Abstract: Generative AI music platforms (e.g., Suno, Udio) and viral chart-topping AI-generated tracks (e.g., "Walk My Walk") have sparked industry upheaval and ontological questions: What is real music in the age of algorithmic creation? This paper applies Martin Heidegger’s philosophy to illuminate AI music’s implications. Drawing on The Origin of the Work of Art, authentic music emerges as poiesis: truth-disclosure (aletheia) through Dasein’s strife between world and earth—requiring lived thrown-projection and historical situatedness. Fully AI-generated music, by contrast, exemplifies Enframing (Gestell): reducing creativity to calculative optimization and standing-reserve, fostering inauthentic “idle talk” (Das Man). Yet Heidegger’s “saving power” suggests reflection on this danger may provoke a turning: recentering music on performative unconcealment while subordinating AI as techne. Engaging Iain Thomson’s recent book, the paper argues generative AI threatens authenticity but harbors promise for rediscovering music’s world-disclosing essence.
What is real music?
Our parents used to say: “That’s not real music.”
In the AI age, this question becomes ontologically urgent
Our parents used to say: “That’s not real music.” Whether they meant that our generation’s music lacked soul, emotion, authenticity, technical proficiency, or style—or if this was an admission of their own cultural disconnect—the statement takes on new meaning in the AI music age, as we are forced to consider the question anew: What is real music?
The most satisfying answer may come from an unlikely oracle: the philosopher obsessed with the question of Being—who foresaw this type of ontological ambiguity in our runaway technological age. Though Martin Heidegger did not directly address the nature of music, his ideas of art and his critique of technology may cast light on what essential qualities are uncannily missing from AI music. Thus to approach the question of what real music is, I will invoke Heidegger’s conception of art from The Origin of the Work of Art and The Question Concerning Technology. My focus here is not on challenging Heidegger’s theories, but demonstrating how their application may help address what is wrong with AI music, and AI art in general.
A departure from art belonging exclusively to the realm of aesthetics or art for art’s sake, Heidegger views art as encompassing world creation and truth revealment, “the setting-itself-to-work of truth” (Heidegger 1971, 44). Harkening back to the ancient Greeks, art is not a distinct sector of cultural activity, but a process of revealing, or bringing forth to presence. By contrast to art as truth revealment, AI music is characteristic of an inauthentic mode of engagement with the world symptomatic of our modern technological worldview, where “everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand” as a resource (Heidegger 1977, 17).
In the following, I argue that while AI can be used as a tool to express artistic vision, the artistic vision itself cannot (and should not) be automated. In essence, every step towards automation without intent may be a step away from authentic creativity. Human engagement within a world of meaning is essential to art creation, and therefore AI on its own is not capable of producing real art. Further, while the proliferation of AI music signals an ontological threat to creativity and existential authenticity by concealing our ability to contemplate the nature of music, there may be a saving power within it which could prompt us to rediscover the essence of real music (Heidegger 1977, 28).
I will begin by providing examples of current AI music controversies and how the issues are typically framed in terms of market disruption, where philosophical questions about what AI music actually is are ignored. Next, I outline Heidegger’s concepts and how they relate to AI music. I explain that AI music threatens the essence of authentic music, echoing Heidegger’s danger of technological domination. After addressing counterarguments, I will explain how reflecting on the essence of AI music can give us a renewed appreciation for human-made art. The inevitable trivialization of producing sound recordings, exemplified by AI music, forces a recentering of music as a performative art.
AI Music and Industry Disruption
The music industry is facing the fourth industrial revolution head on. The rise of AI-generated music forces us to reconsider the value of music and music making. From a simple text prompt, advanced models like Suno can output realistic sounding tracks almost instantaneously. AI music can mimic popular trends or clone characteristics from specific artists. It keeps up with the speed of today’s cultural production, perhaps even surpassing it.
