Humanity is a winning strategy.

I am a video editor, so I deal a lot with stock libraries. Stock music, graphics, motion, and footage are all necessary tools for me to complete my work. That being said, I kind of despise it all. Finding the right stock song for an edit can feel like bashing my head against a wall. So I tend to bounce around quite a bit to different services.

My go-to is Soundstripe and has been for years. But recently I was working on an edit and was unsatisfied with what I was finding there, I signed up for Artlist. I like a lot of their stock library, but found that I pretty immediately regretted the decision. Wonder why? Take a look at their home page:

This is just weird positioning for what has always been a stock catalog. Scrolling down the page you can learn about their “AI Toolkit” to make images, video, voiceover, and music all with generative AI. It isn’t until nearly the bottom of the page where you can learn about their “High-quality stock catalog,” in a considerably smaller font.

What’s worse, this prioritization continues into the logged-in dashboard:

I only want one of those tabs at the top: “Stock Catalog.” Why is this the first thing I see? And even when I click over to the Stock Catalog, there’s an ad for their “Artlist Studio,” their AI text-to-video platform. Inescapable and annoying.

Pop over to Soundstripe, however, and you’ll see this:

In a pop of yellow near the top, it reads “100% Human-Made Music.” Soundstripe is using that fact as a marketing strategy. The only AI aspect here is a search tool for their catalog, which honestly is a good idea (if somewhat poorly implemented).

Clicking over to their FAQ, you can find their AI music policy, which reads:

AI-generated music raises complex copyright questions. Because all Soundstripe music is created by human artists, your licenses are backed by clear, established copyright ownership, and you’re directly supporting real working musicians. Human-made music also carries the intention, emotion, and craft that many creators and audiences still strongly prefer.

I should mention that I do use AI tools. A non-exhaustive list:

• Lightroom Denoising AI
• Pixelmator Pro ML background removal
• OpenAI’s Whisper models for audio transcription
• Photoshop generative fill/expand (tastefully!)
• Claude/ChatGPT for dataset processing, for small coding projects, for automated titling of tasks for work, or for an idea bouncing board¹
• DaVinci Resolve’s Audio Assistant and Voice Isolation tools

What I don’t and will hopefully never use AI for:

• Image generation
• Video generation
• Motion graphics generation
• Music generation
• Writing generation
• Art generation

If it’s a creative endeavor, I want to be in charge of it. I want ownership of what I make. I am the driving force behind these decisions. I’d much rather make something crappy but human and learn through that process than use generative AI.

I realize this is a hypocritical take given that I just listed the generative AI tools I do use. But I guess it’s like... using a shovel? I will gladly use a shovel to dig a hole in my yard. I won’t use a shovel to dig a hole in my neighbor’s yard (without them asking for it). And I will absolutely never use a shovel to crack skulls.

Bad analogy, maybe, but there it is. That’s how you know this blog is 100% human-written. ;)

I know Apple botched their Apple Intelligence rollout and therefore has an interest to bury it. But it’s still interesting to compare their homepage to Google’s about page. Google is all AI, top to bottom. Apple is all hardware, top to almost-bottom, where they plug their services.

I’m sure once Apple gets their AI ducks in a row, they’ll promote it. But I also hope they’ll see that it might have been a happy accident that they got delayed in their response to the market, long enough to watch the sentiment shift, and double down on humanity.

1. Honestly a lot of this use has been driven by web search getting so much worse. That’s also why I pay for Kagi. ↩︎