Artificial Intelligence has turned up at the end-of-semester party you’ve thrown, and she’s wearing the same dress as you. Except hers is a fast fashion knock-off, and you spent hours scouring Vinted to find yours. She’s flirting with the guy that you’ve been seeing, twirling her hair, and she’s guffawing about her recent exam results.

Full marks across the board. You’re pretty sure she’s making that up, though. She’s probably going to be sick on your doormat as she leaves. Blue, luminous vomit from the alcopops she’s been swigging mechanically all night. You’ll feel bad for her and clean it up quietly, because the worst thing about AI is that she’s actually really, really nice to you. Just so easy to get along with. One of those girls who never takes a side in the drama. She cries at the news and smiles at videos of veterans being reunited with their golden retrievers. This doesn’t change the fact that she got the internship you were dreaming of (she replied last minute and only because you told her you had), and you’re still a little bit seething. Smiling through gritted teeth.

Metaphors aside, AI has firmly wedged itself into many aspects of everyday life. Crashed the party. And the afterparty.

And arrived at work the following Monday. A quick scan of any university library and all of the desktops display a writing assistant of some kind. People are even forming relationships with their AI chatbot partners. But perhaps nowhere has AI’s presence caused more controversy than in the arts. How does art coexist with code? And who exactly needs to do the catching up, if it even is a race?

AI and Creative Industries

Recent changes to British copyright laws now allow companies to use existing musical works to train AI models. In response, more than 1,000 musicians released a silent protest album, a literal absence of sound, to highlight what they fear could be a future without human-made music. The AI discourse among creatives has been largely critical: worries of job losses, of homogenization, of soulless art flooding the internet.

And yet, it’s not all dystopia.

Despite the tech industry’s hype, there’s one consistent finding that keeps surfacing: people still prefer music made by other people. A 2023 study conducted by the University of York found that listeners rated human-composed music more highly than AI-generated compositions across key metrics such as melody, emotional depth, and stylistic coherence. Even when participants didn’t know which piece was written by a machine, they tended to favour the human track.

This suggests something important: creative industries aren’t completely doomed. They’re differentiated. Human artistry offers context, story, vulnerability - things that can’t be convincingly replicated by machines, no matter how advanced their predictive models get.

Sure, AI can help generate catchy beats or emulate a particular genre’s structure. But it doesn’t write songs about your first love, or your dead dog, or that one night in Berlin where you swore you saw God on a dance floor. Art is about intention. AI, for now, has none.

Take the Quiz: Which popular Chappell Roan song do you identify with?

Find out which Chappell Roan song fits your personality most!

Looking to the Future

Much like Photoshop didn’t kill photography, and Spotify didn’t kill live music, AI won’t kill human-made art. But it will reshape it. Perhaps, even democratize it, making tools available to people who might otherwise never have had access to professional music studios or training.

Ultimately, the success of AI in music (or any creative field) will depend less on what the machines are capable of, and more on what audiences want. So far, the evidence suggests that we don’t just want sounds that ‘work’. We want stories, emotion, and a sense of the human behind the art.

Consumers, by and large, still value the flawed, messy, deeply human process of creation. That raw demo recorded at 2am. The brushstroke that wobbled. The voice that cracked on the high note.

So no, AI music isn’t going away. She’s at the party now. She might even be invited next time. But she won’t be the one singing the song that makes everyone stop what they’re doing and just listen.