From Dear AI to I+AI

Three years ago, I started a conversation with AI.

It began with images. DALL·E, Stable Diffusion. I’d give it a prompt, and something would come back. Sometimes it wasn’t quite what I wanted, so I’d change it, and the AI would change it, and somewhere in the back-and-forth the AI offered ideas I hadn’t thought of — sometimes bad, sometimes strange, sometimes exactly right. I’d keep the good ones. We’d go again.

I loved that creative conversation. And I noticed that the results I ended up loving weren’t mine alone, and they weren’t just the AI’s either. There was something else that entered through the conversation.

So I started signing that work I+AI. Happens to be my name too 😅

Back then, I decided to build something with it, and I built Gabrielle — the world’s sassiest AI-powered advice columnist. I meant to just write the code. But the process of working alongside the AI was so fascinating that I had to write about it instead. So this blog began: notes from inside a collaboration, in the very early days of figuring out what collaborating with AI even meant. (Gabrielle’s still out there, by the way. You can still email her. She’ll still give you advice — sassily.)

In the three years since, Many of us have become collaborators. We write emails this way now, maybe do our taxes, build slide decks, or even talk through a hard week at 1 am with an AI that answers. Just this week, I talked with my AI therapist for hours about something I’d been struggling with. (Ash AI, btw — life-changing!).

AI is useful. I’m not here to sell you on it.

What I came here for is something else. The most amazing thing AI ever gave me wasn’t any of those useful things.

It gave me back music.

Before the tech career — twenty years at Google, Meta, startups, and more — I played the flute. I loved classical music. I played in orchestras. I danced on the Carnegie Hall stage once. Then I packed it all away. Slowly. Like a lot of us do. I moved to New York, I didn’t want to harass the neighbors, and late after work, there was no time to practice. One day, the flute was just another thing that had been sitting there for years, and I was someone who used to play it.

Three years ago, I started playing music again — with AI as the instrument.

And I got back more than just playing music. I wasn’t just performing someone else’s notes, a flute part in a symphony. Instead, I got a creative flow of making my own music — getting lost in something, sitting up late, swapping a lyric, an instrument, or a prompt, until something clicked and I could finally say: yes. This song describes exactly what I was feeling.

At first, I made music just for me. Stuff I liked, weird little experiments, a song for a friend’s birthday. Nothing serious. I wasn’t trying to be an artist. I just liked doing it.

Then I found out I wasn’t the only one.

I discovered whole communities of people making music with AI. Contests where you bring a song and strangers listen to and vote on it. Listening parties on a random Tuesday night. Challenges where everyone takes a theme and runs with it. I wandered in, shared some songs, and suddenly I had something I hadn’t had in years: People who listened. People who told me what they liked and what they didn’t. People I learned from, who made my songs better. And friends — real ones, all over the world.

At some point, I realized something else. Even the songs I made as a joke, or as part of a challenge, were very much my songs. They represented my view of the world; they were made up of all my influences, and I could see my life stories through them. Many of the friends I made, I’ve never met in person. But I know them deeply. Because they all write music from their lives — their heartbreaks, their kids, things they can’t say out loud sometimes — but show up in their music.

When someone makes a song and hands it to you, you end up knowing something about them that maybe nobody else does. They put it right there in the music. Music skips the small talk and gets right to the heart.

There’s a line I love. Fidji Simo — she runs applications at OpenAI now — gave a graduation speech called “The Golden Age of Creation.” It opens with these words: We are all born creators. That’s what the last three years have felt like. A golden age that’s already here — writing, coding, making art, music, turning ideas into reality. Many of us have already felt it - that power to make something you couldn’t do without AI. Meanwhile, many people are debating whether this type of creation even “counts” or is just slop.

My opinion: It hella counts. You should hear some of the music that my friends around the world create. And maybe you’ll hear something in my music, too.

So I’m bringing the blog back with a new name for what it's actually become: I+AI. Me plus the instrument. Sometimes I play it, sometimes it plays me. I’m not quite sure where the line runs. But it doesn’t really matter.

What I think matters more is this: what becomes possible when anyone can start making music? When everyone can access the power to express themselves honestly through a musical language full of emotions? I think there’s magic in that. In people hearing each other’s stories and realizing just how much we all share as humans, wherever we live in this world.

So that’s what I want to write about here — the stuff I’ve been living the last 3 years:

🎶 The people. Who they are, where they came from, and the wildly different lives that lead someone to pour themselves into a song.

🎶 The communities. The contests, the late-night listening parties, the challenges — all the joyful, weird things people do together when they come together to make music. There are things here that bring people together in ways that were never this accessible before.

🎶 How we actually make it. The craft, the obsession, the hundreds of versions behind one song. (No, it’s not one button press — I’ll show you.)

🎶 My own songs. The music I make is kind of my journal, so it’ll show up here too.

🎶 And Vibya — the company I’m building to bring people together around music. Out in the open: the dreams, what we learn along the way, and what’s interesting for the world.

Actually — no reason to wait. Let me start right now.

This is “Little Island,” one of my favorite things I’ve ever made. A small, late-night song about slipping somewhere quiet and letting the day go.

It was my first song on Spotify. Last October, I made it the opening track of a global remix challenge, and somehow, around 2,000 people made their own versions of it. It’s past 100,000 streams now — and unlike a lot of my songs, this is one I know people actually keep coming back to.

Press play and get lost in it for a few minutes.

If you’ve been getting creative with AI too — music, or anything else in this golden age of creation, I’d love to hear about it. Just reply and tell me what you’re working on.

And if you’re not, stick around anyway. Maybe one of these stories nudges you to start, in whatever way is yours. That’s kind of the whole point.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll learn something interesting for your own creative journey!

❤️🎶

Itai