What Can an AI-Generated Outlaw Country Band Teach Us About Collaboration?

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I built an AI-generated outlaw country band called Southern Oracle. Three women: Syd, Blair, and Maria. They play a sound I describe as outlaw country meets tarot and alchemy. They have lyrics, voices, visual identities, a debut album called Turn the Cards (on your streaming platform now). None of them are real, and all of them are mine. This is the part of my AI work that makes people in boardrooms look at me sideways. So let me explain what it has to do with everything else.

Here is what you need to know about me: I am an artist. My first degree is art history. I am a painter by trade. I am a poet who has published a best-selling haiku book. I play the piano, though I would not call myself a musician. I have been writing songs for as long as I can remember. What I am not is a music producer. When Suno made it possible to take my lyrics, structure a song, create distinct vocal characters, and style the music into a finished track, it did not give me a creative capacity I lacked. It gave me a production capacity I lacked. DistroKid put those songs on every major streaming platform. The question this raises is not whether AI made the art. The question is whether the line between my creativity and the AI's exists, whether it matters, and whether it should.

This is a project with my childhood friend. We have been writing stories together since we were kids, building worlds. Southern Oracle gives life to those stories with tools that did not exist two years ago. The catharsis of hearing a song you wrote performed by a voice you designed is real. But I brought the words, the narrative, the aesthetic vision, the emotional architecture. The AI brought the sonic realization. Where does one end and the other begin? I am not sure the boundary is findable. I am not sure it needs to be.

The hypothesis: creative projects with generative AI produce insights about human-AI collaboration that are inaccessible through analytical work alone, because they engage the builder's identity, aesthetic judgment, and emotional investment in ways that enterprise projects do not.

Three Takeaways

First, building Southern Oracle taught me something about co-evolution that my research frameworks had not captured. In my collaborative intelligence work, co-evolution is the mechanism where humans and AI systems learn from each other over time. In enterprise settings, I struggled to find documented evidence of it actually occurring. Building a band with AI, I experienced it directly. Suno generated musical ideas I would not have conceived. I shaped those ideas based on aesthetic judgment the system did not possess. The result was genuinely neither mine alone nor the machine's alone. Co-evolution requires creative stakes, not just task completion.

Second, the parasocial relationship with fictional performers is not new, but AI makes it available to creators, not just audiences. Horton and Wohl (1956) first described parasocial interaction as the illusion of face-to-face relationship with media performers. KPop Demon Hunters, named TIME's 2025 Breakthrough of the Year with over 500 million Netflix views, proved that fictional characters can generate the same intensity of parasocial fandom as human performers. Their songs charted higher on Spotify US than BTS or Blackpink ever had. But there is a difference between consuming a parasocial relationship as a fan and constructing one as a creator. When I designed Syd, Blair, and Maria, I was building what Winnicott (1971) would recognize as a transitional space: characters that are mine but also generated, existing between self and other. The question is what this creator-side experience teaches about human-AI trust more broadly.

Third, the line between human creativity and AI creativity may not exist as a line at all, and the more interesting question is whether it should. Benjamin (1935/1969) argued that mechanical reproduction strips art of its aura. Generative AI complicates this: the outputs are novel productions emerging from human intent and machine pattern. When I write lyrics and Suno generates music, the contributions are not sequential. They are entangled. I chose the words, the emotional arc, the genre, the vocal character. The system composed the melody, the arrangement, the sonic texture. But my choices shaped what the system could produce, and its output reshaped my next choices. Csikszentmihalyi's (1996) systems model describes creativity as the interaction among individual, domain, and field. Generative AI introduces a fourth element: a non-human collaborator operating within the domain's rules but sharing neither the individual's motivation nor the field's evaluative standards. I do not think the line is findable. I am increasingly unsure it needs to be.

The Longer View

Winnicott (1971) described transitional objects as items existing between self and other, between inner reality and external world. Southern Oracle occupies that space: authored and discovered simultaneously. Learning to hold creative intent while remaining open to what the system offers translates directly to how I think about leading AI transformation. The best outcomes come from holding your vision loosely enough that the system can teach you something.

Fernando Pessoa created over 70 literary alter egos, each with distinct styles and philosophies, describing them as personalities he channeled rather than invented (Zenith, 2021). Building Southern Oracle resonates with Pessoa's practice: the characters develop a coherence that feels authored and discovered at once. Generative AI makes this available at scale.

My Two Cents

Southern Oracle is the most fun and, paradoxically, the most instructive part of my AI work. The boardroom work is important. The research is rigorous. But the creative work is where I learn things I cannot learn any other way, because it is the only context where I am willing to be surprised. A band answering to no one but my own aesthetic sensibility and my childhood friend's is an open laboratory.

I came into this expecting the creative line to be clear: my words, the AI's music, distinct contributions, clean boundary. Instead I found entanglement. The AI's output changed what I wrote next. My revisions changed what the AI could produce. Does the line between human and machine creativity exist? Does it matter? Should it? I have a painter's training, a poet's publication record, a songwriter's notebooks, and a debut album made with a generative model, and I am leaving this experience with more questions than answers. That feels right.

A portion of proceeds from Southern Oracle will go to Girls Start. Somewhere out there is the girl who is going to build the first AI popstar that changes everything, and I cannot wait to meet her creator. The tools to make that happen are already here. Making sure girls know they are allowed to use them is the work.

Read to Learn More

Academic: Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. HarperCollins.

Industry: TIME. (2025). KPop Demon Hunters: Breakthrough of the Year 2025.

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