AI has been a hot topic in 2023 across a number of industries, including music. Songs using AI have been uploaded and removed from streaming services, and labels have had to deal with the issue of AI using real artists’ voices to create brand-new songs, while other artists have fully embraced the new technology.
Country Stars React To Using AI For Songwriting
A number of musicians have offered their thoughts on artificial intelligence (AI) over the last year, including several country stars.
Garth Brooks
Garth Brooks told 92.5 XTU that “the scary part” of AI scares him “to death.”
“I don’t want to be a gloom-and-doom guy, but it’s like all technology; we need to be able to regulate it before we unleash it,” he continued, adding that he’s “not sure what the ‘hopeful’ is unless AI can create Garth Brooks at a certain age that he could tour and hologram forever, kind of thing.”
“I would go in a heartbeat to go see the Fab Four all together again in a stadium, right? It’d be fun,” he said. Note to Garth, that is extremely possible — just ask ABBA.
The 61-year-old singer actually has had experience with AI during a recent project. “My thing with AI, they had liners they wanted me to do, so they went through AI to do it, and they showed it to me, and I’m going, ‘That’s me, I don’t remember doing these liners, but that’s me,’” he recalled. “I’m listening to me. It even had a little laugh. I’m like going, ‘Oh s—.’”
As for whether he’d record a song written by AI, Brooks noted that the best song wins. “I don’t know about that; you’re always open to any songs,” he said. “You don’t care who the writer is as long as it’s not somebody that tried to destroy the world. I get it.”
Darius Rucker
Darius Rucker told the same station “that AI thing is scary.”
“I’m gonna wake up one day and have a robot standing over me,” he added with a laugh. “It’s scary, but technology can be that way.”
While he acknowledged what AI can do in the music world, Rucker said he plans to stick to what works for him when writing songs.
“I think people are gonna use it and everything for songwriting,” he added. “Technology is just way in front of me, so I don’t think about those things. I’m gonna keep doing things the way I do it and writing songs the way I write songs and let the chips fall where they may.”
Jon Pardi
In a recent interview with Taste of Country Nights, Jon Pardi didn’t seem too keen on the idea of using AI to help him write.
“If I’m gonna co-write with AI, it better walk in with a damn coffee mug and wheel in there and start talking to me, and I’ll start asking it damn questions,” he joked before referencing the Pixar film WALL-E. “I wanna see it in person, I want a damn robot to come in and start writing with WALL-E today. WALL-E’s coming in, I’m gonna write with him.”
Ricky Skaggs
Ricky Skaggs thinks that with music generated by artificial intelligence, “there will always be something missing.”
“Until they create an AI that really has a heart, there will always be something missing,” he told Taste of Country.
“It can spit out numbers and it can spit out lyrics, and it can know a lot about a person,” Skaggs added, sharing that he experienced AI himself when a friend of his asked a program to write a song about the musician.
“It talked about bluegrass, it talked about Bill Monroe, it talked about my Christian faith … I was blown away that it knew that much, but it was like, ‘Okay, here’s your words … now create a melody yourself,’” he laughed.
Dolly Parton
Dolly Parton shared with reporters during a recent press conference in London that she’s unlikely to approve of her likeness living on after her death.
“I think I’ve left a great body of work behind,” she said, via The Independent. “I have to decide how much of that high-tech stuff I want to be involved [with] because I don’t want to leave my soul here on this earth.
“I think with some of this stuff, I’ll be grounded here forever,” she added. “I’ll be around — we’ll find ways to keep me here.”
In true Parton fashion, she also cracked a joke about the whole thing, saying that “everything” about her including “any intelligence” is fake anyway.
