Music is my constant companion. I’m almost always listening to a carefully curated playlist or new album. I wholeheartedly believe Spotify Wrapped Day should be a national holiday. So, as an AI reporter who has watched the so-called AI music industry grow over the past few years, I decided it was finally time to see how these artificial artists stack up. So I set a challenge for myself: I would only listen to AI-created music for a full week. 

It was a very, very long week. AI music really takes the “art” out of artificial. But it was an educational and revealing experience, too. 

The story of AI music is an old record that’s been played before. Musicians have debated the role of technology in music creation for hundreds of years, from the introduction of recorded music using phonographs to synthesizers, autotune and production tech going mainstream. What makes this moment unique is that AI can create entire songs with very little human guidance. But the AI models that do so are built using music created by actual humans, creating a haze of legal woes and ethical chaos — similar to that faced by other creators like writers, artists and filmmakers.

Music is one of the few universal cultural touchstones we have. Generative AI is rapidly changing how music is created, and in effect, changing our humanity with it.

A week of AI music

For the purpose of my self-imposed experiment, I only listened to songs that were verifiably altered by AI. I was pleased to see that the AI music sites offered a wide range of songs, but that initial excitement was short-lived. Most disappointingly, the vast majority of the pop music was shrill and squeaky — the musical version of plastic, in my opinion. 

A lot of the trending songs were electronic music, which I’m sure EDM fans would’ve appreciated more than me. It just reminded me of a canon event every young person experiences: Being stuck at a house party where the person on the aux is “an aspiring DJ.” The house and techno styles just reinforced the idea that I was listening to robotic AI music. It made it hard to enjoy when I knew there wasn’t even the illusion of human creation behind the songs.

I fared much better with country and folk music, which had a big focus on the instrumentals and an acoustic sound. A lot of it sounded like it could’ve been by Noah Kahan, Kacey Musgraves or Luke Combs. This is where I started to relax into my typical music habits — getting hooked by a particularly appealing song on a first listen, adding those interesting songs to a playlist that I would eventually prefer over exploring new music as I grew more comfortable and attached to my favorite songs. 

Then there was the truly weird, wacky AI music. Beyond Suno, there is an entire universe of unique AI music on sites like YouTube. My favorite (or the least worst one?) was the 8-minute Game of Thrones disco, complete with a music video, while my editor favored the Lord of the Rings version. I found the songs engrossing, probably because they’re music videos, not just songs, with haunting, AI slop visuals.

Tech and music: A song that’s been played before

Technology has always played a role in music. Musical AI is part of a longer arc in music’s history, Mark Ethier, founder of the iZoptope music tech company and executive director of Berklee’s Emerging Artistic Technology Lab, told me.

“When GarageBand came out, people felt like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can make music because I can drag some samples of a guitar, have a bass and some drums, and I’ve made a song, right?'” said Ethier. “Where we are today is the most extreme version of that.” 

Traditional music software, such as GarageBand, was meant to enhance and democratize the process of creating music. AI music companies say they do the same, but there’s a big difference: You can pop out entire AI songs with just a sentence or two to guide the vibe. The underlying tech is similar to what is running in chatbots and image generators — transformers and diffusion methods, Suno cofounder Mikey Shulman said in 2023.

AI music generators like Suno do more than piecing together a song or tweaking a template. Like with imagery and videos, AI has made it quicker, cheaper and easier than ever to create something that feels like it was professionally produced.

“[AI] has changed is just how much easier it is to do, and how indistinguishable the output is,” Ethier said. Before AI, throwing some loops together on GarageBand wouldn’t be enough to make a full song or hit record. “Now, that distinction is not as clear anymore,” he said.

The AI music arena has grown quickly in a short period of time. Sites like Suno and Udio have racked up subscribers and gained notoriety. Suno reached a milestone of 2 million paying subscribers, its cofounder shared in February. But like other creative AI companies, Suno and Udio have been sued by record labels alleging the AI companies used musicians’ work for AI training without permission or compensation. 

Read More: AI Slop Is Destroying the Internet. These Are the People Fighting to Save It

Can we make connections with AI music?

The amount of time I spent listening to music dropped significantly on the days when I was restricted to only AI music, and I felt that deprivation deeply. It wasn’t until I came across a specific category of AI music that I began to border on enjoying the experience. There’s a neuroscientific and psychological reason why, I learned.

