’ve got to find and build community in whatever ways that you can, right? Get the music out to people, but also have something there. And I feel like what you guys have, whether you stumbled upon it or whether it’s just, you know, the way that your ethos as a band and as human beings have decided to be creative and make art, is that it seems like you’ve been able to bypass a little of that commercialization and form that community. Which then, in turn, is sustaining, right? Like, I think about Phish, the [Grateful] Dead, you know, the idea of that sort of taping community, right? And this idea of like, We’re going to play lots of live shows. People are going to go, and we encourage that taping. That thing gives, as you just said, gives us the ability to deliver a different kind of show every night—that creative challenge of improvisation and locking in and all that stuff. But at the same time, too, it creates this ecosystem, right? And the ecosystem can then become as obsessive as you want to be over shows and archives and “last time played” and “first time played,” and all these different types of things. And it builds the lore. And it fosters that community in a way that I think ends up being probably way more generative, right, than just like, Yes, stream our album. Here it is. And then here’s the next one. Right?

Mackenzie: Yeah. That’s my worst nightmare: to kind of be, like, just constantly trying to push the thing. That’s not fun. No shade to anyone who wants to operate like that, but it doesn’t work for me. It’s a personal preference, I think. And I do feel extremely, extremely fortunate to be able to take the kind of risks and the wild swings. We take tons of falls, too. But we’ve been able to weather it. I’m very grateful for that. It does also—and I know you want to talk about Spotify stuff and everything—but it does sort of make me feel like we have a bit of a duty to do stuff like that. Because King Gizzard exists in this weird realm of “It exists because we kind of took risks the whole time.” It hasn’t been, sort of, despite that. It’s been because of that. And I think we are just luckily and beautifully placed to just be ourselves. And I kind of feel like we have a duty to do that, in some ways, because I know that in so many ways it is easier for us to do it than for other people. And so now, with something like Spotify: Like, it doesn’t pay the bills anyway. For the most part, we’re kind of a touring band, and we make records that people buy IRL. Like, I don’t know. We sort of just exist in our own sort of—we’d whirled over to the side.

Warzel: Right. So let’s just talk about the Spotify stuff, since we’re there. So last summer, you all made a decision to remove the music. It sounds like Spotify CEO Daniel Ek leading the investing of this military-drone company was, I guess, the last straw. You mentioned earlier just that this wasn’t something that’s necessarily paying the bills. Can you walk me through the decision? In terms of what else, in your experience with the platform, led to this, you know?

Mackenzie: It’s a pretty evil corporation, for the most part. I mean, and to be fair, so are a few of the other streaming services as well. And it’s actually kind of easy to hate Spotify, to be honest, as an artist. Like, they pay way worse than almost all the others to begin with, and they’re the biggest. So they’re kind of setting the standards in so many ways. I feel like all my mates were already saying “Fuck Spotify” constantly anyway, before we did it. And before all of the military-investing stuff came up, as well.

It does sort of feel like when you’re making music, making music is—maybe this goes without saying, or maybe I’m just going to say it—it’s such a vulnerable thing to do. It’s actually, like, really hard to make music with other people. I mean, again, maybe that does go without saying. It’s hard sort of emotionally, and it’s hard sort of in a way of—it’s hard to motivate yourself. And it’s just this vulnerable sort of like, weird—I don’t know—sort of thing that we and other musicians constantly put ourselves out there in this weird world to do. Because we believe in it. I guess a lot of the things happening around Spotify started to feel like—it honestly just made me and the others like not going to work, right?

And I love work. Like, work to me isn’t this bad word. Work is awesome. Work is great. I want to go to work, you know? I want to make stuff. And all this shit made me not want to go to work. And, you know, we had a lot of conversations with a lot of other musicians who I love and admire, and some of my other mates left Spotify. I just thought, Man, that’s … I don’t know. For some reason, it wasn’t something that I really thought of being possible. It also sounds like you just spend so much time thinking about music and working on the music, and Spotify is the platform that most people listen to it on. And then a few of our mates left. And I just thought—I didn’t even really think about that as an option.

