The Man Who Bets on the Idea

Rick Rubin has been a music producer for forty years. He co-founded the hip-hop label Def Jam and worked on records by Johnny Cash, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jay-Z and Adele. He describes his own role simply: he deals with art and creativity, sometimes as a guide, sometimes as a collaborator on a project. Watch from 0:02:40 With Steven Bartlett, the British entrepreneur and host of the podcast The Diary of a CEO, he talks about creativity for almost three hours. A little over twelve minutes of that are about artificial intelligence, and that is where he makes the point this article is about: an AI lacks a point of view of its own, Watch from 1:29:30 and a point of view is exactly what we look for in artists. Watch from 1:30:49

The GuestWho is talking, and why he has something to say about AI

Rubin co-founded Def Jam in the 1980s; in the conversation he calls it “the label that I founded.” Watch from 0:18:14 He became known as a producer who gets musicians to make what they themselves love most, instead of what is currently playing on the radio. Watch from 0:16:10 His 2023 book The Creative Act is a bestseller about the path by which art comes into being.

He has his own experience with artificial intelligence. The AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, formerly at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and at Tesla, coined the term vibe coding: you describe to an AI in everyday language what a program should do and let it write the code. That same day, someone online shared a photo of Rubin wearing headphones, eyes closed, hand on the mouse, as an image of the idea. Watch from 0:05:35 Rubin replied with a joke: “Tools will come, tools will go, only the vibe coder remains.” The post was viewed one and a half million times, and Rubin set his other work aside to write a book about it. Watch from 0:07:18 The result was The Way of Code, a reworking of the ancient Chinese book of wisdom, the Tao Te Ching, for programming with AI. Watch from 1:19:38 The book came out in May 2025 in collaboration with Anthropic, the company behind the AI assistant Claude.

The QuestionIs AI dangerous?

Bartlett brings up the topic through a friend who has nothing to do with technology and who wrote to him that he was worried whether this technology would take people’s jobs away. For Bartlett, that was the sign that the question has reached ordinary people. Watch from 1:28:05

Rubin answers calmly. AI is an incredibly powerful tool, he says, and he is curious about what it can do. Like any powerful tool, it can be very dangerous and can be used for bad or for good. Watch from 1:28:30 His comparison is personal: a fire burned down his house. He means his house in Malibu, where he kept all his belongings and which burned down eight years ago, as he recounts elsewhere in the conversation. Watch from 0:51:50 Even so, he would not ban fire, because we cook with fire and heat our homes with it. Watch from 1:28:45 The same goes for the internet and for the printing press, which, in his telling, the Church wanted to ban because knowledge was not supposed to be available to everyone. Good things came out of both, and probably some bad things too. Watch from 1:29:03

The Point of ViewCan a machine be creative?

Asked this question, Rubin first says he doesn’t know; he is curious. Watch from 1:29:21 Then comes the thought that gave the video its title. Everything said in today’s conversation about creativity, he says, has to do with a point of view, a way of seeing the world that is one’s own. An AI has no such point of view. It is the collection of ideas that already exist, and it does not look at things from a particular angle. Ask it the same question several days in a row and you may get a completely different answer each time. There is no fixed stance of the kind “this is how I see the world.” Watch from 1:29:30

Bartlett presses him: if an AI generates ten million pieces of music, surely one of them will eventually be a hit. Rubin sidesteps the question about the hit. What counts as a hit is hard for him to say. Out of ten thousand pieces, you might like one or two, maybe five percent, and that would be quite interesting. Watch from 1:30:14 He recalls a way of working from the early days of hip-hop: producers searched record stores for a short passage on old vinyl, such as a drum break, and built a new track out of it. This was called crate digging, rummaging through the record crates. If an AI were running constantly in the background and he suddenly heard a good snippet, you could make something out of it, and that would be a worthwhile use. Watch from 1:30:25

