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Music is my constant companion. I’m almost always listening to a carefully curated new playlist or album. I believe wholeheartedly Spotify Wrapped Day It should be a national holiday. So, as an AI reporter who has watched the growth of the so-called AI music industry over the past few years, I decided it was finally time to see how these artificial artists stack up. So I set myself a challenge: I would only listen to AI-generated music for an entire week.
It’s been a very long week. AI music takes “art” out of the artificial plane. But it was also an educational and revealing experience.
The story of the AI music is an old recording that was played before. Musicians have discussed the role of technology in music creation for hundreds of years, beginning with the introduction of recorded music using music Phonographs to mainstream mixing and tuning devices and production technology. What makes this moment unique is that AI can create entire songs with very little human guidance. But the AI models that do this are built using music created by real humans A fog of legal problems and Moral chaos – Similar to what other content creators face e.g Writers, artists and filmmakers.
Music is one of our few global cultural touchstones. Generative AI is rapidly changing the way we make music and, in fact, changing our humanity along with it.
A week of AI music
For the purposes of my self-imposed experiment, I only listened to songs that had been verifiably modified by the AI. I was pleased to see that AI music sites offered a wide range of songs, but that initial excitement was short-lived. What was even more disappointing was that the vast majority of pop music was loud and loud – the plastic music version, in my opinion.
A lot of the hits were electronic music, which I’m sure EDM fans would have appreciated more than me. This reminded me of a common occurrence that every young person experiences: being stuck at a house party where the person on the AUX is an “aspiring DJ.” The house and techno styles reinforced the idea that I was listening to robotic AI music. It became difficult to enjoy them when I learned that there was not even the illusion of human creation behind the songs.
I did much better with country and folk music, which focused heavily on instruments and vocal sound. A lot of it looked like it could have been written by Noah Kahan, Kacey Musgraves, or Luke Combs. This is where I started to relax into my typical music habits – becoming addicted to a particularly catchy song upon first listen, adding those interesting songs to my playlist that I eventually preferred over exploring new music as I became more comfortable and attached to my favorite songs.
Then there was the really weird and weird AI music. Behind Sono, there is a whole world of… unique AI music on sites like YouTube. My favorite (or least worst?) was him 8 minute game of thrones discocomplete with music video, while my editor preferred Lord of the Rings version. I found the songs interesting, probably because they are music videos, not just songs Stunning and haunting images of artificial intelligence.
I have no idea what’s going on in that Game of Thrones music video, where the White Walkers are dancing like it’s the 70s, but it was something.
Technology and Music: A song that has been played before
Technology has always played a role in music. Music AI is part of a longer arc in music history, Mark Ethier, founder of the music technology company iZoptope and CEO of the startup Art Technology Lab at Berkeley, told me.
“when GarageBand “People came out, feeling like, ‘Oh my God, I can make music because I can pull out some guitar samples, get some bass and some drums, and I’ve made a song, right?’” Ethier said. “Where we are today is the most extreme version of that.”
Traditional music software, such as GarageBand, was intended to enhance and democratize the music creation process. AI music companies say they do the same thing, but there’s a big difference: You can belt out entire AI songs with just a sentence or two to direct the vibe. The underlying technology is similar to what runs in chatbots and image generators — Transformers and propagation methodsIn 2023, said Mickey Schulman, Suno co-founder.
AI music generators like Suno do more than just put together a song or edit a template. As with photos and videos, AI has made creating something that looks like it was professionally produced faster, cheaper and easier than ever before.
“(AI) has changed how easy it is to do, and how indistinguishable the output is,” Ethier said. Before AI, stringing a few loops together on GarageBand wasn’t enough to create an entire song or hit a record. “Now, this distinction is no longer clear,” he said.
The AI music scene has grown rapidly in a short period of time. Sites like Suno and Udio grew subscribers and gained notoriety. Sono I reached a milestone Of 2 million paid subscribers, its founder participated in February. But like other creative AI companies, Suno and Udio have been sued by record labels alleging that the AI companies used musicians’ work for AI training without permission or compensation.
Read more: AI Slop is destroying the Internet. These are the people fighting to save her
Can we make connections with AI music?
The amount of time I spent listening to music dropped significantly on the days when I was restricted to AI music only, and I felt this deprivation deeply. It wasn’t until I came across a certain category of AI music that I started to enjoy the experience. I learned that there was a neurological and psychological reason behind this.
