The Author Is a DJ Now

AI won’t replace writers. But it will reward the ones who know how to play.

“This novel is constructed from other people’s novels, which I ripped apart, turned inside out, and repurposed for my own use, so I might better describe my little corner of the world, my people…if any young person breaks up this particular novel, strips it down, uses it for parts—well, then it will have completed its literary purpose in this world and made this author truly proud.”—Zadie Smith, foreword to the 2018 edition of White Teeth.

---

The cursor blinks like a metronome. It’s late. I’m at the kitchen table with a cooling cup of jasmine tea, rewriting a sentence that won’t behave. The model is open in another tab, waiting. I’ve given it a few lines to work with—enough to catch a rhythm—and something in the signal is starting to hum.

AI writing doesn’t begin in silence. It begins mid-beat—half a thought, a leftover line, the echo of influence still in the room. It feels less like authorship and more like being in a booth—headphones on, crowd pulsing below—scanning for the moment to drop the next track.

Not long ago, I would’ve closed the tab and called this cheating. I’d internalised the myth that creativity comes pure, untouched, from nowhere. That good art arrives whole. But that was never true—not for music, not for prose, not for anything alive. Originality isn’t about isolation. It’s about arrangement. The ability to notice what lands, to shape what already exists into something that feels inevitable.

The myth of the solitary writer dies hard. Dimly lit, romantic, tortured. One person alone with their thoughts, waiting for brilliance to arrive. But that image doesn’t hold anymore. Not in a world where the machine talks back.

This is an essay about authorship in an age of loops and layers—where the role of the artist is less about creating from scratch, and more about cutting the noise, tuning the signal, and holding the rhythm.

I write with fragments these days. Past selves lifted from paper notebooks, machine memory set to my taste, stray influences braided into resonance. I’m not afraid the AI will replace me. Instead, it’s helping me find my voice.

Sound Without Strings

When the synthesiser arrived in the late 1960s, purists scoffed. It didn’t sound “real.” It wasn’t warm like a guitar, virtuosic like a violin. It didn’t require calluses or breath control. It broke the rules, and people didn’t approve. But in the right hands—hands bold enough to experiment, tweak, stretch—it created soundscapes the world had never heard.

AI prompts the same discomfort now. “It’s not real authorship.” “It’s just prediction.” “There’s no soul in it.” But those objections miss the point. The value isn’t in the first response the machine offers—it’s in what you do with it. Success depends on the ear that listens, the hand that shapes, the eye that sees.

A good DJ doesn’t just hit play. They feel the room. They cut what’s flat, loop what moves, drop the next track just before the energy dips. The best AI writers do the same. They prompt, prune, remix. They carve coherence from chaos.

It takes judgment. Timing. The ability to say: this part, not that part. To know when to let the AI riff, and when to shut it down. As

Anu Atluru

writes in

Working Theorys

, “In a world where anyone can create anything, taste is what matters.”

The refusal is the fingerprint. The cut is the style. Your questions and criticisms define the parameters, output, composition.

• “The first two suggestions are shit. Let’s workshop the third, see if it has legs.”

• “What would Orwell have to say about that?”

• “I want this section to feel like a Four Tet song: melody, repetition, feeling.”

• “I want the prose to sound more Hemingway, but with a dash of Bourdain thrown in for flair. Any suggestions?”

• “It’s not embodied enough. How would Zadie Smith express that?”

• “The tone is less Bregman, more Didion.”

The tool is new, but the rhythm is older than ink. The tribe’s chief storyteller, testing variations at the fire. The poet by candlelight, rearranging lines while everyone else is asleep. A generation ago, writers sat at the typewriter, muttering lines under their breath until something clicked. Today, the interface riffs back. But the act is still the same.

Every artist samples. Every writer quotes. Every DJ loops. AI just makes the layers visible—and allows you to move faster. It’s not imitation. It’s intuition at scale. The ones who thrive won’t be the fastest typists; they’ll be the sharpest listeners. The ones brave enough to experiment, discover, learn.

Creativity as Community

Creativity has never been solitary. That’s the myth: a candlelit room, a closed door. In reality, making happens in motion—in orbit. At dinner tables with friends, in threads with strangers, in the spaces between people and form.

