Right message. Wrong messenger.

I heard a new song called"The Blindness Excuse" — an original track addressing racism and pushing back against colorblindness as a concept. The message landed. I appreciated it.

And then the creepy feeling set in.

Something in my body said "that's not a real singer" before my brain caught up. Turns out I was right The song was written by a white man using AI. Then a second artist created animated characters to “perform” it as a social media video — and watching that only made the discomfort worse.

I've been sitting with the EPOCH framework that I learned about in John Honingford's LinkedIn post,, who encountered it through MIT Sloan researcher Isabella Loaiza. EPOCH names five human skills AI can't replace: Empathy, Persuasion, Ownership, Creativity, and Humility. I was so inspired by it that I also wrote about it here..

What struck me about this song is that the creator bypassed two of the most important ones. Empathy requires actual proximity to lived experience — you can't borrow it through an AI persona. And Ownership means standing behind your work with your own name and your own face, especially when the work is about something hard.

The message deserved a real author willing to tell the story from the writer’s personal point of view as a white man. That would have been the braver version of allyship.

I'm still sitting with the discomfort. That's probably where the real learning lives.