Adele, Beyonce and Taylor Swift hitmaker Ryan Tedder admits to using AI in his music - with the One Republic star branding the technology 'amazing'

Daily Mail​

2 days ago

One Republic star Ryan Tedder has admitted to using AI in his songs, calling the technology's effect on music 'amazing'.
The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, 46, has produced some of the biggest songs of the last 15 years after working with hugely popular artists such as Beyonce and Taylor Swift.
Having shot to stardom as One Republic's front man, he too helped Adele scoop Album Of The Year at the GRAMMYs twice with her albums 21 (2011) and 25 (2015).
Ryan - who too co-wrote Beyonce's 2008 hit Halo - has now however admitted to using AI in his songs, even revealing that he uses the technology to 'change his voice'.
Speaking on a new episode of Smallzy's Surgery, the singer said: 'It is changing music.
'It's changing it from a creative perspective, I've gotten cuts because for instance, if I'm pitching a song to a female artist, historically I would either just leave me on singing the demo or occasionally I would hire a female demo singer to come in and replace me with what they call a scratch vocal.
'But with AI, I started replacing my voice probably 18 months ago. Like if I wanted to do a song with Ariana Grande, I'd sing it like Ariana in my way, process it, put the song back in and all of a sudden you're like, "oh my god this is amazing".
'So I started pitching a song doing that and it started working to tremendous effect... holy cow, it works!'
Ryan also opened up about exactly how much he turns to AI to aid his creative process, saying it saves him 'half a day of work'.
'There's a couple different AI companies that allow me to input my idea and then tell it what I want it to do, to sound like, and then it'll pop out the other end,' he said.
'What that does is save me half a day of work, it's all the s**t that I would have to do anyway, but it saved me it.
'So that's the extent that I've used it. But when it comes to lyrics, ChatGPT lyrics has become the joke.
'Inside songwriting sessions, you'll be like, "man, that sounds so ChatGPT", like that has become the punchline. The lyrics are so bad it's ChatGPT.'
Amid the increasing influence of ChatGPT on the music industry, Spotify have received a host of backlash after being accused of creating 'fake artists' to fill up their playlists.
Back in 2017, the streaming platform strongly denied doing such a thing presumably in order to reduce royalty payments.
'We do not and have never created "fake" artists and then put them on Spotify playlists,' the platform argued.
But just this week a host of listeners once again threatened to boycott Spotify after suspicious arose that a new band could be AI-generated.
The group, named The Velvet Sundown, already have over 550,000 million monthly listeners despite only debuting on the service in early June.
Promotional images of the band all appear to be AI generated, and the credits on their music has no writers, producers or musicians listed.
There's also no live performances or interviews of the band anywhere to be found, and none of the four members have any kind of internet presence.
The band also has barely any social media followers, with just 322 on Instagram and 47 followers on X.
Despite this, The Velvet Sundown have been featured on multiple popular Spotify playlists.
After various media outlets reported that The Velvet Sundown may be AI-generated, the band hit back in a series of posts on X - yet offered no proof to disprove the claims.
'Absolutely crazy that so-called 'journalists' keep pushing the lazy, baseless theory that The Velvet Sundown is 'AI-generated' with zero evidence,' they wrote.
'Not a single one of these "writers" has reached out, visited a show, or listened beyond the Spotify algorithm,' they continued.
'This is not a joke. This is our music, written in long, sweaty nights in a cramped bungalow in California with real instruments, real minds, and real soul. Every chord, every lyric, every mistake — HUMAN.'
They added, 'Just because we don't do TikTok dances or livestream our process doesn't mean we're fake.'
And despite their miniscule following on social media, the band said that they had to 'lock down' all of their accounts 'due to harassment'.
However, none of their accounts are officially verified by any site outside of Spotify, and none of their social media accounts have been set to private either.
On Deezer, where The Velvet Sundown's music also appears, there's a warning from the streamer stating, 'some tracks on this album may have been created using artificial intelligence'.