Nobody Goes to the Symphony for a Player Piano
In a world where more and more art is AI generated, does human creativity matter?
When I was very young, my parents took me to a gathering at one of their friend’s houses. It was one of those parties that all children dread, where adults spend the whole time making conversation and the kids are left to wander around and make their own fun. During my wandering, I came across our host’s baby grand Steinway. Having been taking lessons on my family’s own upright piano, I was intrigued — and awestruck — by the instrument’s presence. Perhaps most interesting, however, was the small black box under the keyboard.
I alerted my parents to the discovery of the foreign object, leading the hosts and the assembled adults to file into the piano room for a demonstration. One of the adults inserted a floppy disk into the device, prompting the Steinway to burst to life, keys depressing without human assistance and causing music to ring through the house. I was amazed as this ghost in the machine tickled away at the piano’s ivory keys. That amazement then turned to a grim thought: If you don’t need a person to play the piano, then what’s the point of learning to play? I stopped taking lessons shortly thereafter.
Some time later, I learned that auto-playing pianos were not new. Although that particular Steinway used a modern solenoid system controlled by a computer, pneumatic systems had been around for almost a century. (You probably know the type from old Westerns, where paper rolls with hole punches spin around and use air flow to activate physical levers that depress the relevant keys.) A century of automated pianos and yet we still have human pianists, and people intent on learning to play.
Why?
Scarcity and the Value of Mastery
Let’s first consider a few other realms of social and economic life that have been similarly touched by automation.
We now have AI systems that are about as good as humans in source code generation and programming. IKEA makes mass use of robotics (e.g., computer numerical control routers, automated multi-spindle drilling machines, etc.) to aid in the manufacture — from cutting and drilling to sanding and surface finishing — of their many product lines. Generative AI can be used to write whole novels or create high quality images and videos.
As such, one could be forgiven for thinking that programmers, woodworkers, and storytellers are all dead professions. And yet, just as pianists haven’t disappeared over the past century, neither have these folks. Nor do I see a future in which these and other skilled creative careers will be solely the domain of machine intelligence. That’s because skill isn’t just about executing a function — it’s about knowing why you’re doing it, and shaping the outcome in ways machines cannot. The value of a skill lies in its scarcity, just as the value of creativity resides in intention.
Being a good programmer is fundamentally about knowing how to give properly encoded instructions to a computer. It’s a game of memory and contextual linguistic heuristics. There are a great many people in the world who lack the former skillset but who excel in understanding why they’re building a given application or system.
Everyone needs furniture, and IKEA’s automation processes help to provide access to reasonable quality goods for entry-level purchasers at relatively inexpensive prices. Mass production means it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to furnish your home or apartment. But as people age and make more money, their tolerance for furniture that needs constant replacement diminishes. At a certain point, people’s willingness to pay for quality and craftsmanship outstrips their pecuniary constraints. Authentic Eames Lounge Chairs, produced by Herman Miller, are still largely built using traditional hand craftsmanship (particularly in the leather upholstery and veneer application). The greater the demand for quality and uniqueness, the greater the need for traditionally skilled woodworkers.
Contrary to the hot mess of writing and production that’s come out of major studios in recent years (I’m looking at you, Disney), crafting a good narrative structure actually isn’t an overly complicated process. Joseph Campbell’s framework of the “Hero’s Journey” — the common narrative structure found in myths, legends, and stories across all cultures and all of human history — can be charted formulaically:
A hero is called to adventure;
He crosses a threshold and journeys into the unknown;
While there, he is tested with trials, makes allies, and confronts adversaries;
Eventually, he faces a climactic confrontation and gains a boon;
He then returns to the ordinary world with that boon.
It’s arguably even simpler than that. An old quote incorrectly attributed to Leo Tolstoy suggests that “All great literature is one of two stories: a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” A generative AI system can replicate the basic structure of a story and even generate a detailed series of images, or videos, to chain together a visual representation of the narrative. But it can’t draw on experience or emotion to make the story meaningful. Stories in particular, and art in general, are fundamentally communicative exercises between an artist and an audience — an expression of an inner human voice made manifest in the real world.
The Studio Ghibli Hypothesis
So returning to the first question: why, a century on from the pneumatic auto-playing piano, do we still have pianists?
Because nobody goes to the symphony to see a piano playing itself.
Learning and mastering an instrument requires dedication to cultivating a skillset. Not everyone can play the piano well. That scarcity elicits appreciation because we know it’s an ability that was earned. And the expression of that earned skill is a testament to a uniquely human endeavour — one that I think is perfectly captured in the person of Hayao Miyazaki.
The Studio Ghibli founder is the source of classic films like Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Grave of the Fireflies. For decades, Miyazaki honed his craft, constantly drawing and rendering even the smallest of details in his film by hand. Indeed, Studio Ghibli is one of the only studios in the world where the production process still relies almost entirely on traditional hand-drawn artistry. In an age where animation has increasingly become a digitized, and even semi-automated, work product, Miyazaki’s disciples continue his legacy by imbuing a decidedly human touch in the studio’s films. Even their most recent 2023 Academy Award-winning feature, The Boy and the Heron, was in keeping with this tradition.
Even amidst a landscape of creative surplus, people crave creative expression that stands apart from the norm and creates a more visceral connection between the artist and the audience. Miyazaki’s films are not beloved because they couldn’t be made by a computer — they are beloved because he refuses to let a computer make them. Each frame bears the marks of choices, revisions, and a lifetime of seeing the world through a singular lens. That is what audiences respond to: the evidence of a person on the other side of the work. This is the Studio Ghibli Hypothesis:
As AI and robotics increasingly saturate the creative market with abundant, technically competent creative outputs, works shaped by a distinct human vision — the auteur ethos — will grow in cultural and economic value.
In a landscape of frictionless production, originality rooted in personal perspective, craftsmanship, and intentionality will become a key differentiator, much as Studio Ghibli’s hand-crafted storytelling still stands apart in a sea of mass-produced animation.
Conclusion
Whether programming code, building furniture, or telling a story, only humans are capable of understanding what people, and the world, might value. That’s one of the many inherent limitations of robots and AI: they don’t create in any meaningful sense; they merely draw from existing patterns and regurgitate on demand. In a world of increasing creative abundance, the human auteur and the niche will not disappear. They will become more valuable — and more meaningful — than ever.
And for what it’s worth, although I quit my lessons, I still play the piano every day.