Mike Stone turns decades of martial-arts writing into 59 AI-made songs

Mike Stone, the martial-arts competitor and instructor in his 80s, has used artificial intelligence to organise a lifetime of writing and turn his poems and philosophical reflections into 59 songs in about a month. Stone, who lives on a remote island in the Philippines, told Black Belt that AI entered his life about a year before the interview. Rather than avoiding the technology, he began studying it out of curiosity, calling the discovery a “spark of light.” He used ChatGPT to sort decades of martial-arts philosophy, personal observations and creative work. Stone said a task that could have taken months or longer by hand was completed in minutes. The purpose, he said, was to unlock and categorise material he had already made, not to substitute for his experience or ideas. “AI wasn't replacing what Mike Stone had created,” he said. “The experiences, ideas and philosophy were still his.” Stone also used the AI music platform Suno to convert poems, thoughts and writings inspired by his martial-arts journey into songs. Hearing the work in that form gave him another way to experience the ideas and encouraged further writing, he said. His embrace of unfamiliar technology also extended to a driverless Waymo ride during a California visit. Stone said that education, knowledge and direct experience could change people’s fear of new technology, an approach he traced to advice from coach Jimmy Gregg when he was 15. Stone’s interest in AI is grounded in a long martial-arts career. A 2025 Los Angeles Times profile described him as 82 and said he had lived in the Philippines for 40 years. It reported that he won 91 consecutive black-belt matches without a loss and earned 17 10th-degree black belts. He sees a potential future role for AI in martial-arts instruction. A sufficiently advanced humanoid system, Stone said, could learn techniques, movements and training methodology; demonstrate and repeat them; and analyse students’ movements. With access to vast information, it could hold more technical knowledge than any individual instructor and potentially outmatch many people as a technical teacher. But Stone draws a line between technical mastery and the purpose of martial arts. He believes instruction should begin with values and principles, rather than simply showing students how to punch or kick. He cited the bow as a practice whose meaning matters as much as its physical execution. An artificial instructor could contain information about compassion, consciousness and empathy without actually feeling or experiencing those qualities, Stone said. In his view, AI may preserve movements and knowledge, but not the human qualities central to martial arts beyond information. That distinction remains material in research on AI coaching. A 2024 randomised controlled study found similarly moderately high levels of perceived working alliance between clients assigned to a simulated AI coach and a human coach, with no significant difference. However, the purported AI interaction used a Wizard of Oz design in which expert human coaches were secretly operating as the simulated system, and the researchers said AI with the full capabilities of a human coach remained far away. Stone also envisages a future system built from his writings, interviews, videos, teachings and experiences, preserving something that resembles his guidance after his lifetime. He suggested that people assessing AI’s pace should consider what may happen in five years, rather than 50. His conclusion was direct: “Don’t fear the future. Learn from it.”