In 2023, an AI-generated track “Heart on My Sleeve,” mimicking Drake and The Weeknd, led to copyright disputes when Universal Music Group demanded its removal from streaming services (Sisario 2023). The song was entirely AI-generated and technically contained no stolen samples, lyrical content, or original melodies, just the artists’ voices (“clones”) and style. This artificial collaboration was generated from an ingestion of Drake and The Weeknd’s back catalogs. In 2024, new lawsuits were filed against Suno and Udio for using copyrighted data to train their AI models. Meanwhile, platforms for independent musicians, like SoundCloud, faced backlash for adding new Terms of Service which enable users’ uploads to serve as training data. In late 2025, Warner Music Group settled its copyright lawsuit with Suno and entered a licensing partnership enabling opt-in use of WMG artists' voices and compositions in AI-generated music. Though appearing to be a positive development, this demonstrates how major labels frame AI disruption primarily as an opportunity for monetization and catalog protection rather than a threat to music's essence (WMG 2025).
Today, AI-generated bands like The Velvet Sundown and Aventhis are amassing millions of streams and listeners on Spotify (Guardian 2025). There are bidding wars between record companies over the AI-powered artist Xania Monet (CNN 2025). The song "Walk My Walk" by AI-generated artist Breaking Rust, hit No.1 on Billboard’s “country digital song sales” (Newsweek 2025). The French streaming platform, Deezer, reported that ~34% of all tracks uploaded to its platform in 2025 are fully AI-generated (Liao 2025). A January 2026 Morgan Stanley survey finds that 50–60% of US listeners aged 18–44 (primarily Gen Z and Millennials) report listening to 2.5–3 hours of AI-generated music per week, mostly via YouTube and TikTok, highlighting AI music's rapid normalization in everyday consumption habits (Kawa 2026).
The proliferation of AI music is turning the industry upside down. The controversy is usually framed around copyright issues and generative art taking market share away from real musicians, which reflects general concerns of labor automation, but while economic loss is a real threat to business as usual, there’s a deeper danger that is concealed by market disruption. Behind legal battles lies the question about what it means to create and consume music in the technological age. The longstanding critique “that’s not real music” takes on new relevance as we formally inquire, what is real music?—Here we are prompted to ask questions about the essence of music.
At this point we turn from legal and monetary concerns to existential ones. Does AI music signal an ontological threat to creativity and existential authenticity? What does AI music mean for human creativity and our being in the (music) world? Is fearing the possibility of AI music replacing real musicians a symptom of one-dimensional thinking? Is technology on the cusp of making musicianship altogether obsolete? These questions echo discussions of existential authenticity and the danger of technology from one of the most original and influential thinkers of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger.
Heidegger and the Question of Being
Heidegger’s thinking was centered on fundamental ontology, or the question of what it means to exist (Heidegger 1962, 1). He accused the longstanding tradition of western metaphysics of ignoring this question, reducing Being to mere objects and subjects (Heidegger 1962, 2). Descartes’s “I think therefore I am” mistakenly takes for granted “I am” as something self-evident; not only is it not self-evident, the concept of Being is missing altogether—the question of Being has been forgotten (seinsvergessenheit). Thus, Heidegger saw western metaphysics as nihilistic because it obliterates Being. To avoid falling into the same trap as his predecessors, Heidegger used a phenomenological approach that introduces the concept of Dasein (“being there” in German) and being-in-the-world to describe what human beings are, as our access point into the question of Being (Heidegger 1962, 78). Dasein is defined as the type of being for whom the question of its existence is an issue. “Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities … it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it” (Heidegger 1962, 32). Dasein cares (Sorge) about the world it is thrown into and essentially involved in. Primordially identified with “the other” (Mitsein), Dasein’s everyday mode is not to question existence, but we have the potential for authenticity through confronting death and embracing freedom (Heidegger 1962, 156, 294). Heidegger’s concept of Dasein as thrown-projection into a world defined by care (Sorge) with the tendency to be absorbed into Das Man, characterizes human existence, truth, and underpins the possibility of an authentic encounter with art, and the distortions of modern technology. While authentic art reveals truth (Heidegger 1971, 44), technology is a reductive mode of ordering nature which obscures the deeper question of Being (Heidegger 1977, 14). While authenticity in music might manifest as a jazz musician’s thrown-projection through improvisation, in an AI saturated world, we risk bypassing this thrownness, losing something fundamental about human creativity.
