AI Music: The Best Thing to Happen to Creators. Or the Worst.

I was sitting in the hairdressers a few months ago, enjoying the music, when I asked my hairdresser who the artist was, she told me she thought it was AI-generated.

A quick internet search later, confirmed it was indeed an AI-generated song.

I sat with that for a moment and realised I didn't know how to feel about that.

I still don't.

And the more I think about it, the more I think that uncertainty is actually the most interesting place to start.

The moment it changed

Here's what unsettled me. The music was doing exactly what music is supposed to do. It was in the background, it was setting a mood, I was enjoying it without thinking about it. It wasn't until I knew it was AI that I started questioning the experience retroactively.

Which raises an uncomfortable question. If you can't tell the difference, does the difference matter?

I find myself doing it now with songs I don't recognise. Listening more critically. Asking: is that too polished? Is that vocal too perfect? Is there a human being behind this or is it generated? Music that once would have washed over me now invites a kind of scrutiny that probably isn't helping me enjoy it.

And that's a loss of something, in itself.

The "too perfect" problem

The more I've sat with this, the more I think the imperfection in music is not incidental. It's essential.

The slight drag on a note. The breath before a chorus. The crack in someone's voice on the lyric that means something to them. These aren't flaws to be engineered out. They're the evidence that a human being made something. They're the part that tells you someone felt this.

AI-generated music can replicate the structure of emotion. The chord progressions that tend to make people feel something, the tempo that suggests energy or calm, the vocal patterns that signal intimacy. It can do all of that. What it cannot do, at least not yet, is mean it.

Whether that matters to the listener is a question I don't have a clean answer to. Clearly it doesn't always matter - I was enjoying that song before I knew. But something changed when I found out. And I'm not sure that change was irrational.

What about the artists we love?

There's another dimension to this that I keep coming back to.

Think about the artists who have shaped how we feel about music. Whitney Houston. Celine Dion. Adele. Part of what makes those artists matter isn't just the songs - it's the story behind them. The journey. The comeback. The interview where they talk about what a lyric cost them. The concert where you're in a room with tens of thousands of people all feeling the same thing at the same time.

You can't have any of that with an AI artist. There's no human story to follow. No journey to invest in. No face behind the music that has lived something and is sharing it with you.

I think about people, like myself, who would have loved to see Whitney Houston live and never got the chance. That opportunity is gone and it's irreplaceable. With an AI-generated artist, that opportunity never existed in the first place. You're listening to something that was never born, will never perform and cannot grow.

That's a different kind of loss to "too perfect." It's the loss of the human at the centre of it all.

But here's the other side

And yet there are people for whom AI music is not a loss at all. It's the first door that's ever opened.

My sister loves dancing - not professionally, just someone who loves it - but she shared a perspective recently that I found really interesting. Dancers, she pointed out, have always been at the mercy of music licensing. You find a track you love, you build something around it and then you can't post it without getting hit with a copyright claim. Or you pay for a licence you can't really afford. Or you settle for something that almost works but doesn't quite fit.

AI music changes that entirely. Dancers can now generate tracks that fit their movement precisely - the right tempo, the right feel, the right duration - without paying a penny in licensing fees. And when those videos go up on Instagram or Facebook with original AI-generated music, they don't get muted or taken down. More than that - some of those AI tracks are getting picked up and spreading on their own. The song becomes part of the moment, people save it, share it, use it in their own content. There's a sideways financial opportunity emerging here for dancers and creators who have historically been underpaid and undervalued. AI music doesn't just solve a licensing problem. It hands them a creative asset they never had before.

That's the same argument we make about vibe coding - that the tools don't replace talent, they redistribute access. A dancer with great instincts and a clear vision can now create the full package. And nobody can take that from them.

Where I've landed - sort of

I still don't know how I feel about AI-generated music. I'm not sure I'm supposed to yet.

What I do know is that "too perfect" is a real phenomenon and it points at something important. Music without imperfection loses a certain something. The humanity in it - the evidence that someone made it, felt it, meant it - is part of what makes it worth listening to. And the absence of a human story means you can never really fall in love with the artist the way you can with Whitney or Adele.

But I also know that the question of who gets to make music - and on what terms - is not a simple one. For every listener who feels something is missing, there's a creator for whom something has finally arrived.

I'd genuinely love to know where you land on this. Drop a comment and tell me what you think.

Thinking about how AI is changing creativity in your own work? Come and join the conversation at Vibe Coding Lab - a free community of founders building in the AI era.