Warzel: I’ve been having this conversation for a couple of years with a number of artists and musicians, especially. And I was talking, to prepare for this, to another musician. Who’s honestly done really well for themselves, very popular, and mentioned that the Spotify stuff—especially the algorithmic-discovery stuff—had just ground them down so much creatively. Like, basically had said: I—use the same terms of work, right—I consider this to be work. I consider when I got to get through, you know, like I’m problem-solving, right? Like, it’s not all fun and games. It’s like my job sometimes. And I’m not afraid to grind through it and do that.

And then there was this feeling recently that they weren’t able to stop. Which was like, I’m going through all this, like, preparing this beautiful meal, right? And I have this total worry that this thing that I have no control over is just going to stop people from coming to my restaurant. Right? Even if they like the food all the time, they’re just going to forget that the restaurant exists. Right? For some kind of weird reason. And this idea also that songwriting is for them this craft: this thing that they love to do, right? And that it’s become sort of … it’s gone from the skill game to this slot-machine game, right? And if you’re thinking about the casino: Really good blackjack players don’t want to spend time at the slots, because the slots are stupid and they’re arbitrary, right? And that’s how it felt fighting for people’s attention. It was a really interesting feeling, though. That it’s got that similar thing of like—it’s just making coming to work feel juiceless, or bad.

Mackenzie: Yeah. And that’s interesting to hear you say that, because I do think there are a lot of analogous sort of—that’s happening in so many industries at the moment, in different ways. And I feel like I can kind of talk about it from my perspective of being a musician. I feel like I have conflicting ideas about it. I feel like I almost open my mouth to say something and I stop myself, because it’s hard to sort of form a fully thought-out opinion on a lot of this stuff. Because it’s still happening. And, again with technology, there are certain elements of a lot of the AI or generative things that I look at, and I’m like, Fuck, that is so cool. That is fucking amazing that that shit is possible.

Warzel: To democratize some of this. To give people some of the tools, some of the ability to say, like, I see this, I feel this, and I want to make this for myself. Right? That is like going back to the first principles of all of this stuff, the way that humans did it before it was professionalized. And yet, if you do reduce it to: Hey man, I want to do this, and I can do it now because I can write out a prompt and push a button, that’s fine on a creative-explosion scale, right? It’s not fine probably in the sense of: I wanna use your guys’ style of music, and I wanna fit it into a Spotify playlist and then, you know, just ride off the back of you guys no longer having your music on Spotify. Right? Because, like, that’s an example of something that’s happened to you guys, right? You have people who are kind of like, yeah. People are coming in, and—

Mackenzie: That really happened. And I totally agree. And it’s something that I’ve talked about, as well. And I think where I landed was: We are doomed. It does feel like we are fucking doomed when that shit happens. It’s like, what do you do about that? This ship has, like, well and truly sailed. I mean, it is totally wack to be able to train the algorithm on artists’ work. Totally wack. Like totally cooked. Totally fucking horrible.

And it’s just—I can’t believe that that has just happened. And it’s like, Whoops, didn’t mean to do that. Shit, okay. Oh well, that happened now. Let’s just move on. What? That’s crazy. That’s why it feels like we’re doomed.

Warzel: Can you describe for me how it happened? How you found out about this? Because essentially, right, what happened was: You guys took the music off of Spotify, and people were just coming in with, like, ringtone-style stuff. Is that how it went down?

Mackenzie: I don’t know how people are making this shit. It’s like, honestly, when I listen to these King Gizzard, sort of, AI-artist songs, they’re insanely funny to me. Because it’s so dark and so twisted and so strange. And it’s so weird that it’s happening to us. All I can do is laugh. It’s insanely funny, but in the most twisted and dark way. It’s just … my reaction is to laugh, but it’s very dark and very weird and very 2026. But basically, to anyone that doesn’t know, we took our music off Spotify. And then, tons of music has just been—it’s probably there now—stuff has been taken down. More songs come up. And I suppose, because our artist page must still exist, or maybe you can still search for it, I don’t know—but it means that if someone is looking for King Gizzard, it’s very easy for them to find this stuff. And actually, there is a very weird problem where you can actually upload music impersonating another artist and go onto their official profile very easily. That’s a whole other thing. It’s super easy to impersonate another artist and end up on their official profile. And this has happened to tons of artists.