In what follows, I explore the nature of art and the existential dangers of AI music through Martin Heidegger’s conceptions of being-in-the-world (Dasein) and technological enframing (Gestell). This will involve further outlining some of Heidegger’s core concepts and drawing parallels into the discussion of AI music. While these concerns surrounding AI also reflect labor automation and autonomous systems, my focus is specifically auto-generated music creation and its effect on the music world and human existence more broadly. By questioning the essence of music within a world increasingly saturated with AI music, we might find a renewed appreciation for real music.
Through this investigation, we will need to define art, AI music, and whether AI tools can be leveraged to create art without corrupting its essential nature. The hope is to harness technology to help express our humanity, not to let it take the place of it. This reflection doesn’t involve a dialectic synthesis of opposites, but an unconcealment of more authentic modes of being (Heidegger 1971, 35).
Heidegger on Art
In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger says: “Art is the setting up of a world” through an event of truth where Being is revealed through the tension and interplay between an historically situated world (Dasein), and earth, the material ground of existence (Heidegger 1971, 49). To help illustrate this, he uses the example of a Greek temple rising amid a rock-cleft valley, its form not merely juxtaposed against the material it is built from, but rather, revealing the possibilities of meaning within that ineffable raw material. Through art, this self-secluding earth is the site for world-disclosure. Thus, creativity is a form of discovery, rather than invention ex nihilo; art uncovers truth. Heidegger describes truth as Aletheia (translated from Ancient Greek as “un-concealment” or “disclosure”), which is the “unconcealment of beings” (Heidegger 1971, 36). Art emerges from lived experience, Dasein’s being-in-the-world, which reveals possibilities of being by engaging with the mysterious ineffable material ground of the existence “earth” (Heidegger 1971, 47).
Heidegger does not sharply distinguish between artist and audience, focusing rather on the thingly quality and the happening of art—what it means for something to be art. Art is an expression of being-in-the-world, grappling with the strife between earth and world, which requires Dasein (Heidegger 1962, 32). By contrast, AI is a computational system which in a worldless vacuum processes statistically probable outputs based on patterns and algorithms. AI has no engagement in the world (Dasein); it does not “dwell” in the world. All the while, AI outputs manifest as “pure world”—maximally disclosed patterns with no withdrawing earth to resist or deepen them. AI relies on explicit data and mechanical processes and cannot grapple with the unknown. Therefore, AI cannot authentically disclose Being, which is the essence of art. Speculative futures of AI consciousness aside, current systems lack the 'Da' of Dasein, rendering their outputs mere simulation.
Poiesis in music: AI music may lack any natural essence characteristic of Heidegger’s view of art. The process of rendering a song entirely from data aggregation lacks what Heidegger calls poiesis. Poiesis is the creative act of bringing-forth meaning—by which something is revealed in its essence, respecting mystery and creativity. “The Greeks called the unconcealment of beings aletheia … and poiesis is the bringing-forth of this truth” (Heidegger 1977, 10). This is akin to what we generally think of as art or poetry, or a natural emergence, like a flower blooming. Poiesis is exemplified in jazz improvisation and folk songwriting, which expresses lived experience—an event of appropriation (something Heidegger calls Ereignis), where being happens. Think Miles Davis pulling notes from the aether, or a young Bob Dylan (e.g., “Visions of Johanna” or “Like a Rolling Stone”) navigating his internal dialogue to give voice to his zeitgeist. In “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan confronts his existence in the face of disillusionment with social norms and inauthenticity. His lived response to cultural upheaval of the 1960s is captured in the lyrics, voice, and raw instrumentation. Al Kooper’s spontaneous organ riff, which was improvised on the spot, aligns with “earth” as the unpredictable basis of art. Improvisation can be viewed as a practical expression of Dasein’s “thrown” (Geworfenheit) “projection” (Entwurf); within the context of the song’s key signature, chord progression, tempo, and structure, along with the other musicians’ choices (thrownness), the soloist responds by creating new melodies, balancing constraint with freedom and spontaneity (projection) (Heidegger 1962, 185).
