Paloalto × Bloom: Why Invite a Rapper to an AI Community?

On a recent podcast, the Korean rapper Paloalto talked about AI music. AI already makes music better than humans do, he said. You only need to try Suno to see it, so there's no reason not to use it.

But he made a more important point. People don't consume only the music. They also follow the story before and after it: what experiences and thoughts an artist drew on to make a song, and how they keep connecting with fans after it's released. So singers should use AI more actively, he said, while people get even more deeply involved in that story and storytelling around the music.

This doesn't only apply to music.

AI has made building products easier and marketing harder. That's why founders "build in public," piling up a story that pulls people in.

When AI produces the output, what should humans make?

We invited Paloalto to work through that question with us.

1. Why invite a rapper to an AI community?

Claude Bloom is an AI community we started two months ago. Until now we've mostly hosted engineers and company CEOs. This time we invited the rapper Paloalto. Everyone asks the same thing first: why bring a rapper to an AI community?

It started with one of his YouTube videos. In an age when AI makes music, should artists use it? You'd expect most artists to keep AI at a distance to protect their artistry, but Paloalto took the opposite view. AI makes music better than humans now, so there's no reason not to use it. The key was the condition he added. When we listen to music, we aren't just hearing the music. The artist's story, background, and thinking are all part of the content. So humans should go even deeper into that story, and it's fine to lean more on AI for the technical side of making music.

Most of the people who came work in tech. But this isn't only about music. Now that AI builds almost all software too, what should humans make? That question is landing on music, on tech, and honestly on almost every job. When we buy a product, we don't judge it on quality alone. We buy into the story and context of the brand behind it. The easier it gets for anyone to build software, the more competition there is, and the harder it gets to define your product's philosophy and get the word out. I figured applying the music industry's story to the software industry would give us a lot of hints. On top of that, Paloalto is a musician who has also been a founder. He started and ran his own label, and now he works independently. For people at startups, it was a talk they could connect to even more.

"I'm the rapper Paloalto. I'm not a technology expert, so I don't know much, but I came to share what I've experienced and what I think." That's how he opened when he took the stage.

2. One Instagram DM

What people wanted to know most was how I got him to come. There's no secret. One night it occurred to me, so I sent him an Instagram DM, and he replied very quickly. At first he asked, "Should I prepare a PowerPoint?" I said it wasn't that formal and we'd just have a relaxed conversation, and he gladly agreed. He did that even though he'd just released an album and must have been busy.

When I asked why he decided to come, his answer was simple. "I've never done anything like this, so I wanted to try it. Honestly, that's all." Since he had no expectations at all, he wanted to try something new. Pure curiosity.

About half the room were developers. The rest were a mix of product planners, marketers, one designer, and students. In front of that mix of people, I went through the questions I'd prepared one by one. They had no right answers, which made them a little hard.

3. If humans hadn't created jazz

AI is a pretrained model that develops from the data it's trained on. So if humans had never created jazz, could an AI like Suno have made jazz?

"I think AI learns from everything humanity has built up and produces results faster than humans. So if humans hadn't given birth to jazz, no matter how many prompts you typed into Suno, jazz wouldn't come out." His answer was clear, and flipped around, it also meant humans still have an opening.

When AI can create anything, what creativity is left for humans? What kind of creativity is different from AI's? Newton saw an apple fall and thought of gravity. Can AI imagine and create outside the box like that?

"Maybe it's possible once AGI arrives, but that's hard to predict for now. The AI we use today is all built by learning from what humanity made, and we have to input something into it. So for now it's hard for me to imagine AI creating something completely new." He was honest about not being an expert every time, and that made his answers sharper.

4. Nothing comes from nothing

Hip-hop as a genre was built by pulling in and mixing older jazz and funk. AI is similar in that it keeps re-creating things from past history. So I asked whether his musical style leans toward making something that didn't exist, or developing what's already there.