Warzel: Have you talked to Spotify about this at all? Or have people on your guys’ behalf?

Mackenzie: Yeah, quite a few times. And they’re—quite a few times—and they are always just like, Oh, whoops; we’ll take it down. And they do take it down. But, you know, there’s more up there before you know it. And it’s not just us. It’s happening to tons of artists. It’s a story, actually. I think it’s just exacerbated this whole thing, because it’s left a hole. So when I’m talking about these, like, AI King Gizzard tracks, they are on our profile. Like, it’s King Gizzard. It’s not someone else. It’s, like, “us,” that’s the weird thing—but it’s not us. It’s just … I don’t fucking know. It’s just—yeah, it’s weird.

Warzel: But what’s so interesting is you all leaving Spotify. It sounds a little bit like, you know, it hasn’t been that hard for you guys. Is that correct?

Mackenzie: I suppose so. And I would want to preface it with, you know, I don’t see us as necessarily being a model for other people to follow. Because I know that we exist on a very unusual path, and I’m very proud of that. But I’m not sitting here saying … I don’t want to sit here and say, “Everybody should leave Spotify.” And if people want to do that, that’s cool. But I’m not here to pontificate on anything, actually. That’s not my vibe.

But for us, we have had nothing but quite beautiful press around that, and around leaving Spotify. And I think quite a lot of people have discovered our music. Because with all of this, the hardest part about leaving Spotify is making your music inaccessible to so many people who listen to music only on Spotify. And that doesn’t feel good. Like, I don’t want to do that. Nothing about that is what I like about what we’re doing. But it felt like the right price. And that’s okay. And I am proud of doing it. But it does feel like people [are] maybe taking notice of what we’re doing, as well. Yeah; it’s cool.

Warzel: I wanted to just end with—it’s easy to get bummed out about some of this stuff when you’re talking about technology and art and all that. Is there stuff that makes you feel optimistic? About—maybe you can just speak for yourself and not for the world and art and creativity. But for you going forward, do you feel like some of this technology, some of this stuff, some of just the explosion of information that you can access, that that’s going to be generative for you, as you continue to evolve as an artist?

Mackenzie: I remember when—like a few years ago now, and I’m sure there are many people listening to this who have had a similar experience—when ChatGPT first came in. And a few people were like, You should try this thing; it’s like pretty freaky. And I was like, Okay, cool. And I started writing in just the most batshit prompts, like, You are a grain of dust traveling through the fucking cosmos. Explain to me what you see along the way. Stuff like that. That just felt so new. And there was a time when I was like, Wow, this feels so inspiring. I feel like this is actually doing something new. I’m sure this is what it felt like when someone first used the thesaurus to write, to help write poetry or something. Imagine if you’d never used a thesaurus, and then you just picked up one. And you’re like, Whoa; this is going to make my writing so much easier!

Warzel: The game has changed!

Mackenzie: Yeah, right? I was thinking about a lot of things like that. All these things we kind of take for granted that were new technology at some point. But I don’t feel very interested in that now.

Warzel: There’s an interesting interview that Brian Eno did earlier, I guess last year, talking about this kind of stuff. Brian Eno is someone who’s created so much generative music and so much ambient out there, and pushed the boundaries of this electronic music and stuff. He was talking about playing around with ChatGPT and this idea that when you first start using it, there is that feeling of, Whoa, like: This did something different. And then he was saying the more times he started to do it, the less interesting it got to him. And he had this great word for it, which is, like—he used to do watercolor painting. And when he would put the brush in the water between the different things, no matter what happened, no matter what colors he was using, the water at the end of the thing would be this weird sort of maroonish-purple. And he called it—munge was the color. And he was like: That’s ChatGPT. The output is munge. Like, No matter what I do, it always kind of comes back to this kind of drab sort of soulless mix of all the stuff. And I thought that that was kind of like a perfect summation of maybe why that kind of stuff is not all that interesting to you right now.

