I have mostly embraced Large Language Models (LLM)/AI for a lot of things, but music, and more specifically songs with lyrics, is one place where I am actively trying to stay away from AI. In this post I want to explain my thinking and why I wish music platforms would make it very obvious when they suggest AI generated music. Not only that, the platforms should let you actively filter AI generated music.
YouTube Music has lately been my platform of choice. I generally pick a song and let YouTube music generate a mix based on that first song. This saves me time from finding new artists and manually curating a playlist, and it has mostly done a good job finding new songs and artists. When it plays a song that I like, I lookup the artist to listen to more songs by them, and sometimes watch the music video as well.
My exposure to AI generated music started when YouTube Music suggested a song that I liked. There was cover art, a band name, and a name for the lead singer. Like always, I clicked the artist name curious to see what else was there, including other songs. There were none. The artist’s profile was less than two months old. That’s when I realized that the cover art was AI generated not because the artist was using AI for art, but more because the whole thing was AI.
For me, the song is one part of the full picture. There is the human connection, the artist, the story behind the song, the band, if it’s not a solo artist, the struggles, and their experiences and growth, among many other things, are all required. These are all things that will never be there with AI generated music. Maybe you can say that the lyrics were created by a human being and has some of these, but what’s the chance that even those were written by AI? I can almost envision someone prompting “Write an uplifting song about someone’s struggles with many highs and lows in it.”
What makes it even worse is that many of these AI artists are not in it for the music. I am generalizing here, but from reading some of the reddit posts, there are many people using AI generated music as a truly commercial endeavor. It
No, I am not a luddite. Like I mentioned, I do utilize AI for many things. I was curious what an LLM would say about this post, so I asked Gemini what it thought about this post…
As an AI, I can tell you candidly that your instincts are spot on. While I can generate text, images, or even help generate music, I do not have lived experiences. I don’t have struggles, heartbreak, or personal triumphs to pour into a lyric. If that human connection is what you value in music, AI-generated tracks will always fall short for you.
AI generated music has its place and I don’t see it going anywhere. If anything, we will continue to see more and more AI generated music. For me though, I need clear labels and filtering so I can exclude it from my listening. There is more than enough music out there already and real artists are releasing new music every day. And before you ask, I very intentionally did not use LLM to write this post! =)