Will AI be the next award-winning artist?

AI has quickly become a worldwide phenomenon. We’ve seen its presence in education, the workplace, politics, technology, and even art. As AI becomes more advanced and continues growing we’ve seen an influx of AI generated art, videos, and even songs. Recently, the song “I Run” by HAVEN has reached high levels of popularity on social media, specifically on TikTok. Many users put it as their background audio within a variety of video genres. With over 480k posts with the song, it is No. 13 on TikTok’s Music Charts. It’s a very catchy song that resembles house music which is an extremely popular music genre among many different age groups. The song’s success does not come as a surprise but has also created a conversation of what this means for the music industry.

Artists such as Mariah Carey, Ariana Grande, Adele, Beyonce, etc. who have insane vocal talents, have put in the work and effort to get to where they are today. Not to discredit the producer who created “I Run” but, AI created and sang all the vocals. Considering the AI use, it’s a decent song and obviously does not compare or amount to award-winning artists, but it does raise the question whether it might one day have more influence in this industry.

“I Run” was made to resemble Jorja Smith’s voice which many people believed it was her singing until she made a comment stating otherwise. This could be very dangerous to many artists as AI can now replicate their voice to say or sing whatever anyone wants but it can also be more detrimental to smaller indie artists who may not have as big of a platform to speak out of. This also isn’t the first time we’ve seen AI replicate an artist’s voice. Back in 2023, an artist named FlowGPT created a song called “NostalgIA” where they used AI to make the song sound like Bad Bunny and Bad Gyal were singing it. While many fans were impressed with the song and enjoyed it, Bad Bunny expressed his disapproval in a WhatApp group chat where he told his fans that if they enjoyed it they don’t deserve to be his friend.

AI in music creation can be a great tool and can be used in many creative ways but it may also be a slippery slope with legal matters such as copyright infringement. There’s no telling how big AI will be in the music industry, but there’s clearly already polarizing opinions within professionals and the general public. Natural talent is hard to beat but as AI grows more and more everyday there’s no telling how far it can go.