BoumTAC

AI and the End of a Hobby: When Technology Kills Musical Passion

Published on January 15, 2026

Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing many industries: automated customer service, translation, development, journalism, and even psychology with ChatGPT offering free therapy services. This transformation worries many people, but personally, it doesn't alarm me that much. Every revolutionary advancement — the car, electricity, the telephone, the internet — has created new jobs and new opportunities.

This is already the case for me with Lounio : without AI, it would have been impossible for me to create descriptions for each artist. It would have been far too costly in terms of time to write the descriptions.

But there's one aspect I've never seen discussed: AI's impact on our hobbies, particularly on musical practice. For the first time in history, a technological revolution could destroy an entire segment of our personal activities.

Why Do We Practice Music?

Before understanding what's going to disappear, we need to ask why we start learning an instrument. The motivations are much deeper and more complex than we imagine. First, there's this search for escape — clearing our heads after a difficult day, finding a creative outlet that allows us to decompress. Music then becomes a refuge, a privileged moment where we can forget daily stress and reconnect with ourselves.

There's also this thirst for learning and personal challenge that drives us. Mastering an instrument means proving to ourselves that we can progress, that we can transform hours of laborious practice into moments of musical grace. It's that intense satisfaction when we finally manage to play that piece that had been resisting us for weeks. This dimension of personal accomplishment is fundamental: it nourishes our self-esteem and our sense of competence.

Of course, there's also the financial aspect for some — the secret hope of being able to make a living from it someday, even modestly. But beyond money, it's mainly the social dimension that matters. Learning music also means developing creativity, meeting new people who share this passion, creating connections around a universal language. And let's be honest, there's this dimension of seduction — we can't ignore it. Knowing how to play an instrument is an undeniable charm asset.

The Social Prestige of "Sexy Hobbies"

Most importantly, it's about social status. I want to emphasize this because it's a delicate subject. Of course, above all, we practice a hobby because we genuinely want to do it — otherwise it's absurd. But we underestimate how much we also do it for others. To earn respect from men and desire from women.

There's nothing wrong with that. When we were little, we all dreamed of being a rock star or a professional soccer player. When we start a new hobby, we want to be able to show it to others. We want to show off the new Jimmy Hendrix solo we can play. That's classy!

As soon as you start running, you can't resist the pride of telling your coworkers that you just finished your first marathon. When you learn to cook, you're proud to prepare a good meal for your girlfriend and see the pleasure and admiration in her eyes. When you perform at your first concert in front of dozens of people, your friends and girlfriend, you're proud.

And that's normal. We do this to show that we're capable of learning, progressing, and producing beautiful things.

I could take my personal example with this blog: I write because I love writing, thinking, and developing my ideas. It's primarily for myself. But it also gives me tremendous pleasure to know that I have visitors who read me, sometimes multiple articles. I enjoy telling my friends that I spent the previous evening writing about such and such subject. It interests and fascinates everyone. It's my little pride.

A Frozen Musical Culture

We are stuck in musical culture. We always hear the same music. I work out at Basic Fit several times a week. There's always music: it's remixes of famous songs — Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Brothers Johnson, Marvin Gaye... These are remixes to avoid paying copyright fees. Basic Fit prefers to pay artists to make crappy remixes of famous songs rather than obtain rights to original songs. This shows how stuck we are in the past.

The other day, I went to a restaurant. On the way home, the music was "I Wanna Be Your Lover" by Prince, released in 1979, 45 years ago! The people who listened to this music in their youth are now 65 years old!

There's nothing wrong with playing old music, but the new musician who arrives learns to play songs published 45-70 years ago. The same way as the musician who arrived 10 years earlier, and the one 20 years earlier, 30 years earlier... We've reached a point where the young teenager who starts guitar will learn to play the same song that their grandfather was learning to play two generations earlier.