Mackenzie: Maybe. Yeah, that’s a very funny take. And yeah, I definitely relate to that. I’m not sure I ever got really, really, really deep, or I really got to know ChatGPT’s personality. But I do know that it has a personality. And I do know that it’s what, like, a good percentage of the world is using. And that—to me, as an artist—is not interesting to engage with right now. At least not in the kind of music that we’re making.

That moment that I was talking about—when I first did use ChatGPT, and it kind of did blow my mind—it actually felt niche at that time. It felt like something that my parents, for instance, wouldn’t have known about. It was at that point, whatever that point was—a lot of it does come back to kind of what I was saying earlier. And I just want to do what makes me want to go to work. And what makes me kind of excited to just get out of bed and race into my studio and make music. Like: That’s what makes me want to pick up the phone and call one of the other guys in the band and say, Be at the studio at nine o’clock in the morning. Like, Let’s go; I’ve got these ideas. I just want to put myself in that head space.

I wonder if this is like when the drum machine came out? Or, I wonder whether it is not like that at all. You know, when the drum machine came out and people thought, I miss real drummers. I miss real drummers, with all that beautiful feel and all their imperfections. And, you know, I could tell the difference between this drummer and that drummer just by hearing them on record. And all those things are true. And then, you know, so much amazing music came out of that. And a ton of this wall of senses is drum machines.

Warzel: I think it’s all a cycle, right? That’s the only way that I can kind of keep it all in my head, because I think we all as humans tend to do that “It’s so over; we’re so back; it’s so over; we’re so back” kind of thing. And instead of being completely doom and gloom about it, or dismissing it as nothing, right, I think it’s a part of this cycle. I think there—as with something like a drum machine—you get to do different things and manipulate it in all these different capacities. And kind of push the bounds of something, right? And there’s a lot of creativity and interesting, like, wall-breaking there. And at the same time, too, I think you sacrifice. You pay the price of a little bit of that humanity, or a little bit of that, you know, spice-of-life type thing. And then people, if you go too far in one direction, eventually I think people start yearning for the other thing.

What I find really inspiring about what you guys have charted out for yourselves is that it feels like there’s a real focus on the humanity part of it. On the human element, on like the drive for the new thing. The creative push. And I think that that is what a lot of people are craving more and more these days.

Mackenzie: Yeah; that’s interesting. And I appreciate that. I think with what we have done in our career, in a lot of ways, we have not been very tactical about anything. And we have made decisions from the gut; we definitely have just tried to prioritize doing things in real life with real people. And that’s, yeah—the obvious stuff, like playing shows and stuff like that. But also just, like, meeting people and talking to people and just being a real person. Like, I would pride myself on being pretty ordinary in a lot of ways. And I think that’s cool.

Warzel: As an ordinary person, I totally agree. Man, I so appreciate this conversation. And, you know, grounding it in the humanity and the real-personness of all that. I think we need more of that. So I appreciate all of this and the insights. And all the time, man.

Mackenzie: Cheers, Charlie. I am grateful for the chat, and the reflection and the inwardness. And the, yeah—it’s just good to talk about this stuff before we go insane.

Warzel: That’s the whole point of this podcast. Talk about it before we go insane. Not so we don’t go insane, but just before we do it, you know?

Mackenzie: So we understand why. Yeah.

Warzel: Thanks again, man. I appreciate it.

Mackenzie: Cheers, Charlie. Thanks, mate.

[Music]

Warzel: That’s it for us here. Thanks again to my guest, Stu Mackenzie of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe to The Atlantic’s YouTube channel or to Apple, Spotify, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts.

And if you want to support the work that I am doing, and the work that all of my colleagues at The Atlantic are doing, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

Thanks so much. See you on the internet.

This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Renee Klahr and edited by Dave Shaw. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

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