About AI in Music Today!

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Every time I share a song I’ve made with the help of AI tools like Suno, I hear the same pushback: “That’s not real music. You’re just stealing from real artists.”

 

But here’s the thing: music has always been about borrowing. Nobody creates in a vacuum. Every song is built on something that came before.

 

Take the 1960s. When the British bands came crashing into America, they didn’t invent rock and roll from scratch. The Stones, Zeppelin, Clapton, and The Who were all obsessed with American blues. Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, and Robert Johnson, that’s where their sound came from. Bob Dylan leaned on Woody Guthrie. Springsteen leaned on Dylan. The Beatles leaned on Chuck Berry. It wasn’t called theft. It was called influence.

 

So when people say AI is different, I don’t buy it. AI isn’t cutting and pasting guitar solos or lifting choruses from somebody else’s song. It studies patterns, rhythms, harmonies, and cadences and mixes them in a new way. Which is exactly what humans do. The only difference is speed. A kid learning guitar from Zeppelin records spends years doing pattern recognition. AI just does it in seconds. But in both cases, the human behind the music still matters most.

 

And let me be clear about where I stand: I’m not sponsored, I’m not shilling for a company. I’m an artist. I’ve written lyrics for decades, and these tools finally let me bring them to life. They didn’t take away my creativity; they gave me a stage.

 

And honestly, we’ve seen this movie before. When Pro Tools showed up in the ’90s, it freaked people out. Suddenly, you could edit vocals, splice takes, and build whole tracks on a computer. Purists said it would “ruin” music. Same thing with drum machines, synths, and Auto-Tune. All of them were called “fake” at first until they just became part of the toolkit. AI is no different.

 

What it really does is to open up music-making to people who never had access before. If you didn’t play guitar, if you couldn’t afford a studio, if you didn’t know someone in the business, you were shut out. Now? Anyone with a laptop can experiment with sounds that once cost thousands of dollars. A lyricist who can not sing can finally hear their words sung. Instead of making the stage smaller, AI makes it bigger.

 

And let’s be honest: if borrowing equals stealing, then most of modern music is guilty. The Beatles, Zeppelin, and Springsteen all borrowed. That’s how music evolves. Not through pure originality, but through transformation. AI is part of that same cycle.

 

At the end of the day, when you hear a song that hits you, do you really care whether it came from a Les Paul, a Moog synth, Pro Tools, or an AI platform? Of course not. You care about how it makes you feel. That’s the measure of art. Not the tool, but the impact.

 

AI music isn’t theft. It’s just the next verse in the same old song. Every artist borrows, bends, and builds on what came before. Pretending otherwise doesn’t protect music; it rewrites its history. It's just rock 'n' roll for the digital age.