Techne as harmonious craft: Along with poiesis, Heidegger draws upon another Ancient Greek conception, techne, to describe a pre-modern way of bringing things into being with respect to their essence in the natural world. “Techne is a mode of revealing … it brings forth what was not there before” (Heidegger 1977, 13). Contrasted with modern day technology (same etymology), Heidegger’s techne is revealing, not extracting. For example, the musical artist works within a medium or material, e.g., bringing sounds out of an instrument crafted by a luthier with distinct characteristics. This pre-modern techne was harmonious with nature. The art of playing traditional instruments and crafting original songs would be aligned with this techne. In this sense, poiesis and techne are evident in all authentic art and music.
AI’s Existential Threat to Music
Half a century before the eventual rise of AI, Heidegger addressed the danger of technological thinking in The Question Concerning Technology. Enframing (Gestell) for Heidegger, is a worldview and mode of revealing that reduces everything, including nature, art, and even oneself to a resource (Bestand) on standby for optimization (Heidegger 1977, 14). This ordering of the world limits modern man’s ability to see different ways of being, and determines how man sees himself. It’s a totalizing mindset that excludes all other possibilities of experiencing the world. Calculative thinking, though great at manipulating nature, hides its essential being. Renowned Heideggerian scholar, Iain Thompson, describes this peril vividly: “As we late moderns implicitly come to understand the being of all things … as nothing but forces coming together and breaking apart endlessly, we increasingly reduce everything to meaningless “resources” (Bestand), mere material standing by to be optimized and ordered for maximally efficient use – including (most dangerously) ourselves.” (Thompson 2025, 54). However, according to Heidegger, a “saving power” grows within technology: once entrenched everywhere, we can grasp its essence, and by way of artistic reflection, we may come to see that technology is one limited way of revealing and ordering the world, and not the truth (Heidegger 1977, 28). Something within this mode of ordering and optimizing the world towards efficiency pushes us to see something deeper outside of it. This other way is art.
The phenomenon of AI-generated art complicates Heidegger’s assertion that art is where the saving power grows, because generative art itself is an extreme form of technological enframing, i.e., reducing art to data, patterns, and optimal output. This mode of revealing reduces all things to resources to be exploited for efficiency and utility, wherein their essence is obscured. AI music embodies Gestell’s calculative thinking by relying entirely on data, algorithms, and statistical patterns, which conceals the way a musician engages with instruments and improvisation to reveal worlds of meaning. While human decision making involves reaching into the unknown (a form of questioning), engaging with the enigmatic character of existence with its temporal horizon, technological Enframing “challenges-forth” nature's resources without respect for its essence (Heidegger 1977, 14). AI music’s reliance on statistical patterns exemplifies this notion. Simply put, AI-generated art is to art, what technology is to Being.
Generative art and AI music are the inevitable development of technological enframing, which produces the highest output for the lowest material cost, at scale. Thompson calls this the “optimization imperative,” “a drive to get the most for the least which profoundly permeates and drives our lives” (Thompson 2025, 41). In a technology driven market economy, art creation is treated as a means to an end—the product of which is directed towards monetization. And to optimize productivity, technology has developed the algorithms for maximally outputting the sound of music, and this is sufficient for most practical applications and passive consumption. AI music sounds like the real thing and meets commercial demand in a landscape of maximal content creation. Superficially, it gets the job done better than humans can. AI music can be made almost instantaneously and cheaply, flooding the market, treating music as a massively scalable commodity. All the while, making music the old-fashioned way is painfully inefficient, expensive and time consuming. Paying musicians to make the same sounds that could be outputted algorithmically is not cost effective. From this point of view, “real music” doesn’t make sense, aside from being able to feed the algorithm and train the AI models. This is a material concern for artists’ livelihoods, but the ontological question “what is music?” goes overlooked.