Joy Allen, a music therapist and director of Berklee’s Music and Health Institute, told me that there’s a reason music from our teen years sticks so strongly with us. Our adolescent brains are sponges, and music is one of the only things that activates every part of our brain, Allen said. Those connections, fueled by teenage hormones and neurochemicals, stay with us long after.

“When you listen to music, it’s not just activating the auditory cortex. It’s activating where you process emotions [and] physical responses … Our brains love patterns,” Allen said. “If you think about music, it’s patterns, it’s chordal structures, it’s the melody line… so we get used to patterns and predictability.”

My teen years were largely set to the soundtrack of Taylor Swift, and anyone who’s met me knows she’s still my favorite artist. But even knowing what Allen told me, I was surprised at how emotional the AI covers of Taylor Swift songs made me. 

A lot of the AI covers I listened to took Swift’s songs and reimagined them in different genres. An AI pop punk version of “You Belong With Me” sounded like it could’ve been sung by another band from my teen years, 5 Seconds of Summer. It was strangely gratifying, with a heavy dose of nostalgia. It was also the only AI song to get stuck in my head.

We can make emotional attachments to any music — created by humans or AI, theoretically, Allen said — during this time. But since my musical identity is already formed, the AI songs that brought out the more visceral, emotional reaction in me were those that drew on those connections and memories, firing those neurochemicals in my brain. I was more engaged and happier listening to these AI Swiftie covers than any other AI song. The songs were different, but they were still the lyrics I had sung into my hairbrush as a kid and in a million other scenarios throughout my life, brought to life in a new way.

While these songs were the highlight of my experiment, they didn’t sell me on AI music any more than the “original” songs did. The AI largely reminded me of the covers I had listened to in real life and seen clips of online. I liked the AI folk cover of Swift’s “All Too Well,” but it was a cheap imitation compared to the guitarist I heard sing it in a coffee shop last year, or the indie bands adding their own individual touches that I come across on TikTok.

The power of a great artist is their ability to create music that inspires others, to move them and spark flames of creativity. Covers by human musicians are a way to pay tribute and express appreciation; AI covers felt like cheap imitations and mockery by comparison. 

Music is human

I was irritatingly cognizant of my experiment while I was doing it. The AI music never held my attention the same way that human music did. With a few notable exceptions, the AI songs were basically white noise. I often caught myself drifting toward the Spotify app to turn on better music. In the final days of my experiment, no music was better than AI music. Even now as I write this, the car horns and bird chirps outside my window are better company than fake instruments. 

AI has become a part of our lives, for better or worse. But it’s not just part of our technology; it’s slowly infiltrating our culture. Music is one of the strongest cultural touchstones we have, and to have AI so quickly and effectively mimic something that is inherently human is… awe-inspiring. Worrisome. But definitely a very clear sign that AI is remaking the very things that define our humanity. It left me with an increasingly deep sense of dread about the havoc AI is wreaking on our culture and humanity.

It’s not just listeners like me who are struggling — musicians are, too. AI-generated music is flooding streaming platforms, leaving companies like Apple Music and Spotify struggling to define what’s allowed, what isn’t and what’s monetizable. It’s even more complex from a legal and ethical point of view.

“As a musician, this is a really complicated time to be understanding tools,” Ethier said. “You used to be able to pick up a trumpet and play trumpet. You didn’t have to think about how that trumpet was trained, or if the trumpet owns your music.”

Music is intrinsically human and social by design. So it wasn’t surprising that I felt disconnected throughout my AI music week. It was an isolating experience — no memories tied to core moments, no TikTok dances, no culture. No artist personality, little fandom. No thoughts of “remember how she jumped an octave when she performed it live?” It was a superficial listening experience. I didn’t want to revisit them once my experiment was done.

So much of the music we listen to is tied to specific memories. The AI songs I felt most connected to were covers of songs I already had a strong emotional connection with: Taylor Swift songs I listened to for the first time at eight years old in the backseat with my childhood besties; songs that were inspired by but utterly lacking the emotion of the ’90s power ballad my dad loves but my mom bemoans every time he plays it; a “Stick Season” AI wannabe that lacks Noah Kahan’s signature “dance while the world burns” flavor.

Music scores so many of our moments of life, from big moments like a married couple’s first dance to the small moments that flow by without us noticing. All of that builds up over our lives. Removing the humanity — or worse, trying to mimic it — sucks the soul out of what makes music worthwhile.

So, no, I would not recommend listening to only AI-generated music for a week. But it was useful, if only to further refine my worries about the way AI is eroding our humanity.