@beccasmelodies Beat it 🎸 wearing my new tee from Kimaa collective. Link in my bio 🫶🏾 (% Code: BECCA15) #guitar #michaeljackson ♬ original sound - becca ☆

Here's a young woman playing Beat It on the guitar, a song published probably before her parents were born, in 1982. She could play anything. But she's learning an old song.

The First Blow: Electronic Music

We learn to play a musical instrument because it's stylish. It's classy to play guitar, piano, drums, or even better to know how to sing at the same time. It requires a lot of practice — thousands of hours to master an instrument.

But the arrival of electronic music broke a good part of this prestige. With a few clicks, you can create an exceptional beat on a computer. It's a wonderful evolution that makes music much more accessible, but it has the disadvantage of breaking the prestige. What's classier between hitting toms and cymbals with sticks, and creating a beat on your Mac then pressing the play button?

Nobody starts learning drums anymore. It's expensive, it makes a lot of noise at home, it takes up space, and you can do the same thing on a computer.

"Style" is important. You only have to look at the Harpejji, an incredible instrument invented in 2007, almost 20 years ago:

@harpejji

🎹+🎸=?

♬ original sound - Harpejji by Marcodi

But it's not "stylish." You can't move on stage like with a guitar. It doesn't have the imposing presence of a piano or drums on stage. The instrument allows you to do fabulous things, but nobody uses it because it doesn't have the prestige of other instruments. Can you imagine a man playing the harpejji on stage after a solo by Jimmy Page or Brian May? It just doesn’t have the same presence.

The Final Blow: Artificial Intelligence

Now, with AI, we can create exceptional music:

With a few prompts, it's possible to create exceptional music like this cover of AC/DC's "Back in Black" in a soul version.

It becomes impossible to distinguish AI-generated music from music created by humans with real instruments. This is revolutionary for music: in the same way that a developer can create their own application and iterate on their code with AI, a musician will be able to create their own songs super simply.

The Death of a Hobby

But this destroys an entire hobby. Why train for years to practice one or more instruments if AI does better with a few prompts?

Electronic music had already done "some harm" to the scene, but now, it's going to completely finish it off. We won't get a medal because we didn't use AI to create our album. This is what's already happening in the world: nobody cares if AI is used. What matters is that the result is good.

Whether code is generated by AI doesn't matter. What matters is that it meets a need. If it can be done faster and cheaper thanks to AI, so much the better.

To my knowledge, this is the first time a technological revolution will negatively impact hobbies. Recent revolutions like the smartphone have only positively impacted hobbies: ease of discovery, sharing, and learning.

This is devastating not only for musicians, but for many artistic hobbies: poetry, painting, drawing... There are already thousands of AI-written novels on Amazon !

An Underestimated Social Issue

Hobbies are important for individual personal development, for relationships, and for social recognition. This is rarely discussed, AI's impact at this level.

How do we gain popularity and prestige now that AI is here? How do we attract the opposite sex? Before, it took hundreds of hours of practice in any hobby to reach a certain level. Now, with two prompts, it's solved. If you say it's made by AI, it removes all respect.

And this is particularly problematic for men. Our way of seducing is to show our skills, our mastery, our talents. That's how we attract, by demonstrating that we know how to do something difficult, that we've invested time and effort to excel in a field. Knowing how to play guitar shows that we have patience, discipline, sensitivity. It's a powerful social signal.

If we're deprived of this, if anyone can create perfect music with a few clicks, what's left for us to stand out? How do we impress, show our worth, create that attraction that comes from mastering a difficult art? It's literally shit for us.

When we see the disastrous impact that other developments like dating apps have had on social relationships, I'm afraid that AI will cause big problems in these areas too. We risk losing much more than jobs: we risk losing those moments of personal pride, those intimate victories that build us and allow us to shine in others' eyes.

The real question isn't whether AI will replace professional musicians. It's what will replace that deep satisfaction we feel when we finally master that difficult piece, when we make a room vibrate, when we impress our friends with our hard-earned talent. And above all, how will men continue to seduce and stand out when their main weapons — their skills and passions — become obsolete?

And that, no AI can give back to us.