In the wake of the U.S. Screen Actors Guild strike over AI protections and U.K. musicians’ silent album protesting proposed changes to copyright law, more than a dozen AI-produced tracks have appeared on the Billboard charts since 2022.

While AI music has gone viral on social media platforms like TikTok through novelty covers that use AI to change songs from one genre to another, appearing on the charts brings a level of industry and cultural legitimacy associated with longstanding markers of music industry success.

What’s surprising, though, is where these tracks are succeeding. My research into YouTube discussions of AI music, explored in a chapter of a new book called Media Imaginaries, found a recurring view that AI was acceptable in “generic” Top 40 pop because this music was already perceived as formulaic and lacking in human creativity. Yet Christian, gospel and country music are where AI-generated tracks have achieved some of their greatest chart successes.

These songs are not created with AI as a tool in a collaborative production process; they are generated through text-to-music platforms such as Suno and Udio, where users enter prompts to produce complete tracks, including vocals and lyrics. Apart from Xania Monet—currently the most successful AI gospel and R&B artist—the people behind these prompts often remain deliberately unknown, with avatars taking on the role of creator.

How storytelling music succeeds

The success of these AI artists is closely connected to what these genres ask music to do. Christian, gospel and country music often tell stories that connect listeners’ everyday experiences to shared beliefs and values through expressions of faith, accounts of struggle or ideas of family, community and belonging.

The charting AI artists reproduce these familiar conventions. AI Christian artist Solomon Ray, for example, presents songs centered on worship, interpretations of the Bible and Christian theology. His persona is built around a familiar form of Christian masculinity that demonstrates vulnerability by yielding to a godly presence.

Similarly, AI country artists appearing on the charts draw on recognizable forms of rural masculinity, placing a rugged “lone wolf” in natural and farmland settings, as seen in Walk My Walk by Breaking Rust.

The human mind behind Xania Monet belongs to Telisha “Nikki” Jones, who writes the lyrics and uses generative tools to create the singer’s voice and appearance.

Jones describes Monet as “an extension of me”: The experiences expressed in the lyrics are her own, even though the performer is an AI creation. Monet’s image aligns with industry expectations of beauty, showing how AI can be used to present personal stories through an idealized celebrity persona.

These AI performers are not disrupting the conventions of their genres, which may be why audiences have been more willing to accept them. While much criticism of AI music focuses on the loss of human creativity, these genres have always placed significant emphasis on the message a song communicates and the community it creates.

It’s the message, not the medium

For much of popular music history, the singer has been central to how audiences understand and relate to songs. Lyrics take on meaning as listeners connect them to the perceived experiences of the person performing them. This helps explain why celebrity culture is so central to contemporary music: Fans follow artists’ lives and develop a strong sense of personal connection, even without knowing them. Taylor Swift’s Swifties and the South Korean pop group BTS’s fans, known as Army, are prominent examples.

These new AI artists disrupt this relationship between embodiment and authorship. Their identities exist primarily to deliver the music rather than to become celebrities in their own right. Virtual personas provide a visual identity, but the emotional connection comes from the song itself and the values and familiarity it represents.

Without the messiness of human experience, these AI artists are less vulnerable to the controversies that affect human celebrities. They meet audience expectations and present a consistent version of the worldview they have been designed to represent.

Currently, this can be seen in music that offers traditional constructions of gender alongside particular cultural and religious values, such as Breaking Rust’s rugged cowboy masculinity and Ray’s Christian messages of devotion.

AI-generated artists are finding success in genres where affirming listeners’ beliefs may matter more than who made the music or whether it offers something new. These first successful AI artists are not necessarily replacing the celebrity musician, but they are potentially changing the ideological role that musicians play.

In my current research exploring YouTube comments on videos by charting AI artists, I am finding that many listeners continue to describe AI-generated songs as emotionally meaningful even after discovering they are not human-made. What matters is not who made the music, but what it offers the listener for their own emotional well-being and enjoyment. Ultimately, does it matter if music is produced by AI if someone has an emotional connection to it?

This does not make concerns about copyright or the environmental costs of generative AI any less important. The early success of AI-generated artists suggests that acceptance depends partly on what audiences want from music in the first place. Where listeners value a song because it reflects shared beliefs, provides emotional reassurance or reinforces ideology, the identity of the creator becomes less important than the message.

If audiences increasingly care less about who wrote a song than whether it expresses the values they want affirmed, then AI may be changing what we think musicians are for. These personas can deliver a consistent message without a personal life that might contradict or jeopardize it.

But the absence of a human performer does not mean the absence of human choices. Someone still decides which stories are told, what the artist looks like and whose values they represent. The question is not only whether AI music can move us, but also who gets to shape the beliefs and identities it invites us to share.

Who’s behind this story?

Gaby Clark

MA in English, copy editor since 2021 with experience in higher education and health content. Dedicated to trustworthy science news.

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Andrew Zinin

Master’s in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X’s editorial success.

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.