AI generated music is unsurprisingly still in the news, sort of. Whether it's contemporary Christian music or country songs there are AI-generated songs there. The Velvet Sundown are not alone!
AI Music Tops Christian iTunes Charts, Popular CCM Artists Respond
By Angela Peacock
November 20, 2025
10:45 am CST
...Dove Award-winning CCM artist Forrest Frank responded via Instagram to the AI persona topping recent worship singles by Brandon Lake and Elevation. “It’s important that we pause a little bit and ask the questions like, ‘Is this something that we want?'” stated Frank.He added: “At minimum, AI does not have the Holy Spirit inside of it. So I think that’s really weird to be opening up your spirit to something that has no spirit.”In response, Townsend defended the use of AI tools in creating the songs by Solomon Ray. “It’s really more of a preference,” said Townsend. “You cannot tell somebody’s feelings and impact from music, if it’s authentic or fake/fraudulent. Who am I to say what God will or won’t use to get the message His people need to them? I’m just here being an instrument.”...
You see, for religious people discussing the role of music in religious life they get to have, well, religious reasons to object to using artificial intelligence/large-language models to fabricate musical works and song lyrics.
Does that mean someone isn't going to ask AI to generate an entire metrical psalter? Somebody has probably already tried that. If Roger Scruton were still with us he might have quipped that whatever the demerits of AI generated sacred texts would they be as bad as the Sternhold and Hopkins metrical psalter? But it's snobby and faddish these days to rip on metrical psalmody in high-flyer Anglican settings.
In other AI-song news ... Broken Rust hasn't actually charted the country chart as such, just the digital singles for country chart, apparently.
Earlier this year I read about The Velvet Sundown and that led to ...
Real sacrificial animals have real crap that has to be disposed of. AI-generated artworks are frictionless, people are saying, in the same sense that a ceramic cat statue doesn't pee on your carpet but also doesn't purr or tap your face to wake you up because 3 am is playtime! The tedious highbrow claim is that real art challenges us but the "us" is generally a circumlocution for "me" and the praise is self-directed. There's such a thing as admiring artistic achievement when an artist challenges themselves rather than us, and challenges themselves to do better. I don't think Gene Kelly was necessarily trying to challenge so much as delight audiences when he worked on Singin' in the Rain. I own the movie so, hey, mission accomplished Mr. Kelly! The kinds of critics and artists who think that great artists and great art always challenges will probably never come around to the thought that great artists and great art can do something more difficult than "challenge", which is to give people delight. To paraphrase Joseph Haydn, life is hard and grueling enough that if you are able to make something beautiful that lifts the spirits of people who are going through life like you are that's no small thing to have done.
But more importantly, I got to remembering amidst complaints about AI slop and claims that high culture ("serious music") aren't available for AI to make crappy knock-offs of that this is not true. It was not true fifteen years ago when an AI program was used to generate classical music.
To any and all would-be culture snobs who think that we need to bring back "standards" in musical work the poptimists could say in reply "Really? It was your highbrow music that got successfully generated by AI work fifteen years before The Velvet Sundown ever happened."
As I hear his music if you really understood what Haydn was doing with his musical materials in the 18th century you'd see that the ways he played with his ideas back then can be used to play with blues licks and ragtime strains in the here and now. The ruts in pop and classical probably can't be fixed by letting the purists hunker down and enforce their barriers. What if, just to be polemical, the rise of AI slop being possible in just about any genre has come about because of reduced synergistic exchange across genres, styles and forms?
Some thoughts to go with links for the weekend.
No comments:
Post a Comment