He cannot picture an AI replacing the artist from start to finish. He would be curious whether it could, but what we want from an artist has to do with that artist’s point of view. Watch from 1:30:49

The DoorPeople who can’t draw can still create something

Here Rubin becomes almost enthusiastic. He sees AI as a tool that helps artists and perhaps also people who don’t even know they are artists. He speaks from the perspective of such a person: I can’t draw, I don’t play an instrument, I have no talent and no way to express my creativity. But I could talk to the AI and, through trial and error and ever new instructions, get it to make something beautiful. Watch from 1:31:13 Perhaps more people could be creative that way, and he finds that a beautiful thing. Watch from 1:31:32

An instruction like this given to an AI is called a prompt. You learn how to write good prompts by trying things out, Rubin says, and the barrier to entry is very low. He considers that a good thing. Watch from 1:34:56

The IdeaWhy the art lies in the instruction and not in the brush

Bartlett offers a thought of his own. When people say an AI could never write this or that great song, they often mean the whole journey that goes with it: the record label, the distribution, the artist’s reputation and life story. As an example he names the British singer Olivia Dean, whose rise many listeners have followed. Watch from 1:32:28

Rubin goes a step further. The finished works are only the result, a reminder, so to speak, that we are creative. Watch from 1:33:06 The real creativity is the idea that makes the work possible. The director Alfred Hitchcock laid out his films completely in drawings beforehand, frame by frame, so that in principle the film hardly needed to be shot anymore. Watch from 1:33:20 The American director Wes Anderson likewise builds his films frame by frame as a draft before any actor arrives, and can already watch them in full that way. Watch from 1:33:40 An AI could be a good tool for producing drafts like these. The creativity, however, lies in the prompt, meaning the instruction with which Hitchcock and Anderson tell their illustrators what belongs in each frame. “It’s not in the drawing. It’s not in the finished movie. It’s in the prompt.” Watch from 1:34:07

A little later in the conversation he gives a second example, the American artist Andy Warhol. Warhol started out as a commercial illustrator and drew shoes for advertisements, for instance. Watch from 1:37:02 Then he arrived at what is now called pop art, with motifs from everyday life such as a Campbell’s soup can. He may have painted the first soup cans himself. His most famous pictures of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, on the other hand, are silkscreen prints, and for those Warhol never painted or touched anything himself. He decided which photo would be treated in which way, and the people in his studio did the printing. Watch from 1:37:31 That does not make these pictures any less Warhol. The art always lies in the idea and not in who puts the paint on the canvas. Watch from 1:37:50

The same was true in the workshops of the Renaissance and afterward. The Dutch painter Rembrandt may have painted seventy percent of one picture and thirty percent of another, while students took care of the rest. Rubin himself concedes that Rembrandt may not be the best example; working with assistants, though, was common practice. Watch from 1:38:16 Today, studio musicians play on many band records instead of the band itself. That doesn’t make the record any worse. Watch from 1:38:51 He leaves his thought open at the end: whether an AI’s ideas will interest anyone, he doesn’t know. “We’ll see.” Watch from 1:39:06

The ObjectionThe song he suddenly liked less

Bartlett shares an experience of his own. He and his business partner heard a song on Spotify that they both liked a lot. Two months later he wanted to hear more from the singer and discovered that she doesn’t exist: the song had been made with AI. Watch from 1:35:56 From then on he liked it less. Watch from 1:36:29 It had moved him because he believed a woman was singing about something that meant something to her. When he learned that none of it was true, the song lost something. He compares it to Formula 1: if seven-time Formula 1 world champion Lewis Hamilton were no longer in the car, he would stop watching, even if the cars were faster. Watch from 1:39:14

Rubin agrees that a race without drivers would be less exciting. Then he turns the observation around. What is interesting, he says, is that Bartlett liked the song before he knew where it came from. Watch from 1:39:52 And he asks himself: would I reject something just because it was made in a particular way? “This doesn’t make sense to me. You either like it or you don’t.” Watch from 1:40:00

So at the end of the AI section, two of Rubin’s ideas stand side by side. What we want from an artist is their point of view. And whether a work appeals to us is decided when we listen, regardless of how it was made. Rubin does not connect the two ideas; the conversation then turns to stories from the studio.

