Light Box

Mark Henry Phillips has spent twenty years making music for a living. For Serial, This American Life, films and commercials. Then one night he typed a few words into an AI music generator, and it did his job better than he ever could. In ten seconds. Basically for free.

Light Box is what happened next: a season-long investigation into what AI is doing to music. But this isn't really a story about musicians or the music industry. It's a story about what happens when a machine can do the thing you thought made you you.

Mark talks to the hitmakers secretly using AI like performance-enhancing drugs. A legendary guitarist who calls it theft, plain and simple. An indie musician whose career was saved by AI. A 19-year-old flooding Spotify with fake artists. Fans of the new technology who lost every song they'd ever made when their platform was switched off overnight. The lawyers, the label bosses, and the CEO whose company trained on basically every song ever recorded — without asking.

Music is older than language. Everyone has a relationship with it. And it's where the questions headed for all of us are landing right now: What's actually ours? What's just pattern? And what's worth fighting for?

Light Box was reported and produced independently by Mark Henry Phillips at Windhill Studios.