This article is an Opinion, which presents the writer’s personal point of view. The views expressed are those of the author/authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Daily Maverick.
When machines sing — can AI imitate the human soul?
When audiences are swept away by the emotions of a band that does not exist, it raises profound questions about the future of creativity, authenticity and ownership in an era in which AI can mimic the human soul, with unsettling precision.
Humanity has produced many great wonders – architecture that defies centuries, literature that continues to illuminate our inner worlds, philosophies that challenge how we live and art that holds a mirror to time itself. But perhaps nothing captures our collective spirit as universally as music.
Music is one of humanity’s oldest companions. Long before we built parliaments or penned constitutions, our ancestors sat around fires, creating rhythm from stones, stretching animal hide into drums or coaxing melodies from bone flutes. Those early sounds weren’t entertainment in the modern sense – they were communication, ritual, prayer and identity. In every culture, music has carried memory and meaning.
Across history, music has healed, confronted and transformed. That is why Bob Marley summoned us to unite under
Miriam Makeba’s voice soared above the cruelty of apartheid, becoming a beacon of freedom, dignity and hope, while
style="font-weight: 400;">Carlos Santana’s guitar continues to bridge cultures and continents, bringing people together through shared rhythm. Back home in South Africa, local favourites like amapiano and gqom are fulfilling Madiba’s rainbow dream, serving as multicultural unifiers at the weekend grooves.
That’s the extraordinary power of music. It flows from authenticity and raw, lived experiences like love, joy, anger, defiance, sadness, grace and spirituality.
But, what becomes of this magic when the music that we adore – rich with stories of love, loss, courage and vulnerability – ceases to come from a human heart, but is instead conjured up from the sterile algorithms of artificial intelligence?
Rage against the machine
In July 2025, a band calledThe Velvet Sundown captured audiences on Spotify, racking up more than one million streams with indie/folk style songs that had aching lyrics, poetic melodies and harmonies filled with the promise of connection.
But The Velvet Sundown did not exist – well, at least, not in the physical or human sense.
The “band” itself was not locked in a garage for months, jamming and learning chords, and no writer was scribbling lyrics on scraps of paper as a result of heartbreak, anger at the state of society, or wonder about the beauty of existence.
When entire artists can be fabricated and popularised, we stand at the edge of a cultural deepfake.
The Velvet Sundown was a fabrication. The songs were entirely AI-generated, with data-sculpted voices and melodies stitched together from probability models trained on decades of indie/folk music.
It’s one thing when AI helps a producer fine-tune beats or assists with arrangements. But when audiences are swept away by the emotions of a band that does not exist, we must pause.
This phenomenon raises profound questions about the future of creativity, authenticity and ownership in an era where AI can mimic the human soul, with unsettling precision. It forces us to confront what authenticity means when a machine can fake it. Who owns the cultural stories being recycled into data? And, most critically, what is lost when voices are simulated rather than lived?
The rise of AI-generated music mirrors a broader crisis in the digital era: deepfakes. These technologies produce hyper-realistic replicas of faces, voices and even entire personas, often without consent.
Think of the ache inUnchained Melody, or the grit in Kendrick Lamar’s
bars, or the meditative
improvisationsof Abdullah Ibrahim’s piano, or the stirring
resonance of Anoushka Shankar’s sitar – these are not mere sounds. They are living testaments of history, memory and truth. To transpose these into algorithmic cut-and-paste operations risks hollowing out their meaning, reducing profound human testimony to empty aesthetics.
The problem is not technology itself… But, this is not like when Bob Dylan went ‘electric’ in 1965.
The threat extends beyond music. AI’s capacity to generate synthetic voices and faces threatens journalism, education and evendemocracy. Deepfakes already pose risks of identity theft and political manipulation. Now, when entire artists can be fabricated and popularised, we stand at the edge of a cultural deepfake: a reality where our most trusted forms of expression, art and music can be co-opted by machines.
The difference with music is emotional scale. Songs shape identity far more intimately than news articles ever will. They soundtrack weddings, revolutions, funerals and heartbreaks. When these intimate anchors cease to belong to real people, what happens to the way that we trust art?
Imagine future generations having their formative coming-of-age moments tied to songs created by code, songs with no human story and no ancestral or cultural thread. What kind of cultural memory do we build in that scenario?
Safeguarding humanity in art
The problem is not technology itself. Tools have always extended human artistry. The piano was once a new technology, as was the synthesiser. But, this is not like when Bob Dylan went “electric” in 1965.
If we allow AI to transform music into an ocean of synthetic voices, we risk silencing the singular, unique resonance of artists themselves. When art ceases to be a grappling of our humanity and an expression of our lives in all of its messy and beautiful forms, we lose not just authenticity but empathy, which is the very core of why art matters.
And so, to preserve music as a sacred space for human connection, we must:
Demand transparency and insist that streaming platforms and other providers clearly label AI-generated music. Audiences have the right to know whether they are being moved by human experience or machine mimicry; and
Advocate that artists have legal agency over whether their voice, style or catalogue can be used to train AI models. Consent must be non-negotiable. Where consent is provided, compensation must be fair and just.
In the end, music is not just sound. It is testimony. It is evidence that we have felt, endured and loved. When machines replicate it without the origin of that feeling, it becomes the appearance of humanity without humanity itself.
Music is our heartbeat, our memory and our prophecy. Let us not surrender it lightly to the algorithms. DM
For me, the most scary aspect of this is not that music can be created artificially - through mimicry, of course, not intelligence - but that we cannot tell this apart from genuine human-generated emotional and intelligent creativity. Perhaps we are not as sophisticated or subtle as we thought we were. I will need to test myself, or have someone test me, on whether I can differentiate between artificial and human. Quite a nerve-wracking idea.
Matthew LloydSep 3, 2025, 07:19 AM
Pandora's box has been opened. But worry not, the digital leviathon that's been unleashed can only consume the digital. We still have live performance - and I imagine this will experience a much needed resurgence - lived experience over digital interaction. And perhaps it's long overdue that we put 'human intelligence/consciousness' back in its place. We were becoming rather attached to our own hubris.
Righard KappSep 3, 2025, 11:00 PM
Thank you for this - when I was a student i was enamoured with a book that argued that making music has for some time been "consuming technology" - equal temperament allowed composers to span different keys, the 808's sound had an unmistakeable impact on early hip-hop, etc. I tend to look at music from a process/social point of view rather than "expression" - and dont know what happens when the technology just takes hte reins. I live in hope that artists can transcend.
