This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Find our full episode on creativity here. 

Fatima Mohamed Alshindi, 43, never thought of herself as a writer. Before the war in Gaza started, she was just another busy mom, balancing her online marketing job with caring for her five kids. Her husband, meanwhile, Monir Mohamed Alshindi, had made a name for himself with his business building and restoring classic cars — no easy feat in Gaza, where blockades made obtaining parts a consistent challenge.

“Many interviews were made with him on TV because he was a genius and creative person,” Fatima said. “He could fix anything, create many things.”

They were a happy middle-class family. And then, in October 2023, everything changed. Hamas launched its attack on Israel, and the Alshindis’ world exploded into chaos and violence. Like a lot of people in Gaza, they were soon struggling to get enough to eat. And so, in December 2023, Monir and their 14-year-old son, Izzaldeen Monir Alshindi, decided to drive to a friend’s house in Egypt to get some food, when Israeli military forces started an air raid.

“Military forces targeted him in his car with his son,” Fatima said. “After the first air attack, my husband came out of the car, went behind a building, and forces targeted the car another time and burned it. So my son, his body burned while my husband was bleeding on the ground. No one came to help him to save his life.”

Both Fatima’s husband and her son were killed.

The grief of losing them, especially in such a violent way, was overwhelming for Fatima. But there wasn’t much she could do — she was barely surviving. Their home was bombed and completely destroyed; she’d lost both her income and her husband’s; and she still had a family to take care of, amid continued violence and shortages. Even finding enough food and clean water was hard. But there was one thing she could do — she could write. 

“I find myself writing without any planning,” Fatima said. “Maybe it helps me to release my feelings.

Fatima found herself pouring out her emotions into stream-of-consciousness prose poems that she posted on Instagram. She wrote them mostly for herself, as an outlet for her grief. But last summer, one of her posts captured the attention of someone halfway around the world — a California artist and musician named TJ Arriaga.

“[She] was writing about how empty her home felt without her husband,” he said. “Just this deep emptiness, and talking about how the house itself was mourning him.”

The text was written in Arabic, but even translated, it struck a chord with Arriaga. Beside the poem was a picture of her husband’s and son’s death certificates.

“It just resonated deeply with me because she’d been through so much,” Arriaga said. “She had just lost her son and husband in a horrible way. And just there’s something about grief that I think your writing can take on this, like, poetic aspect to it that it may normally not have. And I just really felt her words.”

Turning grief into art, and art into survival

Arriaga first got interested in the plight of Palestinians a little over a year ago. He didn’t have any personal or family ties with Gaza, but the stories he was seeing and reading resonated with him in a deep way.

“I think because of grief,” he said. “Just seeing people in situations of grief that I find unjust, I connect with very deeply because I’ve experienced a lot of loss and grief in my life.”

A while back, Arriaga lost his mom, sister, and grandmother, and also got a divorce, all within a span of about two years. Ever since then, he says he’s been especially sensitive to the grief of others.

“I think a lot of times the world is moving so fast and the world keeps spinning when you’re grieving,” he said. “And I feel like that’s what the people in Gaza are experiencing. The world just keeps spinning, but their world is stopped, and like it feels very isolating and cold.”

So Arriaga decided to help in the most direct way he knew how — through online advocacy and fundraising. On Instagram and other social media sites, there exists an entire ecosystem of Palestinians posting about their losses and struggles, and Westerners who’ve dedicated themselves to amplifying their posts. The goal isn’t just to spread the word about what’s happening to these families, but to help them fundraise. It’s how a lot of Palestinians have been surviving amid constant shortages in Gaza, Arriaga says.

But without a Westerner to validate and share their posts with other Westerners, it can be hard for these families to raise money. Sometimes, it’s even impossible, since sites like GoFundMe and PayPal don’t operate in Palestine. 

“They have to rely a lot of times on a complete stranger to run their campaign,” Arriaga said. “And it doesn’t happen commonly, but sometimes somebody will scam the family and try to keep the funds.”

Pretty soon, Arriaga was getting flooded with requests for help — so many that he eventually stopped opening his messages, for fear that his read receipts could offer false hope.

But there was one person who was able to break through the noise — Fatima. By this time, Arriaga had become an avid reader of her posts — most of them equally poetic reflections on her own grief — and started corresponding with her.

As he took in one post after another, his gears started to turn. As an artist, Arriaga is a strong believer in the power of the creative process to frame stories and give them impact. So what if he could find a way to share Fatima’s writing in English, and in a format that would hit people emotionally the same way it hit him? 

That’s when the idea hit him: He could turn Fatima’s poems into music — music that he hoped could help bridge the cultural and linguistic divide.

“I think a lot of times, when we listen to music, we kind of in a way become the character of the song or we see things through that perspective,” he said. “We’re feeling it from the perspective of the writer. And I think when you’re watching news stories or hearing about these horrible things or seeing all the images coming out, there’s this detachment there that when you’re listening to music, I think is different.”

As a musician, Arriaga had the skills and equipment to make it happen. But he was reluctant to insert himself – his voice — into the music. 

