AI and Taylor Swift

In journalism it has already become a matter of existence. Stephan-Andreas Casdorff, longtime — now former — editor-in-chief and publisher of the Tagesspiegel, let an AI write opinion pieces and was relieved of his editorial duties. The paper dutifully explained afterward that AI could be a tool, but must never take over „journalistic judgment,“ „weighing of information,“ „analytical framing,“ or „linguistic craft.“ Sounds clean, until you ask where that’s supposed to lead. Moritz Rinke walked through this in the FAZ, with a goldfish anecdote as the punchline: Stefan Aust asks ChatGPT whether goldfish make a pond clearer, gets „no,“ pushes back, gets „yes“ — both delivered with the same conviction.

„I only use AI for research,“ everyone says, the way people say they only have one glass of wine when the doctor asks.

Is that art? Yes! I think it’s brilliant, and yes, it’s basically the essence of what art is. But that’s a different subject.

Speaking of craft: the Dadaists in Zurich, with whom Duchamp was connected at the same time, if from New York, went one step further than he did. Hugo Ball performed his sound poem „Karawane“ at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, wearing a stiff, homemade cardboard costume that barely let him move. No grammar, no rhyme, no meaning, pure sound. Craftsmanship in the narrow sense — at first glance, there isn’t any. It’s essentially as random as a machine spitting out syllables would be. And yet that evening counts as one of the founding moments of literary modernism. It’s not the syllables themselves — it’s that a man stood there in the middle of the First World War, in a time when language was being burned up for propaganda and war rhetoric, and publicly destroyed that very language. The rupture was the statement, not the sound.

My real subject is music, and I’m not going to wade into whether Dylan sold his soul when he picked up an electric guitar.

I’ve been thinking about getting a drum machine and a small synthesizer. I like looping: I play a short sequence, it repeats automatically while I play something else on top. That’s how I stack sound on sound — or rather, my Boss RS-300 looper does.

Back in the Mike Oldfield days, you needed a multitrack machine like a Revox A77 for that, and the Beatles, together with George Martin, turned it into an art form with Sgt. Pepper. Probably one of the best albums ever made.

But look at it another way. Techno is largely machine-driven, or at least machines carry a huge share of the beat. In techno, effect is the goal — what the music does to me, how I start to feel the rhythm, start moving, start dancing. That’s genuinely great. → external effect

Or take rap, in all its forms. The line between music and spoken word, barely recognizable as singing anymore, fully dissolved into rhythm. In rap, someone tells their own story, the way a storyteller would in a caravanserai. Our fascination with stories is as old as humanity itself. What matters is that it’s their own story, that they actually lived it. → self-revelation

And Taylor Swift. She got married. But past all the tabloid noise, she’s one of the most remarkable artists of our time. She invented something that had existed for a long time already, just not quite like this. The Süddeutsche Zeitung ran a major feature on her two years ago. What’s genuinely interesting about that piece? It reads, for long stretches, almost like a music theory lesson: her favorite chord progression is I–V–vi–IV, the same simple cadence that already carries „Let It Be“ or „Don’t Stop Believin‘,“ known in music circles as the „Axis Progression“ because a comedy band once demonstrated how many world hits run on the same four chords. On top of that, a recurring melodic figure, the so-called „T-Drop,“ that keeps making the same small leap. All of it, in other words, musically well-worn and long since mined. Formulas you could explain in ten minutes.

And then she undercuts the whole debate herself, long before anyone else started having it. In the title track of her album „The Tortured Poets Department,“ she describes how her lover left his typewriter at her place, and quietly wonders who even uses a typewriter anymore. Then she compares the two of them, mockingly, to Dylan Thomas and Patti Smith, the icons of suffering, authentic, ink-and-whiskey poetry — only to undercut herself immediately: no tragic poets, just two modern idiots. Anyone who knows their own cadence formula that precisely and can still write a line that dismantles the entire myth of the suffering genius in a single aside has understood exactly what self-reference and irony can do, no lit-seminar required.

What gets credited to Swift as mastery is, at its core, the exact same thing held against AI as poverty: a kit of parts, formula, repetition. A hyper-specific detail, a typewriter, a keep-going mantra, plus a big, unspecified emotional surface anyone can throw themselves into. Musical flatpack furniture.

So why is she — and her music — so exceptional? Because behind the music stands a life that can be checked: Kanye in 2009, the Mueller trial, Scooter Braun, all of it traceable song by song. The formula gets legitimized by the bill someone actually paid. And that’s exactly what you sense, what you feel, when you listen to her music. With her, someone always ends up paying the bill, and it’s always clear who that is. An AI knows the kit of parts, the formula of the music — but it never picks up the bill, and you can hear that in the result.

AI can’t write from lived experience. But it can help — the way a drum machine helps me hold a rhythm, or the way Claude helped me sort the scattered thoughts that led to this piece.