Unit 10 - My Essay
The Biggest Threat to Musicians: AI and Its Potential.
Introduction
We have all used and experimented with AI in one way or another, whether aware of it or not. From using AI chatbots to a digital assistant such as Siri, AI has crept into our daily lives. But one thing we generally do not realise as musicians is the extent to which we use AI within music creation. My overall aim with this essay is to demonstrate how we utilise AI in our music and what its effects could be the more it develops. Each individual paragraph will detail different aspects I’ve researched that relate to my topic and what capabilities AI holds in music.
So, what is AI in regards to music?
AI itself stands for artificial intelligence, a technology that mimics human learning. This means AI has the ability to accomplish anything a human brain can, such as understanding a plethora of languages, writing your homework for you, and, unsurprisingly, creating music. To do this task, artificial intelligence software is essentially fed large amounts of relevant data to create an accurate answer to your request or task. In turn, this means it processes the data it takes in and creates new information to create your answer. The aspect that makes artificial intelligence so powerful is that it learns off itself and other AI based on its past inputs meaning it’s consistently improving in ways the human mind currently can’t. So, when we involve this with music, we get many different forms of artificial intelligence, all designed to help enhance our creativity. Despite this, music has begun to cause a ruckus within music communities due to arguments about when and if it should be used. (Youth Music, 2024) states that “in the right hands, it can be a really fun, creative, and rewarding thing to engage with,” but in the wrong hands, it can replace creatives in ways that I think are quite dangerous. I have found during my research for this essay that artificial intelligence is much more widespread than I had previously believed within music, and a lot of musicians could be using it without being fully aware.
AI and voice imitation.
There has been a growing trend I have noticed circulating on social media recently, specifically on TikTok. To the average listener, it would appear to be just another audio by a popular artist to scroll past; however, upon further investigation, you discover the audio is not an artist at all; it is AI. But how is this possible? How can AI create something so eerily similar to the original vocalist albeit with different lyricism. Well, as I have made clear by now, AI is managing to learn a variety of different areas of music production, and when it comes to vocals, they aren’t limited to simply writing lyrics or autotune. Artificial intelligence is able to mimic a human voice down to its accent, tone, and unique inflections. But this is not a new thing. AI singing voices have been around and exceedingly popular for years, most commonly under the software product Vocaloid. Vocaloid synthesises human vocals by allowing users to input lyrics and melodies, which the software then processes to create vocals. (Princen, 2024) This is a popular culture, especially within Japan, that has been around for over twenty years and is only growing and becoming more advanced. It works by recruiting professional singers to create different voice banks in an array of languages to generate AI virtual musicians. Each voice bank must include all the phonemes of the chosen language, making it a lengthy process to become easily accessible to the consumers. Be that as it may, this category of AI is constantly improving and becoming more efficient as artificial intelligence continuously learns off of itself. In fact, Cole S. (2024) explains that an AI software called Deep Voice only needs three point seven seconds of audio to clone the involved voice, an impressive—but frightening—accomplishment. As all these advancements are being made, it is no surprise that consumers are taking advantage of this complex technology and creating tracks using popular artists' voices such as Drake and Kanye West. As successful musicians, clips of their voices are spread plentifully across the internet, meaning the artificial generators have plenty of data to work with and the ability to make the cloned vocals high quality. Now many different artists have alternating takes on this as it's taking away their unique ability and making it widely available. The pop artist Grimes has recently spoken out about AI and stated that she would be open to “split 50% royalties on any successful AIgenerated song that uses my voice” (Savage, 2023). Which then in part sparked controversy about the originality and ownership of these songs, which relates to the next paragraph.
The Pros and Cons.
As with most things in life, there is two sides to AI, the pros and cons. Despite its current rise in popularity, artificial intelligence is still simultaneously gaining a bad reputation. In this section of the essay, I am going to highlight some potential negatives and positives of AI use in music creation so we can take a closer look into what it can provide for us. Beginning with the positives, artificial intelligence has become so prominent in music for the reason that it helps enhance our creativity. Artificial intelligence has a variety of different generators and software that can be used to support your music, from an AI drummer on Logic, which follows the groove of your song for those who struggle to create their own beats, to a lyric generator that can write an entire song based on the prompt you provide. All these different software are there to support and engage artists, using these machines to overcome writer's block and help inspire you and help you undertake new creative approaches and experiment with new content. As a musician myself, I have previously used an AI song generator to help me write lyrics to a song I was completely blanking on. Whilst I did not completely copy the lyrics, I can admit I took inspiration, and it greatly helped me write without thinking too much into my words, as I was given a set theme. Not only that, but artificial intelligence creates tracks online for a low cost, if not free. This allows anyone to get their music out there without the limitations of money stopping you from recording or learning. I find this part of AI particularly special as it gives those who don’t have the equipment to still share their creative spirit and reach their target audience and helps beginner producers to get higher quality sounds without spending a fortune (The Kits Team, 2024). On the flip side, it’s not all positives with AI. There are, of course, ethical issues when it comes to artificial intelligence within music. As I previously mentioned earlier on, when using a musician's voice or likeness, it can become a bit of a grey area on who owns the song. Some would say it belongs to the musician whose voice was cloned, whilst others would state copyright belongs to the AI or even the software creator itself. This all becomes an even bigger mess when you realise very little music artificial intelligence creates is ever truly original, it has to supply its guide data from somewhere pre-existing meaning it learns by analyzing if not impersonating songs that are already made (Martinez Jr, 2024). Additionally, whilst AI can provide impressive, intricate tracks, they often lack what can only be referred to as a human touch. It is like how cassette tapes have a warmer sound to them than digital recordings; technology tends to lose that personal emotion that musicians fill their work with. As of right now it can’t replicate that distinctive human sound, but who knows what it could do with its ever-expanding knowledge in the coming future.