“If I was to compose the song and then sing it and record it, then it’s like an observation and me singing about it, rather than trying to tell their story from a first-person perspective in their words,” he said. “Because it’s important that it’s their words, because they’re trying to be heard desperately.”

Using Fatima’s voice wasn’t an option either. She’s not a singer or musician, nor does she have access to recording gear. But for the last few months, Arriaga had been playing around with an AI music-production program called Suno that’s capable of generating entire songs, using whatever instruments and voices you want — including a voice that might sound like a Palestinian woman.

So Arriaga approached Fatima with his idea. She was a little confused at first about the concept, but gave him her approval to go ahead with it, and Arriaga got to work. 

Composing music with AI

One of the first songs Arriaga completed was based on a poem Fatima had written about the death of her son.

“That was a tough one because the subject matter in it is just so intense,” he said.

He began by feeding a translated version of the poem into the program, and then entering text prompts, like you would with ChatGPT, to give it an idea of the kind of sound he was looking for.

“I had like Ghazzawi [a term in Arabic that means ‘of Gaza’] in there; I had ‘Arabic female singer,’ ‘emotional,’ ‘mother’s lament,’ I think, was one of the prompts,” Arriaga said. “There were a lot of prompts.” 

Once Suno had produced a version of the song he liked, he would tweak it with further prompts, nudging it to evolve, iteration by interaction, in the direction he wanted.

“It’s almost like gambling,” Arriaga said. “You pull the lever and eventually you’ll get something close.”

The evolution of the song wasn’t a straight line. One of the benefits of AI music composition is that you can experiment with lots of different styles, but that’s also one of the dangers. Arriaga estimates he ran through roughly 100 different versions. 

He was working under a deadline — he wanted to get the song done in time for the anniversary of Fatima’s husband’s and son’s deaths — so he finished it in just a few days. Fatima told him she loved it; that she thought it was beautiful.

But artistic success was only part of what Arriaga was aiming for. He had a bigger idea for this and the other songs he was hoping to make: to post them on Bandcamp or streaming services, so that any earnings would go to Fatima directly.

“There’s already infrastructure where no matter where you’re at, if you’re Palestinian or whatever, you can still get paid,” Arriaga said. “And maybe if this catches on, it could become a way that families can earn some income directly that they control.”

The controversy over AI-produced art

Arriaga’s goal is a well-intentioned one — though he recognizes that AI-created art is itself pretty controversial. 

Much of the debate has focused on fears that AI will take the place of human artists and human creativity. But Nick Bryan-Kinns — a professor of creative computing at the University of Arts London who does research on AI music creation — says there’s more nuance to the reality of how people are using AI. 

On the one hand, he says, AI has the ability to enhance or enable, rather than replace, human creativity.

“I think the positive things, the gains, are maybe reducing the technical effort it takes to make a decent piece of music and get it to a quality that could be broadcast or listened to, downloaded and so on,” he said.

If you don’t have recording equipment or mixing software, or the technical skills to assemble a recording, AI programs like Suno make producing music a lot easier. 

On the other hand are a multitude of concerns — the risk that AI could put people who record and mix music out of business; the risk of having your work sucked up and copied by another AI model; the risk that it could atrophy people’s musical skills, or turn them from creators of art into editors and curators of art; and the tendency of these programs, at least the mainstream ones trained on mainstream music, to generate a predictable sound.

“You will get very bland kind of music coming out of it,” Bryan-Kinns said. “Very sort of homogenized, middle-of-the-road kind of music, which is fine if you’re making something where maybe the music isn’t the main point of it. Maybe it is part of a story or something to, in this case, sort of foreground a story to bring it to life. But for creating new forms of music or making music that really appeals to people and is something different or unusual, it would be very hard to be using something like Suno to make that.”

Still, Bryn-Kinns says, these programs do not mean the end of human creativity. Instead, he sees them as just another tool. Case in point, Arriaga’s work with Fatima’s poems.

“Part of the point there is about the person who created this music using Suno,” he said. “They did have to go through a sort of creative process, an iterative process. They had to listen to it several times. They had to think about the prompt. They had to change the way it sounded and so on. So, to me, that is forming part of a creative process.”

Also, Bryan-Kinns says, this isn’t the first time the music world has gotten upset over new technology. Take, for instance, gramophones.

“People were freaking out saying, ‘Oh, this is going to be the end of music!’ and so on,” he said. “But it actually, in many ways, democratized music, because instead of having to pay a lot of money to go to the opera or listen to a classical music concert, you could buy the record and listen to it at home.”

And that democratization is a big part of what got Arriaga interested in this project in the first place.

“People love to hate on AI and I understand that, but there also is some privilege in being able to take that stance,” he said. “I think that one of the benefits of AI is it can give people opportunities to create art that don’t have access to all the tools or maybe the money, or even sometimes the time. It can be a luxury to — like, I spent a lot of time learning how to use Pro Tools and play all these different instruments; and a lot of humans, they don’t have that privilege to even learn all the skills. But they may have the ideas and the vision. And I think that people being able to have access to a vision in their mind and to see it through, even if they’re using AI — that’s not a bad thing.”

Listen to the other songs Arriaga produced based on the writings of Palestinians.