I Listened to a Bunch of AI Music So You Don't Have To

And what I discovered will SHOCK you

An AI-generated country song has just made history by topping the Billboard Country chart. Well, to be more specific, it topped the digital country song sales chart. Which isn’t the same thing. But it’s still moderately depressing. Here’s what it sounds like.

I admit, it sounds like a decent simulacrum of a generic Raspy Country Dude. As Rick Beato quipped in his reaction, our digital homeboy must have smoked a lot of digital cigarettes to get that rasp. We’re also very amused at its repeated use of “I,” “me” and “my” pronouns, especially the line “I was born this way.” We can tell it was feeling those lyrics right in the motherboard.

All that said, it’s not like modern country has a Hank Williams or Loretta Lynn to put miles of daylight between their output and this output. This is a running theme in Beato’s wry commentary on the rise of AI “songwriting”: Between current pop songwriters and the robots, it’s pick your slop. Humans will have no one but themselves to blame if (when?) they start losing.

The whole topic of AI “music” and AI “art” more generally has intrigued me for a while. I’ve only ever encountered AI “songs” in contexts where their origins are obviously telegraphed. But if I didn’t know going in that a “song” was AI, if you just gave me some headphones and hit play, I’ve wondered if I could consistently peg it, and if so what exactly I’d be cueing to. Does AI music have an intrinsic “quality ceiling,” or is it just a matter of time and algorithmic finetuning before it’s bedazzling us all? Is there anything that makes human art ineffably human, and if so how does one isolate and pinpoint it? Meanwhile, what are the ethical and emotional ramifications of this tech? Is there a “kosher” way to make creative use of AI tools? Do most people even care if humans made it or a robot made it? Do I really want to know the answer to that question?

Well, maybe I don’t, but I did want some answers to these other questions. Unfortunately, this required consuming a lot of AI music. I did it all for you, dear reader.