His voice hits you with quiet force. A low, steady rumble carved from old wood. It is Randy Travis singing with his unmistakable baritone, “…there ain’t no more where that came from.” As a Randy Travis fan, I was exhilarated to see the country music legend singing again.
But there was one twist. It was not Randy singing, it was James Dupré. With the help of AI and Randy’s blessing, his voice was changed to give the stroke impaired star another moment on the country music airwaves.
This was not flowery. People raged like they were in a two-kilometre traffic jam. Some critics called it depraved, saying the production was generic and the songwriting did not rise to the emotional depth expected from Travis. The lyrics were described as shallow or unfinished. But many fans, including me, didn’t care about the AI debate. We were simply happy, expressing joy and gratitude for hearing his voice again after a long absence caused by his stroke.
You see, we have a bigger problem than that. AI music is spreading fast. Over fifty thousand AI songs are uploaded to streaming platforms each day, drowning real musicians. These are not AI assisted like Randy’s song, but one hundred percent generated by machines. The difference is hard to spot. A Deezer and Ipsos survey found that 97 percent of the nine thousand people interviewed could not tell AI generated music from human made music. That was almost the entire sample. Scary.
Songs like Walk My Walk topped the Billboard Country digital sales and fooled the world. There are many songs that mimic top artists and mashups that never happened. Anyone with a laptop, hobbyists and bored teenagers can generate endless tracks to make passive income.
Large content farms grow each month with music created in minutes while real artists face long nights, heartbreaks, and dangerous piles of coffee to make a demo. The industry is becoming unfair.
Photography already faced this shift. You can generate portraits that never required a camera. You remove the cost of lenses, travel, and scouting. Many photographers now compete with AI generated images.
Coding faces a similar trend. Days when developers walked office corridors like gladiators are fading. Now we have vibe coding. With some clever prompts and a basic understanding of apps, AI tools produce functional app layouts or website blocks with a mere prompt.
The question is simple. Will our creativity depend on how well we write prompts? If models shape every output, then prompt skill becomes the main tool. You choose the idea, the model executes.
AI will not stop. The issue is how we respond. Our value will come from our vision, our style, and our ability to use these tools without losing our voice… and maybe our minds.
