Can AI replace musicians?

by Jess Santacroce
Music Writer, 955 The Heat, Phoenix Radio

Regardless of your career path, the fear of being replaced by artificial intelligence or AI, is common to most fields. Some even worry that the arts will be taken over by AI. While voices can be mimicked, simple jingles can be produced, and parts of songs can certainly be enhanced using artificial intelligence, the features that make music vital to our lives are the same ones that protect musicians from ever being replaced by AI.

AI will never write a song in response to something that happens to it or to someone else

Most lyrics have something to do with some form of strong feelings for or about something. . Romantic songs may be about anything from crushes to forever love between two people. Protest songs reflect feelings of anger, fear, and a desire for justice. Sadness, grief, longing, joy, love and gratitude, reverence for God, and even guilt, dread, or terror are all commonly expressed through song lyrics.

AI content generators can put together words commonly associated with all of those things, but it can never truly feel anything, or respond to a human being the way another human being can.

Jason DeFord, known professionally as “Jelly Roll,” has risen to fame among fans of R&B, Hip-Hop, Rap, Country, and Christian Contemporary music. In “Creature,” featuring Krizz Kaliko and Tech N9ne, DeFord draws parallels between the mythical “boogeyman” and “monsters in closets” from childhood and the song’s main character’s own bad choices with the line “The monster that’s outside my window, he’s like family to me now.”

This song, like much of Jelly Roll’s music, is described as reflective of his own struggles with addiction and past criminal behavior. When a listener hears “Creature” or another Jelly Roll song, they only enjoy listening to the music, they can both reflect on the inspiration behind it, and anything from their own lives or the lives of others they are familiar with to form an emotional connection with the song.

When prompted to write a song about addiction, chat gpt simply generated a basic song with the line, “I’m chasing the ghost, I’m chasing the high,” both common terms to refer to drug addiction, “chasing the ghost” being an especially common term used and explained around the internet.

Music enthusiasts do not only like individual songs, we like artists and bands

Jelly Roll’s music may have struck a particularly deep connection with fans who struggle with addiction and other serious issues, but he is far from the only artist whose music has formed a sort of community based around it.

Perhaps the most famous is “Deadhead” subculture. Beginning in the 1970s and lasting into the present day, people known as “Deadheads,” are devoted fans of the band The Grateful Dead, a band that has inspired them to adopt the values and aesthetic of the mid 1960’s-early 1970’s counterculture. Deadheads value peace, sharing, and a sense of community, and tend to favor a “hippie” or “bohemian” style in dress and atmosphere. While the original group disbanded in 1995 due to the death of Jerry Garcia, Deadheads have gathered as recently as 2024 for performances by “Dead & Company,” comprised of former members of the Grateful Dead with the addition of John Mayer.

Taylor Swift’s most ardent fans refer to themselves as “Swifties,” reflecting their enthusiasm for not only listening to Taylor Swift’s music, but attending her extravagant live shows. YouTube content creators Lizze Gordon and Ryland Adams even created multiple “days in our life” reality-show style videos centered around their efforts to see as many concerts on Swift’s “Eras” tour as possible.

In 2021, pop/rock band Train performed at the Great New York State Fair at Chevy Park. Among the crowd were young girls wearing homemade T-shirts declaring themselves “soul sisters,” in reference to the band’s 2009 song “Hey Soul Sister.”

Other artists’ collective music and their associated personas, styles, and genres inspire individuals to change their lives. The current Amazon fashion and style series “Wear whatever the <expletive reference> you want,” includes one episode featuring a man who was helped through his struggles with an eating disorder by punk music, and one with a woman who is finding her style and identity in part because of her love of country superstar Dolly Parton.

No AI content bot will ever generate a subculture, create a sense of community, or support someone through long-term healing and emotional growth.

The limited capabilities of AI content generators result in lower quality work

Anyone watching or reading the national news today knows that President Trump’s tariffs are a current divisive issue. When prompted to write an anti-tariff protest song, the AI content generator chatgpt’s first offering included lyrics it described as being “in the spirit of Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie,” and then appeared to mimic both artists. Microsoft copilot wrote “Once we traded far and free, built a bridge across the sea.”

When the same content generator was asked for a song about being a writing teacher for ten years, it came up with “Ten years of ink, ten years of dreams, a classroom filled with voices unseen.” And when “Write me a folk song about my dog, Callie,” was the prompt, the result included “Down by the creek where the tall grass grows” and “Callie runs free in the morning light.”

Even in offline classrooms, there has been little “ink” involved in writing classes for the past ten years, as most people have turned to taking notes on their laptops and phones, and it’s unclear how the voices are unseen if they’re writing things down and handing them in, but “ink” and “voices” are commonly associated with classrooms, so the bot picked that up and used it. In the “Callie” song, the bot simply picked up on country and outdoorsy details commonly associated with folk music and spit out “creek” and “grass” and “morning light” material, and since the prompt said “dog” and “folk” song, running free was read as a theme commonly associated with both of those words.

“Write me an alternative rock song about being a freelance writer,” resulted in a song that referenced “every pitch” described as “a shot in the dark,” despite the fact that writing pitches is slowing fading from the practice of freelance writing.

The bot was doing what it was designed to do, quickly gather common details from around the internet, and spit them back out in a technically correct format as input by the prompt. It has no ability to experiment with form or style, ponder the current political climate or career trends of a certain field, or pick out creative details and draw interesting parallels.

There will no doubt be more and more AI generated lyrics and notes in our future. But true music, that which is created from human experience, will never be replaced by a window on a computer screen.