This technology has “opened up a new realm of creative possibility,” Arter said. He had never been a skilled singer; now he could dabble in the old-school R. & B. he grew up with. Suddenly, he could craft ageless personae to represent his music, complete with fictional backstories, in lieu of his aging millennial self. Arter has produced about a hundred and forty songs in the past year alone, and he doesn’t hide the fact that his music is made with A.I., though the unsuspecting listener may not notice the name of his YouTube account, “AI for the Culture.” [...] He has never done marketing or promotion for his A.I. music, yet word of mouth and algorithmic recommendations, such as Spotify’s Radio function, have propelled his work to a level of popularity that he could only dream of as a rapping teen-ager. Justin Bieber has used Arter’s songs to soundtrack Instagram posts, and 50 Cent posted a video of himself singing along to a Nick Hustles track in his car. The rapper Young Thug adopted the chorus of Arter’s “all my dogs got that dog in ’em” for his hit track “Miss My Dogs” and gave Arter credit as a lyricist. Arter was able to quit his job in consulting and embark on a full-time career as a semiautomated musician. He now works with the music distributor UnitedMasters and makes money from more than fifty different streaming platforms. On the side, he generates novelty songs for clients’ birthdays or weddings at five hundred dollars a pop (half price if you supply your own lyrics). Arter has no doubt that what he’s doing is just a new way of being an artist: If your music “changes someone’s life,” he said, “does it really matter if it was A.I.?”

The popularity of A.I. music notwithstanding, A.I. is not, by most metrics, a very good songwriter. [...] Seeing an opportunity in the technology’s shortcomings, Kordofani has forged a burgeoning career helping aspiring musicians “humanize” songs that they have made using the likes of Suno and Udio. One of his clients is Ray Sabbagh, a photographer in Montreal who makes Latin-inflected rap and dance music. Sabbagh generates his songs, sometimes using A.I.-generated lyrics, then uses an A.I. model of his voice which Kordofani trained using IRL recordings that Sabbagh had made. (When friends hear the fake him, they can’t tell the difference, Sabbagh said, adding, “It can get scary sometimes.”) If there are spots where the A.I. voice fails, Kordofani patches in recordings of Sabbagh’s actual voice—an arduous process, but still faster than recording from scratch. The resulting music is pleasant and relatively more human than the songs of Arter or Breaking Rust, though it’s also much less popular.