How has AI developed in music over time? What’s in store for the future?
Artificial intelligence's influence on music has been around much longer than we think. Claire (2024) states that one of the first pieces of AI-generated music dates to 1956! It was a string quartet piece composed by the computer ILLAC I in an experimental project. From there, music has slowly crept up on my AI once people began realising its capabilities. Inventor Ray Kurzweil invented computer software with the ability to recognise different musical patterns and begin to create its own compositions soon after, which sparked the realisation that these machines can imitate what we do. But what we don’t really realise is that AI is everywhere in music, not just in random lyric generators. Modern autotune itself is AI-driven and allows you to make intricate adjustments to your vocals and provide more control. In the future, who knows what AI could achieve considering how quickly it is advancing? There is no doubt in my mind that soon enough big streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music will begin welcoming, if not designing, AI artists in order to be more cost-efficient and to get the exact sound they desire for their audiences, which will possibly in turn see a fall in promotion of human artists. We’re already seeing an increase in people using AI in their music creation with 60% of musicians already using AI (Duffin, 2024) and even 25% of producers getting involved (Rinder, 2025) Even AI-driven social media tools are allowing more engagement with music and predicting consumer trends for music to find its target audience (Berger, 2024). As I’ve previously mentioned, artists are now offering compromises on the use of their vocals, which I’m sure will become more and more common in the coming years with the rise of AI, and although as of right now much of this work is created for comedic purposes (and not of the highest quality), I believe once the right people get their hands on it, this will become a normal way of producing music, for better or worse.
Conclusion.
In order to write this essay to the best of my abilities, I conducted plenty of research from various sources to ensure I included none of my own bias. I will admit, I went into this project believing artificial intelligence to be completely negative and only saw it as technology that was potentially going to replace my passion. However, after truly looking into everything, I honestly believe AI has been essential for us to get to where we are today as artists. We’ve used it in autotune, mixing, and social media to promote our music and even as instruments on our tracks that we ourselves can’t play. To be honest, I will say that the speed at which artifical intelligence software is advancing scares me, who knows how far it could progress in even the next couple of years however, I know that even if AI tracks took of the majority of online streaming, that we would begin to value genuine, human music more as that’s what we love about it so much now. We relate to the songs and the artists and emotions behind them so in that sense, I don’t think AI is really a threat to music because AI does lack that touch that we love. Unquestionably, artificial intelligence has been a great tool to utilise, and I will continue to do so in the future. It allows us to produce the music we want to with more freedom to be unique. Unfortunately, even if live music is still valued, I do think AI is beginning to leave a negative impact on the music industry as industries and streaming platforms see it as an easier, mouldable (not to mention cheaper) way to make appealing music. Ultimately, AI’s effect is going to be whatever we decide to make of it; we have to make sure we use it the correct way to support our creativity instead of relying on it. If we can confidently use it as an aid and not something to directly copy from, I think it can be an amazingly powerful tool. Either way, I’m excited to see what’s in store for the future of music creation and what new limits can be pushed with the help of artificial intelligence.
Reference List:
• Youth Music (2024) The beat goes on: AI and the future of music, Youtube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBkuq2IYrLM (Accessed March 02 2025)
• Princen, G. (2024) The world of Vocaloid - the global music phenomenon explained, Yokogao Magazine. Available at: https://www.yokogaomag.com/editorial/vocaloid (Accessed February 28 2025)
• Cole, S. (2024) ‘Deep Voice’ Software Can Clone Anyone’s Voice With Just 3.7 Seconds of Audio, Vice. Available at: https://www.vice.com/en/article/baidu-deep-voice-software-can-cloneanyones-voice-with-just-37-seconds-of-audio/ (Accessed February 13 2025)
• Savage, M. (2023) Grimes says anyone can use her voice for AI-generated songs, BBC Music. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-65385382 (Accessed Februrary 13 2025)
• The Kits Team. (2024) 'The pros and cons of AI in music production,' Kits.AI. Available at: https://www.kits.ai/blog/the-pros-and-cons-of-ai-in-musicproduction (Accessed February 05 2025)
• Martinez Jr, A. (2024) The Rise of AI-Generated Music: What It Means for Artists, FlourishProsper Music Group. Available at: https://flourishprosper.net/music-resources/the-rise-of-ai-generated-music-what-it-means-for-artists/ (Accessed March 02 2025)
• Clair, A. (2024) 'What AI in music can — and can’t — do,' Vox. Available at: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/358201/how-does-ai-music-workbenefits-creativity-production-spotify (Accessed at February 25 2025)
• Duffin, M. (2024) 'AI Music Statistics and Facts: How producers use AI,' RareConnections. Available at: https://rareconnections.io/ai-musicstatistics/ (Accessed February 29 2025)
• Rindner, G. (2025) 'Why Producers IllMind & Cam O’bi Are Experimenting With AI in the Studio,' Billboard. Available at: https://www.billboard.com/music/rb-hip-hop/illmind-cam-obi-aiproduction-1235886057/ (Accessed February 29 2025)
• Berger, V. (2024) How is AI shaping the future of music?, PRS for Music. Available at: https://www.prsformusic.com/m-magazine/features/how-isai-shaping-the-future-of-music (Accessed February 13 2025)