Gertrude Stein knew this. Her legendary Paris salon wasn’t a classroom or a studio. It was a site of collision. Painters, poets, misfits, future legends—all passing through. Talking shit. Reading lines aloud. Editing each other mid-sentence.

You see it in jazz clubs and hacker meetups, in underground raves and late-night road trips, in the smoky cafés of 1920s Paris and the Discord chats of the 2020s. Not just a vibe, but a frequency. A shared obsession with sound, with structure, with saying it better. With exploring truths about what it means to be alive.

I think about a recent evening on my terrace in Amsterdam—a long table, too many open bottles, ideas cross-pollinating over borrel plates. One guest talked about cryptographic privacy, another sketched a system for digital poetry distribution on the back of a napkin. I left with lines I still haven’t found the right essays for.

Brian Eno calls this scenius—not genius, but the collective intelligence of a scene. Where one person’s casual rant becomes another’s breakthrough. Where the room shapes the work as much as the individual does.

AI writing feels like entering a digital scenius—an archive of voices, rhythms, and references. You’re not just pulling facts. You’re pulling tone, pattern, mood. You’re trying to make sense of what it means to be you.

There’s a walk I take most afternoons—headphones on, music playing—just me and whatever’s still echoing from that morning’s journalling session. Sometimes a phrase floats back up. Sometimes it warps. I follow it until it takes me somewhere new. The ideas don’t happen at the keyboard. They happen as I live my life.

The internet friends who send you links you didn’t know you needed. The perfect conceptualisation buried in a longform podcast. The thing someone says at a party that rearranges your thinking. These are your materials. The machine doesn’t generate meaning. You do. The tool just gives you more pieces to work with.

Inputs matter. Taste isn’t innate, but cultivated. You collect your references, build your palette. It’s a kind of coherence. Not visual polish, but emotional logic: the throughline that makes fragments feel whole. The writing isn’t good because it’s clever. It’s good because it resonates.

The New Literacy

The worst AI writing is easy to spot. But the best? You can’t always tell where the machine ends and the human begins. That’s not a bug. That’s the blend.

Most people won’t ever step into the booth. The easier move is karaoke: type a prompt, get a song, and sing along. The outputs flow fast, frictionless, passable. Blog posts with no blood in them. Scripts that sound like scripts. Content that reads like a photocopy of a photocopy.

The machine doesn’t write for you—it lets you write through it. It just offers options. Possibilities. Ways through. Something to reject, respond to, take forward. The skill is in knowing what to keep, what to bend, and when to throw them all out.

I was stuck on a paragraph recently. I tried three versions. All were close. None worked. I walked away. Did the dishes. Came back. Reframed the question. The AI offered a line I didn’t expect—but I felt it instantly. I’d provoked it, not through clever prompting, not perfect phrasing, but discernment. Through this conversation and every one before it. I took the line and wrote a new paragraph in my paper notebook.

That’s the new literacy: The ability to follow a thread through unexpected variations, to swap between digital and analog. To leave space where the meaning needs to catch its breath.

From the Booth to the Page

Writing today feels less like a quiet study and more like a live set. You’re on your feet. Scanning the flow. Interpreting the room. Each prompt is a cue. Each output a loop. You build by layering, adjusting, cutting, trying again. Not the oracle on the mountain—but the operator in motion.

As

Ted Gioia

observes in

The Honest Broker

, we’re moving from the “age of the critic” to the “age of the curator”—in how artists and audiences find each other, but also in how art is made. You write the way a DJ builds a night: live, adaptive, in conversation with what came before and what wants to come next. The interface listens back. The cadence builds.

The printed book didn’t end storytelling. The synthesiser didn’t kill music. These tools didn’t erase the human. They changed how we participate. The shape is different in the age of AI. More responsive. More scene than solo.

We don’t need to protect some sacred idea of purity. We need to learn how to listen—and how to move. To hold the pulse, not control it. To know when to drop the beat, and when to cut the sound entirely.

The model is still open in another tab.

And the beat—

—is still building.

The tools will keep evolving. So will the skills. That’s the thing about good music—and good stories. We don’t need them to stay the same.

We need them to move us.

---

Thanks for reading Global Natives. If you enjoyed this essay, consider sharing it with a friend or community that might enjoy it too.

Popular essays: The Age of Pre-Grief, The Freedom Trap: Why Escaping the System Won’t Set You Free, Cosmopolitanism vs. Displacement: Running From Where We Came From