In 2018, audiences sat down to watch a Spider-Man movie and saw something they had genuinely never seen before. Comic-book dots and lines on a computer-animated film. Characters who seemed to move at different frame rates. Onomatopoeia floating in the air. A visual language that broke rules people did not realize were rules.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse went on to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. And its producer and co-writer, Chris Miller, has a clear view on whether a machine could have made it.
“I don’t think AI could have made that first Spider-Verse movie,” he told The Hollywood Reporter, “because there was nothing like it to have taken from.”
That sentence is worth sitting with if you make music.
Where new things come from
A system trained on what already exists can get very good at producing more of what already exists. But the moments that move culture forward are, almost by definition, the ones that did not exist yet. There was no pile of earlier films that looked like Spider-Verse for anything to learn from. Somebody had to imagine it, argue for it, and then do the hard work of making it real.
Miller has made a public promise about the next film in the series too. Responding to a fan on X in June 2024, he wrote: “There is no generative AI in Beyond the Spider-Verse and there never will be. One of the main goals of the films is to create new visual styles that have never been seen in a studio CG film, not steal the generic plagiarized average of other artists’ work.”
Notice the goal he names: new visual styles that have never been seen. Not a better copy. Something new.
It is in the tiny details
In that same Hollywood Reporter interview, Miller talked about the wardrobe on Project Hail Mary, the live-action film he and Phil Lord directed with Ryan Gosling. Gosling had experiences with a fox, so he wanted a cardigan with foxes on it. He wore joke science T-shirts modeled on the ones Miller’s own son wears. As Miller put it, “Everything is a personal [detail].”
A fox cardigan. Your kid’s T-shirts. That is not something you can get by averaging. It comes from a life.
Back at the 2023 press conference, Miller made the same point about animation: what really matters, he said, are “these little observations about the ticks of how a person will, like, pick at their pants or give a little glance to the side … These are things that AI isn’t going to do.”
What this means for your next song
You do not need an Oscar-sized budget to apply this. You need to ask yourself a few honest questions before you write.
- What happened to me that did not happen to anyone else? Not “heartbreak.” The specific night, the specific car, the specific thing someone said.
- What do I notice that other people miss? The little glance to the side. The detail you would mention to a friend.
- What would I make if there were nothing to copy? If no reference track existed, what would the song sound like?
Those answers are your fox cardigan. They are the parts of the song nobody else could have written.
Let the tools carry the weight, not the vision
The Spider-Verse team used powerful technology. Phil Lord described the goal of those tools as making “the distance between the artists who make the film and the audiences who watch it … as shallow as possible.” In other words, technology should bring the artist closer to the audience, not stand in between.
That is a good test for any tool you use, AI included. Does it bring your point of view closer to the listener? Or does it swap your point of view for the average?
Your move: at PLAIGROUND, our Song Helper starts with your own stories, not a blank prompt. If you have a song idea that only you could write, bring it to wannaplai.com and see where it takes you.