Julius Smack engages in a dialogue with a fictional AI assistant to create an album using the prompt, “Make an album that tells the story about the origins of Julius Smack.” Starlight emerges as the imagined response, envisioning a world where beauty and violence intertwine, and memories and dreams are excavated to craft stories.

In a near-future Earth, where artists are among the planet’s last inhabitants, a symbiotic relationship has formed between humans and AI—each relying on the other for nourishment and healing. At the sight of a shooting star, artists mine their memories and dreams with generative AI to produce art, which sustains them but generates toxins that must be expelled upon the next shooting star by creating more art.

To compose Starlight, Julius Smack drew inspiration from all facets of life, with the album’s “dataset” serving as a kind of diary. It weaves together old demos, bookmarked TikTok clips of AI-generated content (such as a deepfake of Biden and Trump singing in Mandarin alongside Kamala Harris’ laughter), 2000s dance music, and ‘90s cyberpunk anime, including Ghost in the Shell and Neon Genesis Evangelion. Everyday experiences also became part of the dataset: learning Yaqui in online classes with fellow diasporic Yaquis, riding the train, walking the dog, and dreaming. These disparate threads coalesce to question AI’s role in creative and labor economies, forming a counterfactual narrative where everything—and nothing—is art.