Should Songwriters Use AI Tools Like Suno and ChatGPT?

This one’s tricky. Let me tell you how my thinking changed.

When Suno first came out, I was a little concerned. It was producing decent lyrics, decent melodies, even full demos. They were missing soul, but the quality was a lot better than I expected.

Then a friend called me.

The day ChatGPT wrote a song in my style

We were on the phone, and he was telling me you could use ChatGPT to write full songs in any style you want. So while we were still talking, he typed in something like: “Write a song in the style of RikRok.”

A couple of minutes later, there it was. A fully written song.

I read through it. And it wasn’t bad. I’d have made different choices in certain places, but it wasn’t super far from how I would’ve written it.

That’s a strange feeling, to say the least.

Everybody panicked

Then came all the sky-is-falling news. Songwriters were scared AI would take their jobs. And it wasn’t just music. Pretty much every industry had the same fear.

But I’ve seen this movie before.

When recording went from analog to digital, musicians had the exact same reaction. Hands in the air. “There won’t be any real music anymore, anybody can press a couple of buttons and make a song.”

Real music survived. It always does.

What AI can’t replace

Here’s what hasn’t changed through any of this technology. Taste.

Knowing what a stranger will actually feel. Knowing which chorus will make a room sing back and which one just sounds fine. Knowing how to connect with people. It takes a human being to do that, because you’re writing for human beings.

AI can give you a song that’s not bad. Your job was never to write songs that are not bad.

What AI is good for

What I like about these tools is that they make tedious work much faster. Mixing is a good example.

But even then, you still have to understand the fundamentals of a good song. What makes a chorus strong enough, what will connect with an audience, what to keep and what to throw out. The tool speeds up the work. It doesn’t make the decisions.

So my advice is simple. Learn these tools. Figure out where they fit in your workflow so you can make songs faster. That’s useful.

Two things worth knowing

Some people will abuse it, and the industry is pushing back. Record companies and streaming services are cracking down on AI spam. Spotify said in September 2025 that it had removed more than 75 million spammy tracks over the previous year and introduced new AI policies. We’re not fighting this alone. Big companies are defending their interests, and by extension, ours.

Watch your copyright. In the US, the Copyright Office has said that purely AI-generated material can’t be copyrighted, because copyright needs a human author. The parts you write yourself are yours. If AI is doing the writing, you may not own what comes out. (Here’s what actually protects your songs.)

So I’m not worried. Use the tools for speed. Keep the taste for yourself.