Making music is hard. Well, at least it used to be. I remember the old days, when you had to spend hours and hours honing skills, coming up with something clever or personal to say, then actually recording sounds that people would want to listen to. But that’s the past. In our sparkling future, a pre-teen can dump a bunch of words into a machine and out comes a catchy tune. In 2025, a robot can be a pop star. (Although Data from Star Trek did drop an album back in the 90s. How soon we all forget.)

Three AI-generated songs recently topped Spotify’s “Viral 50” charts. One of the “creators” responsible for these songs, Broken Veteran, who squirted out a track about immigration policies, told the Guardian that AI is “just another tool for expression, particularly valuable for people like me who have something to say but lack traditional musical training”. It used to be that if you didn’t know how to do something, you wouldn’t do it.

I’ll never be Shohei Ohtani – I’m simply not handsome enough – but what if I could buy a robot to hit home runs for me? Could I then call myself a baseball player? Probably not, since I literally would have accomplished absolutely nothing, even if the robot wore a jersey with my name on it.

Advocates for AI art always throw the word “democratization” around, claiming that these machine tools remove the barriers for entry to creativity. Those........

© The Guardian