When AI Creates Something That Hurts (in a Good Way)

AI tools have become a natural extension of my daily life – like limbs I never had, but always should’ve. I use them constantly: to write and rewrite messages and posts, to restore old photographs and breathe them into motion, to dig up information, test ideas, argue with myself, debate politics, wrestle philosophy, and chase down ghosts from both past and future.

I translate live voice conversations between different languages – breaking down communication barriers, stitching people together. I scrape and parse social media profiles and websites to gain context and information advantage. I feed YouTube videos to summarizers, weave their takeaways into my creative workflows, and dispatch agents to plan weekend trips or book entire vacations. I set up MCP servers, create agentic systems, and automate processes spanning dozens of interfaces and applications. I orchestrate an army of coding agents like a slightly manic daycare manager – handing out (and creating new) bugs and specs, guiding progress, reviewing PRs. It’s ridiculous. It’s glorious. It’s exhausting. And it’s… fun.

Yeah, goodbye money (so much for the fun). It’s being sacrificed, enthusiastically, on the altars of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Cursor, Flowise, Adobe Firefly, Google Jules – and whatever else is next on the AI hype wheel.

Now – let’s park the whole conversation around training biases, the death spiral of late-stage capitalist AI tool providers, AI’s role in warfare, the Damoclean mess of copyright, the drama of what it even means to be a creator in the age of prompt buttons, the spread of false information, algorithmic brain rot, social erosion, inequality, and the melting job market. Let’s save that for another day. Probably another blog. Possibly another lifetime. Or leave it to sombody else; the internet’s doing just fine vomiting that discourse up every hour.

For now, let’s just admit something: I love AI.

It makes me curious. It excites me. It makes me want to push limits, smash boundaries, remix tools, blend workflows, and find new ways to reflect, organize, learn – and most of all, express myself. It keeps me moving. It keeps me building. It keeps me… alive.

And beyond the workflows, the agents, the automation – AI helps me share emotion.

It lets me create silly, deeply contextual memes out of private jokes with friends using Flux, Google Imagen, or ChatGPT. It lets me bring family memories to life with spoken words and comedic shorts via ElevenLabs, Veo, and Kling. I use it to make architectural renderings and inspirational visuals for mates trying to shape their ideas, through Firefly, Flux Kontext, or good ol’ ChatGPT again. And sometimes, I use it to turn memories into music – with Suno.

Suno, in particular, has brought an unexpected kind of joy into my life lately: it gives me melodies that would’ve never existed otherwise – because let’s be real: I’m not musical, I’m not motivated enough, and my ideas are sometimes so stupid that no sane artist would want to waste time on them. I create “one-shit wonders” – songs about the mundane, the idiotic, the inside jokes – just to provoke a single laugh. And that’s beautiful in itself.

But sometimes, the stupid turns serious. The joke turns solemn. The experiment hits harder than intended.

Sometimes, AI makes something that actually moves me.

Something that reaches into a hidden part of me and shakes it loose.

Like the song I recently made about Phương (well, I had it mad… eh, generate).

I used ChatGPT to craft a custom song text and define a musical style – based on the memories and context it holds about me and my ex-boyfriend. It even included a quote from one of Phương’s real letters to me. The lyrics were already haunting – still AI-ish, but sick. The style guidance? Spot on. But then came the real magic – Suno, using model 4.5, took those raw prompts and transformed them into a song that made me sit there, completely shattered, crying big, wet, ugly tears.

Was it “authentic”? Of course not. Was it soulful? Not in the traditional sense. It was synthetic. Composed by machines. I barely did more than type and click. But still… it hit me.

And not because it’s objectively good (it’s not, is it?). But because of what it meant – to me.

It’s my story. Our story. The loss. The longing. The fragments of warmth and coldness that defined our time together. The fire and the frost. The tears and the numbness. All of it was in there – even if only I could hear it.

This song would have never existed without AI. And I’m thankful for that.

I love AI.
I love this song.
And yes, Phương – I still love you, in that quiet, unfinished, oddly eternal way.

So, let this song be yours.
Strange as that might seem.
Given how it was made.

Suno – We Were Fire

Hero image: Generated with flux-1.1-pro-ultra on July 23, 2025, at 11:08 PM.