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I teach high school choir. AI is a huge buzz with a lot of secondary teachers right now; students, as always seems to be the case, have been able to stay one step ahead in understanding this new technology. Just this morning, I attended my school’s professional learning, where we made initial plans for an “AI Day,” during which teachers will incorporate activities to show students positive and intentional uses for AI in their subject field.

All this talk about AI in my high school setting has had me thinking about how this tool will affect the music world. Many musicians are especially concerned about how AI often borrows, steals, or misattributes information—and what that could look like in the field of music. In current standard practice, most AI companies avoid using any copyrighted music, but that could change soon. This Washington Post about over 1,000 musicians protesting a proposal in the U.K. to allow AI use of copyrighted music shows a little more of the fight going on between a good number of artists and tech companies.

Let me be clear—I don’t think that allowing the plagiarism of full pieces of music, to the profit of big tech companies, is a win. Regulations are essential as we explore this new technological terrain. However, I think it’s important to remember that begging, borrowing, and stealing ideas within music is, well, at least part of the point of the whole thing.

Chord progressions, note sequences, themes, are recycled endlessly. Any guitar player—especially --will tell you that learning one progression of four chords will get you an enormous way in learning Western music. The genres and subcultures of music we have come from a constant stream of copied ideas. I can teach high school choir because for hundreds of years, people have imitated and re-used the idea of singing in tonal harmony with each other, to the point that my school has over a thousand pieces of choral music just arranged for one specific type of choir voicing. You can enjoy your favorite rock, country, or jazz piece because of genre conventions that have been set up over many years of repetition. In fact, one of the reasons you probably enjoy pieces within a certain genre is the familiarity you feel when, for example, a bluegrass piece has an excellent choppy mandolin solo, or when you can jam out to that big, repeated bridge on a contemporary Christian song. These things are there because someone tried them once upon a time—and they were cool enough to listeners to be favored with endless imitation.

AI is really good at replication. In fact, it’s the only thing it’s good at—AI can’t come up with its own original ideas. It learns from a vast amount of information, yes, but it can’t exercise creative expression or intuition. It can only duplicate conventions it has heard before. Part of music is imitation, yes, but it doesn’t stop there.

Humans—with the creativity our good God gave us—are able to do more than AI. We can take ideas we’ve heard before and expand on them. We can take things we’ve heard before and bring something new to the table, considering our unique time, culture, experience, and musical skill. We can do something crazy and insightful that no one else has thought to do before.

It takes a lot for a song to “stick” with people, and most often, those that do express a part of our human experience very clearly. In music, we find the expression of all parts of life: love, grief, longing, humor, anger, joy, and so on. We use music to better understand ourselves, communicate with each other, and communicate with God. AI might be able to collect a conglomeration of human experience to share some especially universal ideas, but God has created us with too much detail to be summed up with an algorithm. The songs that resonate most with us will always come from real people living real lives.

So—AI will certainly continue to imitate and borrow ideas from the music we know. But, I don’t think you need to be too worried about AI stopping musical integrity or the gift of musical expression God has given us. Instead, I think it’s time to think about how we can use AI to make beautiful and God-glorifying music in the 21^st century.

With this in mind, here are a few final thoughts on how to meaningfully utilize AI in our music creation and enjoyment.

1. Consider how using AI in music could help you be more creative instead of hindering you. For a composition unit I recently taught, a student gave AI instructions to set a Biblical text into a modified verse form that rhymed. After trying a few versions and adjusting a few words, she had a set of lyrics! This enabled her to start composing an arrangement that flowed well without spending hours trying to format syllables. She was able to use AI as a tool to assist her creativity.
2. To expand on this, I think there is a window in the field of music for AI especially related to writing music. Composition is so underutilized—mostly because in our traditional Western notation, there is a huge learning curve to get thoughts down on paper. I am hopeful that AI will be able to make the composition process more accessible, so that more people can share their own music with the world.
3. While we’re talking about using AI for music, remember that AI can be a silly tool bring a little extra joy to your day. I’d encourage you to try the app or website sometime this week to generate the crazy song of your wildest dreams. A few students and I generated a song for women’s choir called “Dancing Pickles with Sombreros” the other day. It was amazing.

AI will copy and imitate the music we already know, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Let’s recognize AI as the tool it is, learning from and using it to help us in our music making.