There’s a reason why music from our teenage years sticks so strongly with us, Joy Allen, a music therapist and director of the Berklee Institute of Music and Health, told me. Our teenage brains are like a sponge, and music is one of the only things that activates every part of our brain, Allen said. These connections, fueled by teenage hormones and neurochemicals, stay with us long afterward.
“When you listen to music, it’s not just the auditory cortex that’s activated. It’s where you process emotions (and) physical responses are activated… Our brains like patterns,” Allen said. “If you think about music, it’s patterns, it’s chord structures, it’s the melody line…so we get used to patterns and predictability.”
My teenage years were largely dedicated to Taylor Swift’s soundtrack, and anyone who’s met me knows she’s still my favorite artist. But even though I knew what Allen told me, I was surprised by how emotional AI’s covers of Taylor Swift songs were.
A lot of the AI covers I’ve listened to have taken Swift’s songs and reimagined them in different genres. The AI-assisted pop-punk version of “You Belong With Me” sounded like it could have been sung by another band from my teenage years, 5 Seconds of Summer. It was strangely satisfying, with a heavy dose of nostalgia. It was also the only AI song that stuck in my head.
Nothing like Taylor Swift for a good dose of nostalgia.
We can emotionally connect to any music — in theory, created by humans or artificial intelligence, Allen said — during this time. But since my musical identity was already formed, the AI songs that brought out the deepest emotional reaction in me were the ones that relied on those connections and memories, releasing those neurochemicals in my brain. I’ve been more engaged and happier listening to these AI Swiftie covers than any other AI song. The songs were different, but they were still the words I sang into my hairbrush as a child and in a million other scenarios throughout my life, brought to life in a new way.
Although these songs were the highlight of my experience, they didn’t appeal to me any more on AI music than on the “original” songs. The AI very much reminded me of covers I’ve listened to in real life and watched clips of online. I loved the AI-folk cover of Swift’s “All Too Well,” but it was a cheap imitation compared to the guitarist I heard him sing in a coffee shop last year, or the indie bands adding their own individual touches I encountered on TikTok.
The power of a great artist lies in their ability to create music that inspires others, moves them and ignites the fires of creativity. Covers by human musicians are a way to pay tribute and express appreciation. The AI covers look like a cheap imitation and a mockery in comparison.
Music is human
I was disturbingly aware of my experience while I was doing it. AI music has never caught my attention in the same way as human music. With a few notable exceptions, AI songs were essentially white noise. I often found myself turning to Spotify to play better music. In the last days of my experience, there was no better music than AI music. Even now as I write this, car horns and birds chirping outside my window are better than fake machines.
Artificial intelligence has become a part of our lives, for better or worse. But it’s not just part of our technology; It is slowly creeping into our culture. Music is one of our most powerful cultural touchstones, and to have AI mimic so quickly and effectively something that is so inherently human is amazing. Worrying. But it’s certainly a very clear sign that AI is reshaping the very things that define our humanity. This has left me with an increasingly deep sense of fear about the havoc that AI is wreaking on our culture and humanity.
It’s not just listeners like me, but musicians too. AI-generated music is flooding streaming platforms, leaving companies like Apple Music and Spotify struggling to decide what’s allowed, what’s not, and what’s monetizable. It is even more complex from a legal and ethical point of view.
“As a musician, this is a really complicated time to understand instruments,” Ethier said. “You used to be able to pick up a trumpet and play it. You didn’t have to think about how to train that trumpet, or whether the trumpet owned your music.”
Music is inherently human and social by design. So it was no surprise that I felt disconnected throughout my AI Music Week. It was an isolated experience, no memories attached to key moments, no TikTok dances, no culture. No artist personality, little fanbase. No thoughts on “Remember how it jumped an octave when you performed it live?” It was a superficial listening experience. I didn’t want to visit them again once I finished my experience.
A lot of the music we listen to is linked to specific memories. The AI songs I felt most connected to were covers of songs I already had a strong emotional connection to: Taylor Swift songs that I first listened to as an eight-year-old in the backseat with my childhood best friend; Songs inspired by the 90s powerhouse song that my dad loves but my mom cringes every time he plays it; “Season of the Stick” AI wannabe that lacks Noah Kahan’s signature “dancing while the world burns” flavor.
Music records many of the moments of our lives, from the big moments like a couple’s first dance to the small moments that go unnoticed. It all piles up on our lives. Removing humanity—or worse, trying to imitate it—sucks the soul out of what makes music worthwhile.
So, no, I wouldn’t recommend just listening to AI-generated music for a week. But it was useful, if only to improve my concerns about the way AI is eroding our humanity.