A few weeks ago, several of Southern Gospel’s prominent song publishers issued a joint statement regarding the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) during the songwriting process.
Their statement included these four points:
1. As publishers, we recognize our moral, legal, and spiritual obligation to ensure that, to the best of our ability, the songs we promote truly reflect the heart and efforts of human creators rather than being mere products of technology.
2. The integrity of the songwriting and pitching process must remain beyond reproach, applying equally to both music and lyrics.
3. The intended use of AI technology is never to create the lyric or melody itself, but rather to provide a demonstration of what the original song sounds like. Therefore, it becomes even more imperitive that we assume more individual responsibility in the integrity of the process. To that end, We are committed to an ongoing dialogue and education with the songwriters we represent regarding the sustained recognition of ethical boundaries.
4. To alleviate any concerns artists may have regarding the originality of the songs submitted for their consideration, we are prepared to provide a signed statement with each submission, affirming its authenticity.
With that backdrop, I have been checking out one of the main AI songwriting apps just to satisfy my own curiosity about what is even possible with AI. What I’ve “created” over the past few days (I hesitate to use the term “created” in light of the above statement) has been, in some respects, every bit as lame as I had imagined it would be, but in other respects, surprisingly better than expected.
I plan to walk through each item mentioned in the statement from the publishers in a series of articles. I’ll also be sharing examples of music produced by the app. Some of these examples will be produced with almost zero creative input from me. Others will be with pretty much all the creative input I’m able to offer within the limitations of the app.
First, though, I want to hear from some of you. What are your thoughts about songwriters using AI to write songs? Is it morally, legally, or spiritually wrong to make use of AI while writing a song?
Please leave a comment here, or if you prefer to keep your thoughts just between me and you, send them by email to: ai@musicscribe.com
Before I let you go, however, take a look at the graphic image at the top of this article. It was initially generated by ChatGPT, and sure, generating images is different than generating music. Still, it represents some general issues one may encounter when using present-day AI. I had asked ChatGPT for an image with musical symbols and a tech-style font. You may think the symbol in the top right isn’t a real musical symbol. It actually is, but it’s not commonly known. It appears to be half of a sharp symbol, and that’s exactly what it is. The symbol indicates when a pitch should be raised by a quarter-step, whereas the more common sharp symbol indicates the pitch should be raised a half-step. It’s possible that ChatGPT views all musical symbols equally or is ignorant of the fact that one of the six symbols it chose isn’t nearly as common as the other five. On the other hand, ChatGPT may just be a jerk. Why would I say that? Well, I asked it three times to regenerate the image with the text centered horizontally between the left and right margins. I also asked it to make the image 1600X900 pixels. ChatGPT either couldn’t or wouldn’t do either (see image below) after saying it understood the request. I ultimately re-centered and resized it myself. I’m obviously trying out a different AI app to generate music, but this raises a point I’ll get to later in this series of articles.
I’m comfortable with the level of use of AI that the song publishers agreed on. I think that Gospel songwriting ought to be 100% from human creativity.
I don’t think it hurts anything if they save time and speed up the demo process by generating a demo on a site like Suno. For myself, I wouldn’t want to submit any demos with AI vocals; if I were an artist, I’d much rather hear humans sing the song. But I don’t and wouldn’t care if the instruments were AI. And I don’t think it’s necessarily WRONG if the vocals were AI, too – just not my cup of tea.
When I say I think that the songwriting process should be 100% human creativity, there is one caveat/exception that I think is OK. If a question of fact or word definition came up, I think it’s harmless if someone uses Claude/ChatGPT etc. as a search engine instead of Google to verify a fact or word definition. For instance, if they were writing a song about Lazarus that referenced Bethany and Jerusalem and wanted to check whether Bethany is north, south, east, or west of Jerusalem, I don’t think it matters if one uses Google or AI to look that up (knowing that there’s a higher risk of AI getting it wrong, but also knowing that AI is usually the first Google search result for a question of that nature!)