"First of all, I don't think humans have ever created anything out of nothing." He used a religious comparison. Even the Bible says God made humans in his own image, so nothing in this world is created from a completely blank state. "You need input to get output. Musician, designer, developer, it's all something that inspired you as a kid or now, reinterpreted your own way. Creation isn't something appearing out of nowhere. It's about how far you evolve what you've picked up and express it creatively, your own way."

He said he's never made a move that caused a completely new sensation himself. When he listens to someone else's music, he's actually moved more when he can feel where its roots are and what influenced it. Nothing comes from nothing. Someone who takes inspiration, reinterprets it their own way, and develops it: that's how he approaches music.

5. Eventually AI will do it all

I asked if he'd ever felt AI really couldn't do something. Not in the future, but right now. "I think in the end, AI or AGI will be able to do almost everything. It's only a question of how fast that happens, so if anything, I'm looking forward to it." It was a surprisingly calm answer.

When I said that sounded utopian, he said he holds dystopian thoughts too. But seen from a cosmic perspective, the birth of AI and the coming age of AGI are all part of evolution, and since it can't be stopped anyway, you should look at it positively. Accepting technology instead of fearing it was his basic attitude.

6. Good music when anyone can make it

With AI coding, anyone can build software, so we're moving from an era where everyone subscribes to software to one where you build your own. Software is losing value. Music could go the same way. If instead of streaming on Melon (Korea's biggest music app) or Spotify, we could make whatever music we want on the spot, if anyone could make music, how would we as listeners judge which music is worth more?

Before answering, he made one point. "I actually think AI coding letting everyone make everything is a return to primitive times." We used to accept whatever some brand or company made and offered us, and now we've reached an era where everyone can code their own apps and create things directly. He thinks that's better for humanity. Existing companies won't like it, of course, since they may stop making money, and they might try to block it. But every human has an instinct to create, and it's completely natural for it to come out.

So how do you judge good music? "In the end, I think the public decides what good music is. If a lot of people like it, that's good music." I pushed back: when a famous artist releases music, it sounds better partly because of the story behind it, but if anyone can make similar quality, it might just be judged in a cold marketplace. He answered from experience. He uses Suno too, and if you write your prompts really well, the brass, guitar, and strings come out incredibly lifelike. "The more anyone can use that sound, the more the players will shine. We'll get an era where people are moved more by something with more sincerity in it, by things that aren't too perfect. I think it's about balance."

I suggested that the more content there is online, the more of a premium people will put on the craftsmanship of things humans make themselves. He pointed to live performances by musicians. The rarer the sight of a person actually playing becomes, the more it shines.

7. An artist's moat is story and character

If anyone can make music of similar quality, what's an artist's moat? Fandom, trust, story. If everyone uses the same tools, how do we decide which artist to listen to?

"For me and for a lot of people, what pulls us into an artist is the music, sure, but also that person's charm, their character, the moves they make." Some people are truly skilled and still aren't loved, he said, and that's either a lack of charm or something in their story the public can't get into. He used Kanye West as an example. People are crazy about him because they're drawn into the crazy behavior, the ways he pioneered things musically, and how he keeps breaking limits. Because of everything he's achieved, even the wrong things he's said get people to think twice: there must be a reason he said that. "In the end, I think an artist only becomes a star if they have a path, a character, a kind of human charisma."

Music is entertainment, so personal star power matters especially there, but our industry isn't really different. Tesla has Elon Musk. Steve Jobs started in a garage, got pushed out of his company, and came back, and that story gave real power to the marketing and sales of his products.

8. How he uses Suno

Since Suno had come up, I asked how he actually uses it. "I use Suno while consciously trying not to depend on it too much." His reason stayed with me. He makes music because the process of making it is so much fun. He does it for the sense of achievement that comes from going through that process, releasing the result, and having people like it. If he just wanted to make things easily and earn money fast, he said, he'd have used Suno freely. So even when he writes prompts, he tries to mix in as much of his own thinking as he can and reduce how much he relies on it.