What RemainsWhat makes a great artist, even with AI

If creating something becomes this easy, Bartlett wants to know, what will then set a great artist apart from a mediocre one? Watch from 1:35:10 Rubin’s answer: the same thing as today. You love an artist because they make something that changes your life and moves you, so that you want to hear a song a million times, watch a film again and again, read their books. Watch from 1:35:15 Whether an AI could write a book you would want to read again and again, he doesn’t know. He sees no signs of it. Watch from 1:35:42

Earlier in the conversation he had described what connects the great artists he has worked with. Usually it is a point of view: seeing the world in a way others don’t, or noticing something everyone knows and no one has put into words yet, the way a good comedian does. Watch from 1:14:59 Add to that hard work. Someone who is very talented but not willing to do whatever it takes will probably never be heard. Watch from 1:16:13

The Rest of the ConversationWhat Rubin says outside the AI section

Most of the nearly three hours deals with the question of how art comes into being. Rubin argues for ideas that cannot be justified. He calls them indefensible, which literally means “unjustifiable”; he means decisions that cannot be justified by reason and that you still consider right. Watch from 0:03:53 He never thinks about short-term sales figures while he works. Watch from 0:11:59 Every work is like a diary entry, and no one can declare a diary entry wrong. Watch from 0:12:38 As an example he names the band Linkin Park, who, as he tells it, looked for a new style with him after three similar albums. About half of their old listeners didn’t like it, but new ones came along in their place. Watch from 0:13:23

He considers comparisons pointless, because the singer Michael Jackson is better at being Michael Jackson and the musician Prince is better at being Prince. Watch from 0:34:22 He sets deadlines only once a project is about ninety percent clear. Watch from 0:36:11 He divides the path there into four stages: gathering the seeds of an idea, experimenting, crafting and completing. Watch from 0:38:28

A longer section deals with how strongly our own image of ourselves can pin us down, for example as a lawyer in Manhattan, and with the idea that anyone can start over at any time. Watch from 0:59:41 Rubin also speaks openly about a severe depressive phase at age 33, triggered when a new boss at a major music company called his contract into question. It took him years to come out of it, and since then he has understood the artists he works with better. Watch from 1:08:23 He learned to meditate at fourteen. Watch from 0:20:48

The Cross-CheckWhat the title promises and what Rubin says

The video’s title claims there is one skill AI can never steal. Rubin is not that certain in the conversation. Asked whether AI can be creative, he answers that he doesn’t know. Watch from 1:29:21 Whether an AI’s ideas will interest anyone, he leaves open with “we’ll see.” Watch from 1:39:06 The “never” appears only in the video title.

Two of his examples are exaggerations. The Church did not ban the printing press; it used the press itself and soon controlled it: printed works needed church approval, and from 1559 there was an index of forbidden books. And that Warhol used assistants in his studio for his silkscreens is well documented; how much he touched himself varied from work to work. With the Rembrandt example, Rubin qualifies himself.

His description of AI is essentially accurate. AI models learn from existing texts, images and sounds, and they often give different answers to the same question because their outputs deliberately contain an element of chance. Providers can, however, give them fixed instructions for tone and attitude. Whether that amounts to a point of view in Rubin’s sense is a question the conversation does not answer.

What remains untouched: forty years of experience in the studio, his examples from film history and the question he himself leaves open, whether we hear a work differently once we know how it was made.

Summary and context by kipode.de. The text is our own; statements from the original are timestamped. The video is from The Diary of a CEO and is embedded via the official YouTube player. Not an official translation, no connection to the podcast.