On a sunny afternoon, I left my flat to take a nice stroll through the Meadows: headphones on, phone on ‘do not disturb,’ playlist on rotation. I was in the mood to discover new music, so I decided to play a song I like and listen to similar pieces recommended by the streaming service. Near the end of my walk, a blues song I had never heard before came on called ‘Step by Step in Time’ by a certain Benny Rivers. Curious to see what it was, I looked at the album cover. It looked AI-generated — what on earth was this Benny Rivers thinking when he chose that hideous cover? I had to investigate.
A simple Google search of his name gave no results. Strange. After some digging, all I could find was a dodgy Instagram page and an even dodgier website, but nothing else. I realised that this is because Benny Rivers is an AI ‘artist’. Some brief research revealed that this is not the only AI-generated song available — other AI artists, like the band The Velvet Sundown or Velorien Marrow are just two examples of a very long list. The most popular one, however, is Xania Monet. Monet is represented by a music label, and three of their songs have charted in various Billboard US charts, with the highest ranking being a startling number 1 in US R&B Digital for the song ‘How Was I Supposed To Know’.
This upset me a lot. I felt cheated knowing that an AI song snuck into the playlist I was listening to, guilty, and frankly a little afraid of not recognising that the track was a product of artificial intelligence on my own.
I got to thinking — how is this impacting the artistic world? It is argued that AI is a useful tool, and that it is anachronistic to pretend it is not in our lives. Even The Beatles utilised artificial intelligence in their single ‘Now and Then’ to isolate John Lennon’s voice from a messy demo and merge it with the rest of the track. But in that case, we are not talking about de novo generation of music by AI. The line is fine, but in my opinion, it is clear that AI-generated songs don’t belong anywhere near our playlists alongside human art. How can we listen and relate to music and lyrics talking about human experiences, when these are generated by something artificial? What does AI know about human emotion?
I was glad to find out that in 2025, the US Copyright Office stated that 100 per cent AI-generated music cannot be copyrighted and falls under the public domain, meaning that no profit can be made off of it. Even so, ethical issues remain. Should more guidance be issued to make listeners aware of the music they are consuming? Sources argue that AI-generated songs must be labelled in some way to let the audience know they are not created by a human, as it is very difficult to recognise it as being AI. In 2025, the BBC published an article online titled ‘How can you tell if your new favourite artist is a real person?’ giving readers tips on how to recognize AI-generated artists and songs on streaming platforms.
The bottom line of all this is that we need to re-evaluate how much we allow ourselves to use AI and for which purposes. Can music and art be created by something non-human? Should we be consuming it? To what extent are we prepared to let AI take over creative fields, and if so, shouldn’t we put transparency policies in place to make the distinction between products of human and artificial intelligence clear? One thing is certain: I will certainly not be listening to Benny Rivers again.
“WWW X” by Syced is licensed under CC BY 1.0.
