The MP3 Moment We’re Repeating With AI

I remember when MP3s first came out.

I was deep in the music world at the time, and the reaction from musicians and producers was almost universal: frustration. Disdain, even.

The sound quality was objectively worse than previous formats. The dynamics were gone. The peaks and valleys, the very things that made music feel alive, were flattened by compression.

If you opened up a WAV file on a screen, you’d see movement. Space. Air between the sounds.

If you opened up an MP3, you’d see something closer to a brick.

It wasn’t subtle.

And I remember people saying, over and over:

“This sounds terrible.”

But then something interesting happened.

A few years passed.

And artists began asking for their records to sound like MP3s.

Not because the format improved.
Not because compression suddenly became beautiful.

But because that compressed sound had become familiar.

People had been listening to so many MP3s that their ears had adjusted. Their expectations had shifted. What once felt thin started to feel normal. Even desirable.

The compression didn’t just change the sound.

It changed taste.

And lately, I’ve been thinking about how similar this feels to what’s happening with AI and writing.

When it became personal

I was working with an author on a very personal book. We weren’t just moving information around. We were sitting with stories. Pauses. Moments that took time to surface.

At one point, they said:

“Couldn’t I just run this through AI and have it write the book?”

It was a fair question.

So we tried it.

The output was clean. Structured. Grammatically sound.

And something was missing.

It wasn’t wrong.

It just didn’t understand anything.

It didn’t know what that sentence cost them to say.
It didn’t know the relationship behind the story.
It didn’t know why a contradiction wasn’t confusion; it was honesty emerging.

It had no context.

And context is everything.

What context actually is

Context isn’t just background information.

It’s lived experience.

It’s the fact that a word means something specific to you because of where you grew up, who raised you, what you lost, what you survived.

In music, context is the reason a singer’s voice cracks on a note.
It’s the room the song was recorded in.
It’s the years of playing slightly behind the beat because that’s how you learned to feel time.

In writing, context is the subtle rhythm of someone’s thinking.
It’s the imperfect phrasing that comes from memory rather than formula.
It’s the lived tension inside a paragraph.

AI can simulate structure.

It can identify patterns.

But it doesn’t know what it feels like to live inside a story.

And readers, even if they can’t articulate it, can sense that difference.

When “sounding like AI” becomes a problem

Recently, someone submitted a manuscript to us. One of our comments was that it felt like it had been written by AI.

They were offended.

They said, “But I wrote it myself.”

And I understood that reaction.

But what I said was this:

“It doesn’t matter whether AI wrote it or you did. If it sounds like AI, and you’re human, that’s the issue.”

Because what we’re seeing now is subtle.

Just like with MP3s, the more we consume compressed output, the more our expectations shift.

What we read shapes how we write.
What we hear shapes how we produce.

Over time, compression becomes the aesthetic.

And if we’re not careful, we start sanding down our own edges without realizing it.

This isn’t really about technology

I don’t think most people are afraid of AI because of job loss alone.

I think there’s something deeper.

There’s a quiet fear that human nuance might get flattened.

That context might become optional.

That the lived experience behind words will matter less than how efficiently they’re arranged.

But here’s what I’ve found over the years, in music, in publishing, in life generally:

When something becomes overly polished, overly compressed, overly uniform… people eventually start craving what feels real again.

They miss the dynamics.

They miss the air.

They miss the human.

The opportunity

I’m not anti-AI. I use it. I’m fascinated by it.

But I am very aware of what it can’t do.

It can’t have a childhood.
It can’t sit in a village in the mountains, wondering how life will unfold.
It can’t live through something and then write from the other side of it.

It doesn’t have context.

We do.

And the more compressed the digital world becomes, the more valuable that context becomes.

Not less.

So maybe the question isn’t whether AI will change how we write.

It will.

The question is whether we stay conscious enough to protect the dynamic range of being human.

Because if the MP3 era taught me anything, it’s this:

When we compress too much, we don’t realize what we’ve lost until we start missing it.

And by then, the work is to rediscover the peaks and valleys again.

The good news?

They were never gone.

They were just ours to keep using.