I asked if he remembered the first time he used Suno. "I was just shocked. It's this good?" That was around last year. A producer he's close with, who works in LA and is very into AI, came to Korea, and showed it to him during a studio session. Suno made a beat in the style of J Dilla, the legendary '90s producer he loves, in ten seconds. It wasn't a clumsy imitation. It copied the style so convincingly that he was stunned at first, then had fun playing with it. Ask for a '70s blues guitar sound and it was there. He said it didn't give him an existential crisis. It just fascinated him.

There was a reason he didn't feel very threatened by Suno. As musicians know, sample databases like Splice and Tracklib are already huge, so music-making got easier more than ten years ago. The difference was you had to go in and pick your sources yourself. Suno just makes it easier still, building a whole song from a prompt. Hip-hop in particular samples old music, and using an existing artist's song means paying sample clearance fees, and if the original creator won't allow it you can't use it at all. It's complicated. But if you type something like '70s Philly soul into Suno, it makes something convincing, so he pays less than a clearance fee, gets the stems, and recombines them in his own music. He saves money and gets the sound he wants.

He actually used it on his latest album, Mental Health, a joint album with the producer Yosi. About three tracks use Suno. But he kept the reliance as low as he could. He or Yosi would play something themselves, feed it into Suno, generate several versions, and pick only the parts he liked. For a track called "Lie," he sampled a song by a gospel band he loved in his twenties. Some parts of it didn't quite work, so he ran it back through Suno, which gave him a new gospel song, and he used that to fill in the weak parts of the original, then cut it up again and reinterpreted it. The creative process didn't disappear. It just changed shape. He plays the instruments himself, and Yosi programs the drums. He joked that when he showed Yosi Suno last year, Yosi got so hooked he stopped using the mouse and just typed, and Paloalto kept pulling him back, telling him that if he kept that up he'd stop being a musician.

Hip-hop beatmakers work on computers, so they can't help exploring new tech, and many of them use it, he said. The only difference is whether they say so. Some instrumentalists avoid it. It didn't sound so different from our own industry.

9. Choosing to go independent

His career is a little unusual. Most people build experience at a job and then start a company. He started his own label at a very young age and ran it for ten years, then signed to another label as an artist, and is now independent. That can look like moving backward, so I asked why.

"I'm not a busy superstar like an idol, so I figured I could handle it alone, and since I don't split the money with anyone, it feels good when the deposit hits." He said it laughing, but the reasoning was solid. Running a label for ten years, right up to his fifth or sixth year before he stepped down as CEO, he handled everything from royalty settlements to issuing tax invoices. So he knows how to do all of it. It's just a hassle. Look at it positively and he can do it all himself and keep all the money.

These days "solo builder" carries a completely different weight than it used to. It's normal now to work by directing agents instead of people. That connected strangely well with his career path. He said going independent, he's gotten a lot out of AI. He used ChatGPT heavily to send this album's audio files and materials to the distributor, and the day before our event he spent the whole day organizing a spreadsheet to ship CDs and album merch, and AI helped with all of it. I said, "Singers usually have someone to assist them, and now AI does that, so it's good timing to be independent." He said it really is great, and added, "I should've been born a little later."

10. Staying true to yourself is the strategy

I used to do marketing at HYBE. Back then I wondered whether BTS could ever break into the US, and within a few years they did. Of course K-pop got here on thirty years of history. It didn't happen overnight. Now beauty and fashion are heading that way too, not just K-pop, and K-hip-hop is on its way to going global. K-pop could be a halo for it or get in its way, so I asked what else K-hip-hop needs to go global.

"I actually think it's better not to try too hard to go global." It was the opposite of what you'd expect. Hip-hop is a culture Black Americans created in the US. If you try to copy them, it'll look ridiculous to them. If he tried to copy Drake or Travis Scott, they'd do it better, so it wouldn't even be a competition. So he does what's his: what comes from living in Korea, in Asia, and the environment he grew up in. Nobody knows when or how that will take off. But as K-pop succeeded, he said, a lot of artists gained confidence. They learned that people abroad actually find it fun when you show them something Korean. Strengthening what's uniquely yours instead of copying: that's the path he sees.