The music industry’s focus on market effects speaks to the idea of music only being reduced to money, which conceals the ontological concerns about the nature of art previously outlined. Through a technological mindset, we only see material concerns: changing industry standards, questions of legality and market disruption. However, there is a greater risk of forgetting about the being of music, and more generally, its ability to disclose truth through poetic unconcealment. We risk losing access to truth by not questioning the essence of music.
In Being and Time, Heidegger introduces “The They” (Das Man) to refer to the conformist masses who accept and reinforce the status quo. “This Being-with-one-another dissolves one’s own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of ‘the Others’ … we take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure” (Heidegger 1962, 164). The They levels-down everything to that which is familiar. AI music might be said to appeal to Das Man in the sense that it can sound like music without necessarily saying anything; “Idle talk … expresses itself in indefinite knowing … it has lost its primary relationship-of-Being towards the entity talked about” (Heidegger 1962, 212). AI music passes as music which suits most purposes of music in a world of superficial, passive consumption.
Music that is auto-generated based on trending or popular sounds is parasitic, and as inauthentic as it is artificial. Fully AI music is derivative in the most literal sense—and its reduction of music to data obscures music’s being as a mode of revealing truth. This could be understood as the idea of soulless pop being taken to its limit, as the question of whether something is “really music” is nothing new. Human-made music that is formulaically produced to mimic what is already popular or trending could be said to be acting in line with Gestell. A team of ten songwriters in Los Angeles pumping out catch phrases for the next pop hit might learn a thing or two by consulting an LLM; they likely already do this. Where there has been any stigma with overly formulaic corporate pop, AI-generated music is this principle taken to the extreme. AI can outperform humans at this task with no effort. Hence, the phenomenon of tracks like “Heart On My Sleeve”.
AI music is an algorithmic imitation of an essentially human activity, and it does not result from or express lived experience or existential struggle (accumulation of wisdom, practical skill, expression). As it propagates and thrives in the digital world, it covers up possibilities of a deeper connection with existence through music. Outside of its productive capability, AI music lacks any artistic authenticity and can be called a musical paradigm of The They’s “Idle Chatter”. We are all susceptible to internalizing this public opinion as our everyday experience of being with others. AI music must be consumed as superficially as it was generated. It thus cheapens the listener and the musician. By Heidegger’s account, we have a tendency to become similar to the instruments we produce. As Thompson warns, “The “greatest danger” of this “nihilistic” late-modern epoch of technological enframing is that it could become permanent … should our endless quest for self-optimization ever erase our defining capacity for creative and responsive world-disclosure” (Thompson 2025, 54). Yet this threat invites counterviews: Could AI's efficiency liberate human creators from drudgery-laden tasks, enabling deeper creative expression through poiesis?
Countering AI’s Creative Potential
Does AI democratize musical expression? AI music may empower non-musicians or those without access to instruments and other production tools to “create,” or turn inspiration into sound. Indeed, AI music generators will continue adding to the already staggering number of new music releases; there are already over a hundred thousand songs uploaded to Spotify daily, with a significant portion being AI-generated music (Music Business Worldwide 2023). Is this superficial form of “creativity” a good to be maximized? Beyond the frustration of it being harder to discover human artists in a landscape flooded with AI music, we must ask what terms like create or express mean. Can music creation be reduced to data production? What is being “expressed” through the AI song?
One could argue that AI generated content reflects human existence as a product of cultural inputs. To respond to this, we should revisit Heidegger’s notion of art happening in the strife between world and earth. AI music operates entirely within an already-disclosed, calculable “world” of data patterns, statistical probabilities, and pre-existing works. It has no encounter with a self-secluding material ground. Its output is transparent; nothing shelters or withdraws. In this sense, AI music is pure world without earth.
