news2day Explainer: Could AI music change our tunes?

AI-generated music is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. But is it having an impact on the music we listen to? Jack McCarron from RTÉ Prime Time investigated this topic, and he came in to chat Cara and share his news2day Explainer - watch it now up top and read the Q&A below. First of all, what is AI music? AI music is basically music made with the help of artificial intelligence. There are tools now where you can type in the kind of song you want — the style, the mood, the instruments, even what you want the lyrics to be about — and within seconds it can generate a finished track for you, with vocals and everything. What makes that interesting is that making music normally takes time, practice, skill and creativity. So, if AI can produce something convincing almost instantly, it raises a bigger question: does it matter how much of the creative work was actually done by a person? Could AI take over the music scene? And what did you do to test it? My colleague Sarah and I made two different AI songs in two different ways. Sarah gave all of the creative bit over to AI. To try and add a few more human elements into my song, I played some basic guitar chords, played a short beat and sang a hook into the AI – I then asked it to make a song based on my actual human input. We were trying to test whether people would actually hear the difference — whether putting more human effort and creativity into the process made the song feel any more human, or whether the AI could do just as convincing a job on its own. What did you learn from the experiment? Most people actually preferred Sarah's song, even though AI had done more of the work. But the interesting part was that some people liked the songs less once we told them AI had made them. So, while AI-made music is probably going to become more common, our experiment suggested that human artists still matter — because people don't just connect with how a song sounds, they also care about the person, the effort and the creativity behind it. Tune in to news2day weekdays at 4.20pm on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player during the school term. Visit www.rte.ie/news2day for more from the show.