investigating the latest claims about AI in music

By Jess Santacroce
Music Writer, Phoenix Radio

Despite what every article about artificial intelligence (AI) continues to claim, experience and experiments have continuously shown that AI cannot replace musicians. It cannot write a song that is anywhere near as complex, unique, or meaningful as anything a human songwriter could ever create, because it can never observe, reflect, learn, or feel the way a human being can. AI cannot teach about music, as it cannot truly respond to students and has a tendency to offer incorrect information. It is a poor music researcher for this same reason. 

Although AI can never replace musicians, music writers, or music teachers, many continue to claim that it can help with your music career. It can certainly take over basic tasks like generating a rough draft of a rehearsal and practice schedule, creating a draft of a budget for an independent artist, and making an outline for a lesson plan, but can it help you create art? The latest claim coming from proponents of using AI in music is that it can help musicians and other creative people explore genres, generate ideas and overcome creative blocks.

To test this, we performed three experiments offering an AI chat bot hypothetical situations a musician might face, and examining the results for quality and usefulness. The experiments were conducted by the author of this article. 

Prompt #1: Generating ideas:  I'm an amateur/hobbyist musician. I normally sing pop, country, and folk styles. I would like to write my first song, but I have no idea where to begin. Can you help me come up with a list of songwriting ideas?

Result: AI models are sometimes jokingly referred to as “plagiarism machines,” and when prompted to offer a list of songwriting ideas, chat gpt really lives up to that title. The prompt was run twice. One set of “ideas” was nothing more than a general description of the types of songs someone might write. Chat gpt 5 suggested I use one of the “common song themes” of love in transition, freedom and escape, growth and change, and simple joys among a few others. That one of course, was completely useless. I cannot imagine anyone who has ever even listened to music somehow being unaware that writing a song about love in transition, freedom and escape, and growth and change are options for themes.

The other set, however, included “ideas” that sounded suspiciously like descriptions of several songs that already exist. The bot encouraged me to “Write from the perspective of an object” and listed a guitar as the first suggestion. That idea was unfortunately already taken sometime in the early 1970’s, as “This Old Guitar” by John Denver was released in June of 1974.

While direct copying is still plagiarism, getting inspiration and ideas from the work of other musicians and other artists is neither new nor wrong. It would just be much more inspirational, and with streaming services, faster, to simply listen to a song for inspiration. If I wanted to be inspired to write about a guitar, I could have found “This Old Guitar” just as fast as I got this list of prompts, and it would have taken me the same amount of time to listen to it as it did to sit and read over these two lists.

Prompt #2: Exploring genres: If a musician typically writes punk/alternative music, but would like to explore genres and write something more like a love song, what should they do?

Result: Punk/alternative fans will of course see that this prompt contained a test. If the bot were truly able to correctly identify all existing genres, search out new ones, and help people explore, it would respond that what I just described is called “pop punk,” with the simple suggestion to listen to some “pop punk” bands.

Chat gpt could not even manage that. In the middle of completely generic observations and advice like “Love songs aren’t just soft happy acoustic ballads. Some  of the best ones are messy, conflicted, angry or even a little obsessive,” it did suggest a few bands and artists. Unfortunately, it missed the existence of pop punk as a genre, and the name of one of the most well-known pop punk bands out there. “Study adjacent artists,” the bot advises, “Billie Joe Armstrong: punk with sincere love themes.”

Any punk/alternative fan could have just told the person running this prompt that they were talking about “pop punk” and suggested they listen to Billie Joe Armstrong’s band Green Day in about half the time.

Prompt #3: Overcoming creative blocks: What do you suggest for a songwriter experiencing creative blocks?

Result: The Chatgpt bot suggested I stop trying too hard to write something perfect, listen to some music I normally wouldn’t listen to or hadn’t listened to in a while, write without my instrument, collaborate, give myself little challenges like only writing with three chords, stepping away for a while, and looking at what’s going on with myself beneath the surface. It also suggested studying other music, and imagining my audience.

These are all actually decent ideas. They’re just generic, likely to be ones everyone who ever needed a writing prompt has already heard multiple times before. 

To give the bot a second chance, I followed up on its offer of “If you want, we can get more specific—like what kind of music you write, or what your process usually looks like—and I can help you break the block in a more targeted way. “

My “musicianship” consists of being able to sing, and singing twice per month on a volunteer/hobby basis on my church’s worship team. I’m not a professional musician, and I have never written a song unless you count silly made up chants and joking around in childhood that all little kids seem to do, so I entered “Most of the writing is based on personal experiences, but random things can also serve as inspiration. The music genre is typically alternative.”

In response, chatgpt suggested writing from a different perspective than my own, starting with a song fragment instead of a whole song, breaking my own habits, and blending the random things and personal experiences.” Again, these are not bad ideas, though the bot certainly didn’t do anything a conversation with another human musician or other artist could do much better.

The bot ended by suggesting that my block might not be a lack of ideas, but something going on in my life right now. It wanted to help me “start a song from scratch, based on what (I’m) currently feeling.”

This bot was not programmed to help me. It was programmed to get me to keep using it, and to offer it increasingly personal information. Were I actually the songwriter in the prompt, this would, at the very least, cause me to waste time talking to a bot that I could have spent writing a song.