Dave Stewart learned to play guitar the wrong way. Twice.
First on his brother's out-of-tune instrument with a string missing. Then from the neighbour who learned to play in a Japanese prisoner of war camp and played more like a banjo player than a guitarist. Only when a friend from college came home, heard the noise, and re-tuned everything properly did Stewart actually begin to learn.
Most people would have called those false starts a waste of time. Stewart calls them the foundation of everything. Because the accidents, the mislearning, the constraints, the borrowed equipment, the £5,000 loan from a bank manager in Crouch End to launch the Eurythmics – didn't hold him back. They made him.
That's the thing about creativity that the AI conversation keeps missing.
We talk about AI as though friction is the enemy of good creative work. Faster. Cheaper. More. Remove the production bottleneck, lower the barrier to entry, and generate at scale. And yes - these are real and occasionally valuable things. At Rare Entity we use AI tools every day and believe they are genuinely transforming what's possible.
But here's what I keep coming back to: the creative breakthroughs that have actually moved culture didn't come from removing friction. They came from inside it.
Stewart and Annie Lennox made Sweet Dreams in a squat above a record shop. They went to work with Conny Plank – a producer who built his own mixing desk and worked out of a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, not because it was the efficient choice, but because Plank taught them the most important lesson of their careers: there are no rules. Mic the drum kit from six feet away. Put a microphone down a well. Turn the gain up on the soundboard. Do anything.
That lesson – born of constraint, shaped by encounter, earned through experimentation – is something you cannot prompt your way to.
The risk of this moment isn't what most people think it is.
It's not that AI will replace artists. It won't. Audiences know the difference between content and culture. They can feel when something was made by someone who has lived, and when it was generated by a system that has processed. That instinct is not going anywhere.
The real risk is subtler: that AI seduces the next generation of artists into skipping the adventures that make the music. That make the art, the experience. That make culture. You can’t avoid the friction that makes things interesting, not at the exact moment when the world is starving for depth.
As Dave often says, “Typing a prompt into AI to make a song is not the same as going through all those adventures. You miss out on life.”
He's right. And if artists miss out on life, audiences eventually miss out on art that means something.
This is why the question for creative businesses right now isn't "how much can we automate?" It's "what are we trying to protect?"
At Rare Entity, we are betting on a specific idea: that in a world of infinite content, the scarcest thing is genuine creative authority. Taste that was built over decades. Cultural understanding that can't be scraped. Instinct that was forged in specific rooms, at specific moments, in collaboration with specific people.
Roy Orbison was in Dave Stewart's garden. Conny Plank played the role of alchemist in a farmhouse outside Cologne. A bank manager in Crouch End made a decision that would fund one of the most iconic albums in British music history.
None of that had a workflow. None of it was scalable. All of it was irreplaceable.
The creative businesses that will matter in the next decade aren't the ones that generate the most. They're the ones built on that kind of depth – and are smart enough to use AI to amplify it, without letting it hollow it out.
AI democratises creation. That's true and it's worth celebrating.
But culture has never been democratised. Culture is earned. It's specific. It belongs to people who showed up, made the mistakes, found the collaborators, learned the wrong way a couple of times, and kept going anyway.
The future of creativity belongs to those people. We're building the infrastructure to back them.
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By Dom Joseph, Co-Founder, Rare Entity
