Uhlík vs Křemík · Czech podcast about artificial intelligence

Mike Trafik of PSH Lets AI Help with Business, Not with Music

Episode 13 · 8 July 2026 · 57:28 · Guest: Michal Řepka

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Michal Řepka, known as Mike Trafik, the musical heart of the rap group PSH, was a guest on the Uhlík vs Křemík podcast. With hosts David Salomon and Adam Hanka he talked about why he keeps artificial intelligence out of his music, what it was like to ride an autonomous taxi in Austin and why his restaurant does not need a digital revolution yet.

Music stays handmade

Mike Trafik says he does not use artificial intelligence when working on music. He enjoys the whole process, including the slow steps he could make easier. He uses ChatGPT pragmatically: he enters a few keywords to get longer texts for his business and production work that he does not feel like writing from scratch. He still makes the result more human, because the dry and artificial form bothers him. Adam Hanka summed it up: music is a product he does not let AI touch, while the logistics around it are fair game.

He has been making music for about twenty-five years. When he started, production meant expensive, hard-to-get hardware and know-how nobody would give you. Today software is enough and sound banks are at hand. He thinks that is great, but there is another side to it: "if something is lying in front of you on a plate, it does not push you to look for ways to squeeze the most out of it". That is why you have to be tougher on yourself and put in the work, because you can hear it in the end.

Asked whether he loses plays because of AI-generated music, he said he does not primarily compete for them. He does not want to compete with musicians a generation younger, and he believes his music is original and his own precisely because he keeps AI out of it.

Creativity is not at risk, caution helps

According to Mike Trafik, artificial intelligence will not fatally threaten creativity and originality, because that is a deeply human discipline. As an example he mentioned the NFT boom, which in his view is already dead. On moral questions, though, he is more cautious, even a bit sceptical. He sees how people handle an overload of information and cannot sort it. AI, he says, therefore needs oversight and guardrails. Just as democracy has slow approval and decision processes, nothing should be rushed here either, because time can work in our favour.

Later in the conversation, when the guest talked about values, Adam Hanka remarked that when we fear AI, we are really afraid of ourselves, because we pour ourselves into it. In his own field, programming, he has seen artificial intelligence change everything within a few years, whereas in music the steps are slower.

Robotaxis in Austin and the American contrast

It was Mike Trafik's first time in America. On the way from Washington to Austin they drove through the countryside of the East Coast, and in Austin he rode an autonomous taxi several times. He described it as a really strange feeling, with the steering wheel turning in front of him and nobody sitting there. By the third ride he ignored it and adjusted the temperature and the music. A ride cost about six dollars, similar to an Uber.

The biggest shock for him, though, was how little Americans seem to care about what happens anywhere outside their world. His second observation was the difference between America and Europe: "there you really have to be very clumsy and very unlucky not to succeed". In Europe, he says, it is the other way round, you have to be very skilled and lucky. He noticed it mainly in the restaurant business, when he came across a roadside chain with nine hundred branches.

Restaurants as a protected zone

Today Mike Trafik has one restaurant, which combines Asian cuisines with the rest of the world and makes fresh Japanese noodles that other Prague restaurants buy from it. He says himself that the nineteenth century rules there, and he is not ashamed of it. In his view, an online booking system will not bring more business to a single pub, and people come mainly to eat well. It would be different with fifty or a hundred branches, which could not be run with pencil and paper.

Adam Hanka pointed out that AI fits where data is created: invoices, emails or bookings. He distinguishes intensification, when you make something existing more efficient, from extensification, when you want to copy the operation and grow. For his restaurant, he says, data analysis would make sense once it wants to scale noodle sales to more restaurants.

You can hear the whole conversation in the Uhlík vs Křemík podcast.

The episode is in Czech. Czech page with chapters, quotes and the full transcript