🎵 “Is AI Music Cheating?” – Notes from a Musician’s Mind 🎹

There’s a growing chorus of musicians who call AI-generated music “cheating.” I get it. I even tend to agree—broadly. After all, if a machine can write a song in seconds, where does that leave the human soul, the hours of practice, the deep emotion behind every note?

But here’s the thing: music was never really ours to begin with.

Let’s face a fundamental truth—there is no such thing as “original” music. Everything we compose is a rearrangement. The notes have been around forever. The scales are codified. Cadences follow patterns. Ragas and talas have been taught and passed down for centuries. Our creative freedom lies within a structure.

Think of it this way: a composer is not an inventor, but more like a florist—you pick from a garden of known flowers (notes), and create your own bouquet (song). Some bouquets are elegant, some wild, some awkward, some unforgettable. But the flowers are not new.

And that’s where AI comes in—not as the thief of creativity, but as a new gardening tool. It can help you mix a new color palette, suggest a strange new combo you may not have thought of. Maybe it throws in a cactus next to a lily. Or a jazz chord into a bhajan. Weird? Maybe. Refreshing? Sometimes.

Using AI to generate ideas, explore harmonies, or test out grooves isn’t cheating—it’s collaboration, as long as the final music still has you in it.

A machine can suggest a progression, but it can’t feel heartbreak. It can simulate a raga, but not the memory of your mother singing it on a hot summer evening in Chennai. That part—the soul—that’s yours. And that can’t be automated.

So let’s not shame the use of AI. Let’s just not be lazy with it. Use it like any other instrument or idea machine. But let the human hand arrange the bouquet.

After all, music is still about connection—and no machine can do that better than you.