Is blatantly taking an artist’s music a form of disrespect?
The other day, I was relaxing and watching YouTube videos about music, including performances in one of my favorite genres: fusion jazz.
The algorithm recommended a video by an artist I won’t name. The challenge was to take a famous pop song and remake it in any style the artist and band wanted. On the spot, they turned it into a fusion jazz piece.
I watched them build this beautifully complex arrangement with multiple time signatures. It was such a delight to hear. The fact that they could come up with the arrangement and perform it like that on the spot made it even more impressive.
Then I read one of the comments. The commenter basically thanked the artist and said they were going to rip the whole piece, put it into AI, create an album based on it, and make millions.
The struggle within
I still don’t quite know how I feel about AI-generated music as a whole. Song creation is becoming incredibly easy with tools such as Suno AI, and people without a music background can now create polished-sounding tracks. We’re already seeing plenty of AI-generated music on platforms like Spotify and YouTube.
Some of it sounds almost too perfect, like it was mastered in the best studio in the world. Sometimes it even sounds a little robotic. But I also enjoy some AI-generated music. It can be groovy, fun, and even stir up real emotions.
What bothered me was the attitude in that comment. It felt disrespectful and dismissive of the artist’s craft, and of all the effort and time she had spent developing the mastery needed to create something like that.
I think my discomfort is less about AI existing and more about how people choose to use it. There’s a difference between enjoying new creative tools and treating someone else’s hard-earned artistry as raw material you can simply extract, imitate, and profit from.
That comment felt disgusting and distasteful to me because it reduced all that skill and creative effort to something that could just be sucked into a machine and repackaged.
I’m still figuring out exactly where I stand on AI music. I can appreciate what these tools can create while also feeling uneasy about what happens when respect for the original artist disappears.
And even if someone was actually planning to do what that commenter described, maybe some thoughts are better left unposted.