Untitled's founders say AI makes musical choices more visible

Untitled co-founders Dan Lilienthal and José Chayet describe a future in which making music becomes easier while deciding what deserves to exist remains difficult. In a new episode of Jackson Dahl's Dialectic, they connect AI generation to a longer history of creative tools that reduce labour and move more authorship into selection.

Their phrase is that music may be reduced to a series of choices. That does not mean the choices are interchangeable or that process stops mattering. The same conversation draws a sharp contrast between generating a complete song with one command and preserving the drafts, voice notes, versions and conversations that led to a finished recording.

Untitled is built around that second view. The service stores work-in-progress music without a public feed and lets artists share unreleased material privately or directly with listeners. The founders say it has 50,000 paying users. They point to Lorde's XRAYS collection — 49 demos and works in progress from Virgin — as an example of how the history behind an album can become part of the release.

AI can lower the cost without supplying the judgment

The useful idea here is not that prompting has replaced musicianship. It is that lower production friction makes judgment more exposed: which possibility to pursue, which version to abandon, what to revise and when a piece is finished.

That framing also explains why an archive of failed and unfinished attempts matters. If AI produces more plausible options, the artist's path through those options becomes more informative, not less. A finished file alone cannot show whether the creator directed a long process or accepted the first adequate output.

Lilienthal and Chayet do not present Untitled as an AI generator. Their contribution to the debate is a product philosophy: the creative record includes the chain of decisions around a song, and tools should preserve enough of that chain for collaborators and listeners to understand the work.