Model Behavior: Rick Rubin
Watch now (31 mins) | “I’m certainly not afraid of [AI]. With any new instrument, you can make bad sounds, and then someone figures out how to do it well.”
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Substack promotes a special edition of Model Behavior, a series featuring top thinkers on AI, with an interview between founder Chris Best and legendary music producer Rick Rubin. They discuss AI's role in creative life, from writing to music, and Substack's introduction of the Pangram integration tool. Rick shares his thoughts on AI's potential in various genres and its influence on his own work.
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Model Behavior: Rick Rubin
“I’m certainly not afraid of [AI]. With any new instrument, you can make bad sounds, and then someone figures out how to do it well.”
Rick Rubin and Chris Best
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In this special edition of Model Behavior—our series that asks top thinkers, writers, and creatives how they consider and use AI—Substack founder Chris Best speaks with legendary music producer Rick Rubin. Rick writes The Creative Act: Thoughtforms & Innerworks on Substack, where he shares reflective insights and practical creative exercises drawn from his approach to art and awareness.
Rick had questions for Chris about Substack’s decision to introduce the Pangram integration, a tool that lets readers check whether text was likely written by hand or with AI assistance. Chris, in turn, took the opportunity to ask Rick where he lands on AI in his own creative life, from writing to music. Along the way, they get into which genres AI music might be most successful in, the story of the discarded wah-wah pedal that helped define Jimi Hendrix’s sound, Rick’s slow conversion to Nine Inch Nails, and a sci-fi scenario where every album and film could be made for an audience of one.
What follows is a lightly edited version of their conversation.
Chris Best: I’ll be honest about where I am on AI writing, AI generation, and AI creative assistance: I don’t know what any of the answers are yet. This stuff is hitting the world like a tidal wave, and I don’t think anybody knows exactly what to think. There’s such a wide range of perspectives. And I’m building a platform, so I don’t want to wait until every answer is figured out before we make it good. I’d love to hear where your head is at.
Rick Rubin: It’s so early. We have no idea how AI will influence writing, or whether it will ever be good, or what its strengths and weaknesses will be. It’s a brand-new tool, like fire for the first time. Fire is dangerous and can burn down your house, but do we pretend it doesn’t exist, or make it illegal? I don’t know. It’s very powerful, and it can do a lot of things.
I’m curious about it, and I’m interested in interacting with it to understand it. But I don’t have a good grasp of how it works or where it’s strong or weak. Most of the time, the results I get back aren’t satisfactory. Even for something as simple as a Google search, I don’t feel great about what I’m getting. That said, it’s a cool new tool that keeps getting better, and I believe at some point we’ll find a really good use for it.
Chris: In the software industry, we’re already there. My co-founder and CTO Jai [Jairaj Sethi] has gone from sitting at a screen typing all day to managing a fleet of robots. He says, “Hey, fix this. Hey, make this good” and gets back a video of the thing working. It’s transformational in software, which is different from creative work.
Rick: If there were a machine that could tell how much of your coding was done with AI’s assistance and that were somehow vilified, what would you do?
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