# My New Favorite Song Is a Lie

By Wes Pomeroy. Published June 11, 2026. https://wespomeroy.com/writing/ai-generated-music/

There is this [new song I love](https://youtu.be/b9RZX-HP7zU?si=8gkS-2QN_HXzkU_Z).

A friend of mine posted it on Facebook. I'm not a big R&B guy, not my usual taste, but the vocal performance grabbed me almost immediately. I don't normally pay much attention to lyrics; I'm a production person first, I listen to how a thing is built. But these spoke to me. And the production was solid, with real bass and the hip-hop elements I tend to want. It went onto the short list of songs I'd call favorites.

Then I found out how it was made, and it's kind of messed me up.

## What I found out

The artist is one of a wave of acts charting right now whose music is generated, largely or entirely, by AI. You describe what you want and a finished song comes back. Voice, band, mix, the whole thing.

The tools offer different levels of control. Some let a person do quite a bit: write the words, steer the sound, take the result into real production software and work it the way any producer would. Others do almost everything for you off a short description. But even in the most hands-on version, the tool is doing a great deal of the heavy lifting that people used to do themselves, by hand, over years. A human can sit anywhere on that range, from shaping nearly every choice to typing a sentence and shipping whatever comes out.

And here is the thing I care about, the part that turns out to matter to me. With this song, I can't tell where on that range it was made. There's a human name in the credits on some tracks, and the project calls itself "human-led with minor AI-assisted production." But I don't know what that means. I don't know which choices were made by a person who could explain them, and which ones the machine just handed over.

## Two feelings at once

Knowing that did not undo the song. It is still excellent. It is still on the list. I went back and played it again after I knew, and it still worked.

But a discomfort moved in next to the love, and the two of them have been there together ever since. I feel both.

Two things are bothering me, and they are different.

The first is the lyrics. They touched me. They still do. But knowing they probably didn't come from the lived experience of the person singing them makes them feel less sincere, and a little manipulative, like the song reached into me using feelings nobody actually had. I came to it thinking I was hearing from someone. I am not sure anyone was there.

The second is the production, and this one is more personal. I know how to make a track like that by hand. It takes tradecraft, the kind you only get from years of practice and a lot of failed attempts. It reminds me of my friend [Doug](https://variety.com/2021/music/news/doug-smiley-dead-music-executive-marketing-verve-1234920862/), one of the best producers I ever met, who passed away. His talent floored me. It earned my respect and it pushed me to get better at my own work. When a track that good can come out of a description in a few minutes, with none of that cost paid by anyone, it feels like his hard work and his sacrifice and the risks he took are being devalued, almost stolen back from him after the fact. That one's hard to shake.

## Every made thing has two parts

For the sake of this, think of anything someone makes as having two parts. There is the journey: the labor, the skill, where it came from, whether it grew out of something real. And there is the outcome: the thing itself, and whether it works.

When we argue about AI in art, both of these are usually in the mix, more felt than spelled out, weighted differently by everyone, and rarely separated cleanly. Both parts are always there, AI or not, and they always have been. What changes is how much weight each one carries for you, in the specific thing in front of you. And that changes a lot depending on what the thing is.

## It depends on the stakes

What decides it, as far as I can tell, is how much the outcome actually matters to you, and in what way.

When nothing rides on it, the outcome is most of what matters, and how it was made barely registers. A catchy song on your drive home moves you or it doesn't. Where it came from changes nothing else in your day. That is a fine way to listen, and most people listen that way most of the time. They might be enjoying the song more cleanly than I am.

When something rides on it, how it was made starts to matter a lot, because now you have to trust it. Think about a piece of business writing, a recommendation you're going to act on. You are not just buying the words. You are buying the judgment behind them. Did a real person reason this through, test it against reality, and put their name on the risk if it's wrong? If the answer is yes, you can lean on it. If a machine generated it and nobody can actually defend the choices in it, you are betting on something with no one behind it. Same with a medical answer you're about to follow, or advice about your money. How it was made is most of how you decide whether to trust it.

And then there's a big middle, where it depends entirely on the person. A song. A painting. A poem. For one listener, the outcome is the whole experience and the source is beside the point. For another, the source is the experience, because they came to feel a connection with a person, and a machine can't be the person on the other end of that. Neither of them is wrong. They just brought different stakes to the same three minutes.

## This isn't the first time

None of this started with AI.

Photography did it to painting. Once a machine could capture a face in a second, painters had to figure out what was theirs to do. Painting didn't die. It just stopped being about getting the likeness right, and the value moved to the things a camera couldn't do.

Recording did it to live music. A record is perfect and repeatable and always there. A concert is none of those things, and people still pay a lot to stand in a room and watch a person pull it off once, in front of them, with the chance of getting it wrong.

And Milli Vanilli did it to the pop song, decades before anyone typed a prompt. Two guys out front who weren't the voices on the record. The scandal wasn't that someone else sang, plenty of records use uncredited singers. It was that they sold you a story about whose voice that was, and the story was a lie. When people found out, they didn't shrug. They took their hurt and their sense of betrayal and went home, and the records didn't sound the same afterward even though not a note had changed.

Every time, a path to a result got handed off to something faster, and people split into the same two groups. The ones who only ever wanted the result. And the ones who'd been counting on a person being there, and felt the absence the moment they learned about it.

## What the discomfort is telling me

So my unease about that song isn't a glitch, and it isn't me being a snob about new tools.

It's telling me what I brought to the song in the first place.

I didn't come to it just for a good sound. I came to hear a person who went through something and shaped it into a form I could see myself in, and to feel the work of somebody who paid the price to make it. That's why I've always held a little back from singers like Elton John or Jerry Garcia, who didn't write the words they sang. Gorgeous voices, both, and for me never quite the full thing. That's my stake. It isn't everyone's, and it doesn't have to be.

It's also why control matters to me more than whether AI was involved at all. The more a tool lets a person actually make the choices, the more comfortable I am with the result, because it means somebody could stand behind it. They could tell me why the chorus lands where it does, why that word and not another one. A person who shaped every choice can answer for it. A person who typed a sentence and shipped what came back can't, because there were no choices to answer for. They just liked what the machine gave them.

## The questions

I'm not going to tell you AI music is theft, or that you're sentimental for flinching, or behind the times for not. There isn't one answer here that's right for everyone. There are just better questions, and they're yours to ask.

What actually rides on this thing, for you? How much do you need to trust it? And when you feel that flicker of unease, or notice you feel nothing at all and the song is just good, what is that telling you about what you came for?

It's one of my favorite songs, and I'm uncomfortable with that.