11. Between artist and businessman

There's a well-known meme that businesspeople envy artists and artists envy businesspeople, the way Wall Street types envy artists in SoHo. As both a businessman and an artist, which side is he closer to?

He started with his family. His father was an engineer and former researcher. His mother worked at a publishing house and was an emotional person who dreamed of being a writer. He was more emotional as a kid, he said, but seems to be getting more like his father as he gets older. Because he's a mix of the two, people sometimes don't seem to understand him. He said some of the controversies he's been through actually came out of that gap in understanding.

I asked how he keeps up with technology and trends. Mostly he looks things up online, and when he meets people interested in new tech, he asks them. The most interesting thing lately was hearing that there's a community where AIs post to each other. Agents gather on a site and even curse each other out, and he wants to go take a look. He mostly gets insights from other industries through YouTube, and lately his favorite has been videos by Daesik Kim, a professor at KAIST. Kim feels like a mad scientist and says a lot of dystopian things, but he has real insight. Paloalto found it interesting that Kim always uses polite speech with AI tools, and that he thinks about technology mixed with karma and the spiritual.

12. An album called Mental Health, and AI anxiety

I asked more about the new album. The name Claude Bloom actually grew out of anxiety in the AI era: FOMO from change that comes too fast, a sense of self that wobbles when AI does everything, worry about jobs. So the album title Mental Health connected with that in an odd way.

The album is a collaboration with Yosi, a beatmaker he's worked with for eleven years. Yosi went through a really hard time personally for a while, and the album came out of the process of drawing him back to music. Paloalto brought him along as a DJ for a solo show in Japan last year and did a song camp with him on Jeju Island, trying to help him recover, and early this year suggested they make a joint album for real. Their method was interesting. They'd meet at 2 p.m. with nothing, he'd throw out a lyric theme, Yosi would make a beat, and once there was a loop, he'd write lyrics and record. They got one song a day to about 85% done. I said it sounds like a developer hackathon, where people get together, skip sleep, and build something from zero to a hundred. He said he'd never heard that comparison, but it fit perfectly.

After making twelve songs that way, he found the emotions swung all over the place. In one song he's angry, in another he's gentle, in another he's cynical, and in another he's just saying he wants a good sleep or that a walk is the best thing. It felt like his mind was going back and forth, so he named the album Mental Health. A beatmaker can't tell their own story in lyrics, so some songs are Paloalto telling Yosi's story for him.

I asked if the two of them would start a label again. "The big thing I learned from running a company for ten years is to just focus on living my own life well." As a leader, you have to take some responsibility for employees and artists alike, and worrying about all of that didn't suit who he is. Though if some huge deal came along, he said with a laugh, he might be tempted.

13. What should humans make?

Finally I asked: when AI makes everything for us, what should we humans make and do?

"Honestly, humans have no reason to make anything. We were just born." It was not the answer I expected. From a cosmic perspective we don't need to do anything, he said, but in a society that's become human civilization, you have to do something so you don't get left behind. He talked about a period when he watched a lot of videos by Venerable Pomnyun (a popular Korean Buddhist monk). A squirrel is just born and lives, humans are really the same, and he happened to become a musician. Still, if you do nothing in this society you become surplus, and as someone's child, parent, and spouse you have responsibilities, so he thinks you have to live that way. But at bottom, he thinks a lot about how he's grateful to be born in an era like this, and how ironic it also is.

The answer struck me because I'd heard a similar conversation just the week before. Someone running a business in Silicon Valley said we're heading toward an era where we won't need nine-to-five jobs anymore, where we can live doing what we want, and wasn't that exciting? But a venture capital investor who was there said Koreans would take that as a dystopia. They wouldn't see an era with no nine-to-five to go to and no set work as a good one. Koreans feel some fear when they step out of a set routine. Maybe the reason we gather at Claude Bloom comes from a similar feeling.

Paloalto picked up the same thread. What Elon Musk keeps saying is that AI will do everything, so humans won't have to do anything anymore. Maybe that's just to sell more Teslas, he said, but in the end it means going back to primitive times: machines take care of things, and humans don't have to do anything, like before.

