What is a musician worth when AI can compose?

You trained for years, and now a machine produces in seconds what cost you so much to learn. Confronting what a musician is worth in that light is a heavy, honest reckoning. Do not rush past the ache of it. But worth was never only in the producing. A machine can arrange notes. It cannot have spent those years becoming the particular person you are, with your ear, your failures, your reasons for playing. When you make music, it carries all of that. That is not something a model can shortcut, because it did not live it. So stop measuring yourself against its speed, which is a race you were never in. Measure yourself by what only you can say. This week, make one small thing that is unmistakably yours, rough and honest. Your worth is not in matching the machine. It is in being the one thing it can never be: you.