The lights dim. The bass rattles your chest. Anticipation twirls up your spine. Freshman Harper Morgan described the feeling of a concert in one word: “Euphoria.”

     That feeling doesn’t come from perfectly generated music; it simply comes from the joy of living life. “You can feel the energy of the performers and the crowd completely take you over,” Morgan said.

     This energy is exactly what’s missing in the wave of AI that’s taking over the music industry. AI-generated songs can sound clean, catchy and calculated, but once you know it’s AI-generated, it feels “empty and shallow,” freshman Gavin Evans said. 

     The use of AI in the music industry leads to major ethical concerns, especially when the music generated is derived from thousands of individual artists’ works. 

     For example, HAVEN’s viral song “I Run” heavily used AI to create vocals that sounded similar to artist Jorja Smith. This eventually led to copyright issues when Smith’s label accused the song’s producer of unauthorized cloning and plagiarism. Consequently, the song was taken down and re-recorded with a human singer.

     “An AI model could create a hit song using data from a thousand different artists,” Band Director Esther Brier said, “so who gets the credit? It’s just not possible. But that’s just how AI works.” Musicians dedicate themselves to their craft, only to have their work stolen and taken into systems that can easily replace them without credit or pay.

     AI may be able to replicate the sounds and formulas of a hit song, but it could never replicate the feeling it gives its listeners. If AI in art continues advancing as rapidly as it has been, we risk robbing music of the very thing that gives it meaning.

     Music is meant to be deep and layered. For some musicians, it defines their entire life.

     Chris Powers, Director of Online Learning and co-founder of the band The Hip Abduction, described how deeply music has been rooted in his life.

     “There are pictures of me in a stroller with a ukulele,” he said. “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to make music.” The desire and passion to create is something that AI will never be able to possess, no matter how advanced it may become.

     At the end of the day, AI is a machine based on data and programming, despite the fact that AI-generative musicians are rapidly advancing. 

     “It’s a bot. It has no soul, has no emotion, and there’s no creativity behind it. It’s just being told what to do, and it chugs out a bunch of filler. There’s nothing real,” Evans said.

     AI also erases the struggle behind creating music. Negating the final file, musicians take an immense amount of time to compose, produce and perfect their music — the process that gives music its weight. 

     “Removing the artist from the process of creation? That just seems gross,” Powers said. When creation becomes effortless, the results are disposable. 

     Most importantly, AI-generated music breaks the bond between artist and listener, musician and instrument, and in the end, breaks connections between people. Music is a delicate art form meant to be shared. It forms memories and relationships. That connection is fractured when the creator isn’t human. 

     “It’s just like taking away humanity from art,” Powers said. “It’s all those essential songs that I listen to, and I go back to and have core memories with, or concerts I went to with friends and family, then I connect to the songwriter themselves. This artist that I’m connected to goes away if the creator is AI.”