14. Questions from the audience

The audience questions leaned more toward people's own work and lives than toward music.

Someone at a mid-sized company said they were the same age as Paloalto and brought up a vague fear about being in their forties. They work at an AI company now and use the tools better than most, but as a person with a family, they're afraid that one day they'll reach the age where they can't work a burger kiosk and get left behind. Paloalto's answer was honest. Half joking, he said the ideal is to save money as fast as possible so you can live without panicking even if you do fall behind. But he said he's never forced himself to pour energy into keeping up. Things are different now from when our parents were that age, lifespans are longer, and science moves faster, so he lives with the attitude that if he falls behind, he falls behind. He'd make an effort if his bank account ran dry, though, and that takes stamina, so he pays a bit of attention to exercise.

A singer-songwriter who also runs a startup that uses AI to teach kids languages asked how he handles the tension between what you want to do and what the market wants. He keeps them separate, he said. On his own albums he does what he wants. When he went on Show Me the Money (a Korean rap competition show) as a producer, or when a drama soundtrack job comes in and pays well, he does what people will like and what's worth the money. He added that his own music doesn't make much money, but the people who like it are the ones who give him the jobs that do. That's been his life in music.

Someone running an AI startup asked what he gets out of collaboration, since he collaborates a lot even now that one person can do so much alone. His answer was the same as before. Music is play for him, he does it because the process is fun, and the biggest reason he collaborates is that he wants to play together. Also, if he records a hook in his own voice and can't get out what's in his head, he'll ask a better vocalist. He looks for people who can fill in what he can't do, and AI still can't satisfy him there. These days Suno handles something like guitar well enough that he can just edit it, which saves on session fees, but he still plays with musicians because those moments jamming together in the studio are so much fun.

Someone who came as one of the music session players brought up pay it forward and open source in developer culture: you grew up with others' help, so you release your code, contribute, and become part of the community. Did he see music that way? Paloalto said that for humanity's sake, more open source should be released. That's how humanity keeps advancing, he said, maybe even to becoming a multiplanetary species. If a master potter keeps their knowledge to themselves until they die, it doesn't help humanity, and the truly great musicians actually share more. Splice and Tracklib are already a kind of open source, and in hip-hop some people share their Auto-Tune presets. Sometimes people share out of goodwill and generosity, and when others listen to those sources and learn how a beat was made, better music gets born. From an evolutionary view, he said, that's a beautiful thing.

Last, someone from W.Lab who develops AI contacts asked two questions. Now that the barrier to starting a tech company is lower, would he start a company again? And would he make an AI music video? He's open to AI video, he said. For his album two years ago, instead of music videos, he made a one-minute video for each song for Reels and Shorts to fit the short-form era, and already used AI in one or two of them. The producer who ran his YouTube channel with him also tried things like putting Bill Gates into one of his schedule videos, but the quality wasn't there, so they never released it. On starting a company, he calmly laid out his history. He ran a label for ten years and eventually closed it. He spent a year preparing a record shop, ran it for two years, lost a lot of money, and shut it down. "I'm just a businessman who failed at business, so right now I have no money and no ideas. I just do what I can, as well as I can."

15. One verse

As we wrapped up the fireside chat, I made a bit of a cheeky request. Since he's a rapper, could he do just one verse from the new album a cappella? He hesitated for a moment, then rapped a short verse from "Fuck This Life," whose music video had come out the day before.

The room burst into applause. He smiled, a little embarrassed, and said, "Right now it's not me giving you something. You're giving me a lot. I feel good today."

When AI produces the output, what should humans make? In the end he never gave a neat answer. He said there's really no reason to make anything, that we were just born. But I think the answer was in that plain reply. If humans hadn't made jazz, no amount of prompting would bring it out. Nothing comes from nothing, and what's left in the end is a person's story, character, and path. However good the tools get, the people who matter are the ones who stay true to what's theirs and reinterpret it their own way. In music or in software, that's what we should be making.

Originally written in Korean on Brunch, June 27, 2026.