LA Hosts First AI Music Awards
The Facts
- The first AI Music Awards ceremony in the United States took place Friday in downtown Los Angeles, honoring people who created songs at least partly with artificial intelligence, a field that has drawn lawsuits while gaining millions of streams.
- The night's top awards for AI artist, song and album of the year went to Xania Monet, an AI-generated avatar. Billboard said her R&B track "How Was I Supposed to Know?" was the first AI-generated track to appear on one of its radio charts.
- Monet was created by Telisha "Nikki" Jones, who said she wrote all of the lyrics before setting them to music with the help of AI. Speaking before the ceremony, Jones said AI music is "a new thing that people just have to get used to."
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The Spin
Pro-industry narrative
A song starts with a human idea, and a generative tool is just the latest instrument that helps artists finish their projects. Lyrics about trauma, hope and heartbreak don't stop being real because a machine handled the vocals, showing craft, not fakery. Gatekeeping music behind years of lessons and studio money shut out plenty of talented writers, and tearing that wall down deserves applause.
Industry-critical narrative
While these artists probably do work hard, using a platform that has never felt human emotion can't earn the right to a song. On Spotify alone, nearly 90,000 synthetic tracks a day now crowd out people who actually lived those stories. Paying machine output from the same royalty pool as human work rewards industrial spam, output that will ironically also replace these AI users one day. Art without an artist is just product.