While AI tools (e.g., automated mastering or virtual instruments) may function as subordinate techne enhancing human expression, fully auto-generated music bypasses Dasein’s essential engagement with earth and world. The friction inherent in traditional craftsmanship—historical constraints, material resistance, lived struggle—discloses depth that algorithmic optimization cannot replicate. The last Beatles recording “Now and Then” (2023) exemplifies this: AI stem-separation technology (developed by Peter Jackson for Get Back) isolated John Lennon’s vocals and piano from a lo-fi 1970s demo tape, allowing Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr to complete the song with new parts; the tape’s inherent earth—imperfections, hiss, and bleed—resisted total technological ordering and enriched the final disclosure of meaning (Jackson 2021; Beatles 2023). This is an example of how technology may be applied to bring forth authentic musical expression.
AI as tool (subordinate techne): mastering, stem-splitting, virtual instruments
Full auto-generation: bypasses friction/earth—No lived experience or intentionality
The inherent friction within the artist’s mediums gives music much of its character and depth—the hiss of analog tape, the worn strings on Bob Dylan’s guitar that carry years of strumming, the dust almost audible in the studio light. An analog synth has the same tendency to disclose more depth than a virtual version of the same instrument. Not only AI, but all digital tools need to be engaged with authentically. Without existential depth of techne and poiesis, is it possible to create?
Music is created by a musician, someone who engages in their world to bring-forth music. Without engaging in the creation of the music, authentic expression is impossible. AI music lacks lived experience and intentionality. This is not an elitist standpoint, but a defense of human existence. Technically unskilled people can still make profoundly authentic art if they have something to say; consider Daniel Johnston’s raw, trembling “True Love Will Find You in the End.” Art requires existential engagement and intent far more than polished skill.
By contrast, AI cannot have anything to say, and it cannot care about what it produces. “Like a paradoxical Dasein without any “Da” (that is, a being which lacks the self-disclosive ‘here’ of its own intelligible world, and thus not really a Dasein at all)” (Thompson 2025, 18). Though technologically sophisticated, the algorithm is no one—AI has no Dasein. According to Heidegger’s notion that truth is Aletheia, situatedness is necessary to disclose Being (Heidegger 1971, 36).
Some might argue that AI music could inspire creativity by offering a starting point, e.g., an AI chord generator. This may be true to an extent, as anything might inspire artistic beginnings, but the AI generated starting point only becomes music once engaged with by a musician and transformed/co-opted into an authentic expression. Sure, Bach and Mozart used formulas to structure their works, but the poetic truth comes through their music by their human engagement with the formulas; the classical forms could be viewed as structures of language through which musical ideas may be optimally communicated through performance. By engaging with the formal conventions of music, baroque and classical era musicians preserved and authentically expressed the historical and cultural traditions in which they were deeply embedded. Art is rooted in a historical world, revealing truth within a historical context. This truth is inaccessible to AI’s calculative processes.
In general, the human artist imbues the work with its meaning, however great or minuscule their input (one could assert something like: less human input = less meaning). While not the most extreme example of meaningless music—being auto-generated music made to serve the purposes of music—specific “AI tools” leveraged by music producers may still detract from music creation as an art form. The over-use of automation can obscure the potential to express existential truth through meaningful engagement with an artistic medium, e.g., musical instruments.
Music and art at its essence is not “content creation” but world-creation. Like a craftsman working with a wood’s grain, the musician reveals a world of meaning by unconcealing the sound within the instrument; their lyrics reveal ways of being through their inner dialogue and personal expression of language that was chiseled into them through lived experience. The sounds in a work signal the world from which those sounds were produced. Through the context of this world, the sounds have meaning. This “world” cannot be found in generative AI. It is fundamentally absent. AI art is not art because it lacks art’s essential poetic essence and it obfuscates Being (Heidegger 1971, 49).
