can someone who can't write songs use ai to write one?

By Jess Santacroce
Music Writer, Phoenix Radio 

As generative artificial intelligence, or “AI” continues to weave its way into every part of life, debates continue as to how deep its impact could ever be on music. While many musicians and devoted music fans maintain that true music, like any true form of any art, must come from a human being, other people create and promote music and even musicians that are generated entirely from AI. Look for a side hustle or day job to finance a project in your music career, and you’re greeted with a screen full of videos promising that you can easily run a money making business by using AI to create all or most of the content you might need. 

Can you simply prompt AI to do things you don’t actually know how to do yourself?

The Heat Beat conducted an experiment to see if someone who has an extensive background in music, but no training or experience in song writing could use AI prompts to produce a song. The person entering the prompts is fifty years old, and has been singing since she was about three or four. She is a professional artist, but her paid work consists of novel writing, teaching writing skills to other adults, and content writing/copy writing for musicians, educators, and other content creators. She currently sings as a hobby/volunteer, but is not and has never been a professional musician. In other words, me. 

Rules

1. Since AI is promoted as the fast, easy way to attribute material to yourself that you didn’t actually create, I can only use up to ten prompts.

2. The song must be created entirely by me interacting with AI. Phoenix Radio has some amazing professional musicians working with it, including the owner and SHE-o herself, a talented children’s song writer, and my own husband, a professional musician and songwriter in addition to hosting “Masters of Jazz” and “Blues Power” for the station. I’m not allowed to talk to any of those people about this until the experiment is over, or attempt to actually learn anything about songwriting myself from any other source.

3. The song produced must be one that I would be willing to sing in front of other people. If the song passes that test, at least one other person, this time a professional musician, must express willingness to perform or record it without being prompted. 

4. I can’t “throw” the experiment by intentionally asking the bot to write about strange topics. I have to create a love song, a protest song, or a song about a situation typically addressed in song lyrics.

The experiment

I began by telling chat gpt I needed to write a song. The bot offered me a guide on songwriting followed by an offer to write lyrics from scratch, help me finish a half-written song, match a specific style or artist, focus on melody and chord vibes or make it sad sad or pretty sad. I asked it to write lyrics from scratch, told it I did not want to mimic any specific artist, and listed my real favorite genres, which are Punk/Alternative, Christian Pop, Blues, Classic Country, and Jazz. I mentioned I also like Metal. I asked it for a song about a woman who feels isolated even though she is married and has an office job, a description of a character I recently created for a novel I am working on.

The bot immediately pulled out the most stereotypical details possible. It wrote me bland lyrics about marital problems, which I noted my character does not have. Of course since I like country music, a truck had to be in there. I prompted it to remove those things, along with some things that did not make sense, like nods after I prompted it that the character becomes engrossed in an online environment. Once I fed it the information that my character is a musician, it wouldn’t stop writing lyrics about a waiting guitar until I directed it to take that out. One of the prompts was that it was meant to be a love song, another asked it to stop repeatedly mentioning the city after I told it that my characters lived in one.

Results 

After more prompts replying to revision questions it asked me and adding a few more similar notes, here is the song AI produced:

In a Way That Feels Kind
Verse 1
He’s working late, I’m here again
With hours I don’t know how to spend
I’m not unhappy, just alone
With questions I don’t say out loud
Chorus
I just want to feel loved
In a way that feels kind
Not corrected, not fixed
Just met, just aligned
I don’t want a second life
Or secrets I can’t keep
I just want to feel loved
When someone reads me
Verse 2
We speak in long and careful lines
About the weight of ordinary lives
Everyone arrives unsure
We leave sounding more the same
Chorus
I just want to feel loved
In a way that feels kind
Not rescued, not praised
Just seen, just aligned
I don’t want a second life
Or somewhere else to be
I just want to feel loved
When someone reads me
Bridge
If love is being understood
Then this must count as love
Final Chorus
I just want to feel loved
In a way that feels kind
Not corrected, not fixed
Just met, just aligned
If belonging feels like breathing
And silence feels too deep
I just want to feel loved
When someone reads me
Outro
When someone reads me


Its final message to me said that “we” could talk about where the song might appear in the novel. I may not be a songwriter, but I am a writer, and I could not think of a blander and less realistic plot line than if my musician character got into trouble in an online chat room, and responded to that situation by writing a song about looking for attention in an online chat room. Whatever went on in the online community would probably stand out much more for her than the fact that she was on a website.

When I started this experiment, I expected it to either succeed for AI, and end in a moving song written from the point of view of a lonely woman who got in trouble looking for affection and attention online, but was not necessarily about that, or simply fail and produce bland, corny content. It certainly did produce something bland and corny. I do not even need to show this to any professional musicians, as this is definitely not usable for me, either as something I would care to sing in an open mic nor as something I would incorporate into my novel.

I didn’t expect it to so clearly illustrate some of the reasons that non-musicians will never be able to replace songwriters with the help of AI. The AI bot failed to even pick up the detail that the character is set to get into some type of trouble in the online environment. None of the follow up questions asked about further plot details of the novel the song was to be based on. It didn’t even generate any follow up questions about the character’s husband and their relationship, despite being prompted that this was a love song. I would expect even the most predictable human-written song to be a “his love saved me” song, given the prompt that it was a love song, and that there were no problems in the marriage. Both AI bots and people can ask the most basic, the most likely, predictable questions and determine what would most commonly come next given a prompt. AI bots can even do that much faster and more thoroughly than people. But having the empathy required to care and ask which details would be the most meaningful to a human being in a situation is something only a human can do….and it is this caring...about anything...that is the root of a truly well-written song.