AI-generated content is on a stellar trajectory. In marketing, in music. Here’s three major hits, created by AI:

"Heart On My Sleeve". A faked collaboration between Drake and The Weeknd. Went viral.

"Walk My Walk" by Breaking Rust. Reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart. It’s on Wikipedia, even. Sounds totally cool.

Three would be “Verknallt in einen Talahon". Yes, a hit in Germany. The title means — I don’t know what it means, but I could google. Or ask My AI.

The song was created by producer Butterbro, who used AI to compose the music, generate the vocals, even design the artwork. It broke into German charts at number 48, way back in the middle ages of AI, in the summer of 2024.

As with much of AI, generated music goes back a while. Dave Howel Cope, a musician and computer scientist, started his career in the art of artificial music by feeding punchcards into mainframes. He went on to invent Emily Howel, a computer program capable of creating music so similar to Bach that even the most knowledgeable music lovers are fooled.

Cope used a technique called Latent Semantic Analysis, which was undergoing great progress at the time, just before the internet. LSA, and its sibling Latent Semantic Indexing, is used in the intelligence community, for algorithms in social networking, software code analysis, and more.

Another example, and telling of his later development as Singularity prophet, is Ray Kurzweil, who in 1965 was credited with the invention of a primitive form of AI capable of recognizing musical patterns and synthesising new compositions. Telling, because he immediately popularised his creation on a TV show.

LLM training involves processing huge amounts of data. They have “read the internet”.

Music production is no different. Stable Audio 2.0 used a dataset containing over 800,000 audio files.

Where music goes, marketing follows, hot on its heels.

To give a rough estimate: of all data created this year, more than 50% is AI generated. That includes marketing materials and communications. With over 50% of marketers creating content with AI assistance, 90% of all online content could be synthetic by 2026.

We all know examples of words or phrases that are typical of a certain subculture. That’s how language evolves. Like language itself then, language-based AI generates answers most likely to be helpful based on the popularity of certain sequences of words on the internet.

Music, however it’s made, follows the same logic. Marketing too. But it’s humans who choose.

Thing is, until Ray Kurzweil’s dreams of Singularity come true, AI can’t come up with a single campaign by itself.

AI may create, but humans resonate. And humans who buy.

Let me close with this. Yesterday evening, on Tiktok, a clip from a Tiny Desk concert with John Prine performing Come On Home. A more Unartificial Intelligence is hard to find.