The great AI-driven devaluation of art is a myth. While machines are busy minting infinite digital content, they’re creating a bull market for the one thing they can’t replicate: the human story. This isn’t a crisis. It’s an arbitrage opportunity.
Tomi Oladunjoye is an Oscar-qualified composer and the Founder of Zenyai with over eight years in film and game production. His AI audio startup, partnered with IBM and Microsoft, is developing technology to transform images into immersive symphonies. He argues that as AI floods the world with instant content, human art—and the stories that go with it—will only grow more valuable.
Like fine wine: “Think of an expensive bottle of wine from the 1800s. The experience is elevated by the story: the family who crafted it, the history it survived,” Oladunjoye says. “You’re told that this bottle made it through World War II, and suddenly it becomes more elegant. The same thing will happen with human creativity. The artist's process, their story—that becomes a luxury people will yearn for.”
Proof of process: For Oladunjoye, that sense of story is more than a romantic notion. In a world of infinite AI output, what makes human work stand out is the effort behind it. “An AI can tell you what dataset it scraped and what back-propagation it used,” he says. “But a human can tell you, ‘I stayed up until 4 AM. This was my third iteration. I poured myself into this.’”
Mirror, mirror: This moment isn’t just about new tools. It’s a confrontation with identity. The rise of machine-made content, he argues, is pushing artists to look inward and ask what it truly means to be human. “AI is now forcing us to actually look within and go deep,” he says. “It’s forcing us to ask what gives life meaning.”
Creative tension: While some artists, he says, are “Luddites” resisting change, most are reacting to a deeper injustice: their work being scraped to train models without credit or pay. “Artists are already underpaid, and now it's like a punch in the face,” he says. “Someone’s profiting off my work without giving me credit.”
Still, he sees a way forward: AI as a powerful copilot that accelerates the dullest parts of the process, like pre-production and ideation. “AI gets you to default 50 percent,” he says. “You start the creative process already halfway there.” But that’s only the beginning. “If you rely too much on any creative AI, you won’t get better at your craft," explains Oladunjoye. "You have to take that 50 percent and bring your own soul to it to get it to 100.”
Encore! Encore!: While some tech leaders imagine a future of hyper-personalized, AI-generated content, Oladunjoye believes that vision only captures “20% of what could happen.” Perfect isolation, he argues, isn’t the endgame. “Humans are default social,” he says. “They don’t want to be isolated. They want to be part of a community that comes together to listen to a specific type of music.” No matter how flawless an AI-generated DJ set gets, he contends, it can’t replicate the shared energy of a live concert.