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Where the line sits
The line is hard to locate. A songwriter stuck on a rhyme for small might open a dictionary or a rhyming website, and nobody would call the finished song AI. If an app supplies the word, at what point does it become an AI song? The same question reaches producers and engineers who use AI for EQs, and there is an argument that it is like the shift from patching synths together to using an electric piano.
Intent
The difference is intent. Someone trying to squeeze as much as possible out of AI without anyone noticing knows what they're doing. A kid at home looking up a word has no such intention, and the song is still his.
Fewer gatekeepers
Technology has also opened doors. A song called Coal was written, recorded on a laptop, and released, and it beat 99% of the money-pushed, multi-songwriter songs. Fewer gatekeepers is a good thing, and as soon as something works, it gets commoditized.
Has new technology sparked this debate before?
Antares released Auto-Tune in 1997, and Cher's 1998 hit Believe made its pitch-correcting effect famous. Critics argued that it let singers sound better than they were, while others used it as a deliberate creative sound. By the late 2000s, rapper T-Pain had made the effect a signature style. Pitch correction is now built into most recording software.
Why did Switched-On Bach matter?
Wendy Carlos recorded Switched-On Bach in 1968 using a Moog modular synthesizer, which had to be patched together with cables to make each sound. The album played Johann Sebastian Bach's music on electronic instruments and became a major commercial success. It won three Grammy Awards in 1970. The album introduced many listeners to synthesizers.
Where did rhyming dictionaries begin?
Peter Levins published Manipulus Vocabulorum in 1570, which is generally considered the first English rhyming dictionary. Poets and lyricists have used such reference books ever since to find words that fit a rhyme scheme. Modern versions appeared in print for songwriters throughout the twentieth century. Online rhyming tools now do the same job by searching a word list.
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