Is using Ai in music a good or bad thing ?
I’ve always been inspired by science and technology, one of my main passions with music since I am a student : The wild and fast progress, the new developments and new ways of working it constantly opens to us in so many fields : health, industries, research, education, art… However, and as it always seems to have been the case, the fast progress of computer science must always be carefully checked as it can have wonderful impacts and at the same time open doors to new threats and downsides.
The world is definitely buzzing about Ai, increasingly these last three year, as the use of generative Ai (such as Chatgpt, Microsoft Copilot, Mistral, DeepSeek…) is becoming more widely spread and is increasingly used in engineering, education, marketing…
The purpose of this article is of course not to explore each field and review each threat and benefits one could see related to Ai.
Coming back to Art and Music, the central subject of interest in this article, this brings us to the inevitable question. What is the new place of Art given this sudden thrive of technology and Ai ? What place should be left to authenticity as no Art, I feel, can touch humans if it doesn’t carry a deep message, conveys emotions and touch hearts. Can machines do this as well as humans? The answer is of course no…
Then how to use technology and Ai in art, in such a context?
Should we still look at Ai and its possible benefits or ignore it because of all the uncontrolled consequences it brings if used excessively?
It seems quite difficult and even absurd to ignore the period in which you live, as you end up overlooking new paths, new ways of progress which other fellow artists will be using. It is also a risk to disconnect music and arts from the business and tech world as I strongly believe both do benefit from each other. A good use and knowledge of tech, definitely enhances art. In their days, as pianist Alexandra Silocea was recently posting, composers such as Bach were indeed also seeking the latest technology advances with organs, Wagner was looking at improving acoustics in the opera houses and Saint Saëns was the first to record himself and try out the phonograph. Similarly the development of the piano technology from the end of the 18th century with stronger hammers and longer strings enabled it to be the perfect tool for the stronger expression needed with the emergence of romantic music.
Ai, to start with, is without doubt a new world for all, and things are still evolving and shaping themselves. The music industry is still full of questions for instance regarding the property of copyrights when an art work has used Ai. The news in February 2025, was full of excitement when a leader of the Auction art market launched the first major Ai dedicated arts auction sale, that generated as much awe as controversy. More recently in July 2025 the release of two albums from the “Velvet Sundown” band, that were 100% Ai generated, similarly raised a lot of questions. Indeed, if Ai uses words, images or music recordings to create a new Art work, that are not copyright-free, then we enter a zone of infringement.
Yet, regulations might still evolve to adapt to the new context. Famous artists such as Picasso, have inspired themselves from other artists ; there can also be some acceptable cases where artists or musicians use Ai solely to enhance their own work.
Tim Hallas, both a Music and tech teacher as well as an expert and speaker at the Music and Drama expo in London last January, wrote beginning of 2024 in the Music Teacher online magazine, that despite the risk of plagiarism in music education, “If students could use it (Ai) to create work, then surely we as teachers need to explore how to use it for ourselves and help students to navigate it effectively”. Music students he says, can and certainly should still work on their critical thinking skills when reviewing the work from Chatgpt or any GenAI app, to identify areas of improvement, especially as there are still errors or incomplete information in genAi answers.
In regard to music composition, the question is more about the place that Ai will take in fine in a music composition. We may fear as in George Orwell’s 1984 book that Ai will come as a substitute for human creativity! A nightmarish thought indeed.
Bobby Owsinsky, well-known author and renown audio engineer who produced recordings for singers such as Ex-Rolling stones Mick Taylor explains in his recent 2023 must-read “the musician Ai’s handbook”, why and how to use Ai when composing music to produce the most satisfying results. Ai composition, he explains, is actually a complex task. It goes well beyond writing a text prompt or asking a GenAi tool to write a song in the style of a famous artist as most Ai generating tools won’t produce a full song this way. It’s more about asking an Ai tool to “help you either generate a melody, a lyric or a chord progression” or improve some of your lyrics, which will help you in your much wider composition task.
So this means reassuringly that to produce really good results, musicians will still need to first create themselves a very good basis of their composition to start with, that Ai can then help develop or improve a little.
In terms of copyright, there are still a lot of limits and unclear zones regarding the use of Ai generated music. For the moment only the recording copyright is considered, while it seems the publishing copyright has for the moment no clear ownership.
And as for the recording ownership, there are here too still a lot of unanswered questions: For all music composition tools using data scraped across the web, as a lot of this content is copyrighted, it seems there is then copyright infringement, even though law might evolve.
Ai copyright laws are indeed not quite similar across the world regarding the sudden wide use of Ai in music and elsewhere. In the US, a song that has been completely generated by Ai without any human intervention can’t be copyrighted. It is also in some cases not possible to share and monetise a music that is produced from an Ai platform without paying a high subscription fee. In most cases, and to circumvent those limitations, it therefore seems recommended to download the MIDI file generated by the Ai generative platform and load it on your own DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and build the full music composition -independently from Ai tools- from there.
So Ai tools, if well used, can offer wider options for music creation, and rather than substitute themselves to a human, can support and expand our creativity once started. Similarly to developer coding, you’ll still need excellent prompts produced by humans to produce excellent results.
We may be skeptical Ai will produce the next Mozart’s kind of music, as music composition has still to remain something mainly thought, imagined and built by humans, (as the mixture of emotional and creative knowledge is something that remains a purely human skill). However, it can still be a great boost for faster music creation, backing tracks for video creators, or muzak…as long as most of it remains generated by humans.
Conclusion … what is then the place of music and art in this new world ?
Similarly to what Keynes’s innovation brought to mass production, or the broad use of computers from the late 1970s, Ai opens a new exciting era. It will definitely help boost our productivity in some cases and can therefore help us to improve our artistry in the music and artistic world - however, it will only be effective if it is used in the right way.
Why ? Because art and music is there to make you think, reflect and become aware of feelings and emotions. Ai is great to help you get started, scale and analyse data, with its efficiency and ability to process and automise tasks, thanks to its access to algorithms and huge banks of data. However, whenever we start automising our tasks and moving at a hectic speed, we end up also being more robotic and then cease to feel and tap into our own creative space.
Can Ai- or electronically generated music move you close to tears ? Certainly not. So if Ai is used as a tool to enhance our efficiency in art, then it may be successful but only if it brings human beings to become more human in their way of doing their work ; and avoids becoming a substitute to our thinking and creativity.
As Sophie Jones, chief strategy officer at the music trade body the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) wrote following the Velvet Sundown discovery: “We believe that AI should be used to serve human creativity, not supplant it,” said Jones.
We are indeed unlike robots, and like thinking about what we do, why and how to do it at best. This is when we, as humans can produce the best results and make art and music most meaningful for others.
Sources:
https://www.musicteachermagazine.co.uk/ (1st November 2023, 1st January 2024)
The musician’s Ai handbook (Bobby Owsinsky)
The Economist (March 23rd 2024)