The Saving Power
We must try to identify what art is and what it is not. More social acceptance of AI-generated content does not validate it as an art form. Reflecting on the phenomenon of AI music, e.g., realizing there is something more to music than the technical calculative proficiency to produce/reproduce specific sounds (poiesis, world-disclosure, etc.), could bring us closer to appreciating the poetic character and potential of authentic art, rediscovering music’s poetic essence. This is its saving power. As Heidegger quotes in The Question Concerning Technology,“But where danger is, grows / The saving power also” (Heidegger 1977, 28, Hölderlin). Generative AI can only output an imitation of human creativity, but it lacks any authentic engagement with Being. Through this reflection on the essence of generative art, the true nature of art as a way of deeply encountering the world may be revealed. Thompson describes this as an “inverted mirror.” “In this way, then, the technological enframing that threatens to reduce thought itself to efficient optimization reveals the nature of our distinctive thinking in its inverted mirror: We are “thinkers,” ontologically-disclosive beings whose sensitive thinking [Besinnung] creatively composes being’s polyphonic hints into meaningful compositions” (Thompson 2025, 46).
“But where danger is, grows / The saving power also”
As a signal of this saving power, the popularity and controversy of AI-generated songs has prompted the Recording Academy to set guidelines for Grammy eligibility. AI may be used as a tool in the creative process but the work must have meaningful human authorship to be eligible: “Only human creators are eligible to be submitted for consideration” (Recording Academy 2025). Similarly, the RIAA requires meaningful human contribution for Gold or Platinum record eligibility (RIAA 2025). What qualifies as “meaningful” and “human” should not be taken for granted, and need to be continually questioned as AI further permeates music production. Bandcamp has explicitly prohibited fully or substantially AI-generated music on its platform, reaffirming its commitment to human creativity and authenticity as of January 13, 2026 (Bandcamp 2026).
While navigating the complexities of copyright law in the AI age, we must question its deeper implications and see AI for what it is, at its core: a commodification of human experience and ultimately an inauthentic counterfeit of art—revealing a perspective from nowhere, alienating both musician and listener. Heidegger’s saving power of artistic reflection on the essence of technology and its byproducts provides a path to restore authenticity.
Authenticity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
In an era where generative AI permeates cultural production, Heidegger’s call for meditative (besinnlich) thinking alongside calculative thinking offers a critical resource for preserving art’s disclosive power. AI music poses an existential threat not just to musicians’ livelihoods, but to music’s poetic disclosing of Being. Yet, per Hölderlin's verse, AI music harbors a saving power: a stark reminder to reclaim music's world-creating essence. By contemplating the nature of AI music, a calculable resource lacking intrinsic value, we can come to freshly appreciate the poetic essence of authentic human-made music. Despite our varying aesthetic preferences of genre and style, by contrast to AI music we might finally come to an agreement on an answer to the question “what is real music?”.
Heidegger’s prophetic critique of technological thinking has never been more relevant than today, and the same principles hitherto discussed can be applied outside of the music realm, and to art more broadly. Beyond music, this framework critiques AI visuals and literature, urging a Heideggerian 'turning' where technology serves poiesis, not supplants it. Heidegger’s ideas can help redefine authenticity and provide a new framework for considering AI art. Humanity must choose to develop a free relationship with technology by realizing that it is not neutral. “We shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological” (Heidegger 1977, 4). Thompson describes the non-neutrality of technology with a fish metaphor:
“many people today … seem to relate to technology the way fish relate to water, that is, as the very medium through which they live, a medium rendered nearly invisible by its growing ubiquity. And yet, this metaphorical water has a current, a current we might not ordinarily notice while caught up in it (much like a rip tide in the ocean), but one that is pushing us in a particular ontohistorical direction, subtly but pervasively shifting humanity’s basic understanding of what is and what matters” (Thompson 2025, 40).
By understanding the non-neutrality of technological enframing, and questioning technology’s essence, we might remember to value what is essentially human and decide not to hand it over to mechanical automation. We must resist the seductive ease of new technologies like generative AI which can save us the hard work but leave us with a finished product that lacks meaning. Rather than racing to the finish, we should embrace the struggle and friction of each creative step, which are essential to both life and authentic art. Unlike machines, we care about the world. Nothing that we can find enjoyment or fulfillment in will ever be obsolete. AI music is not destined to overtake old-fashioned human-centered music creation if we remember to value our existence and engagement in a world of meaning.
Consider then an historical perspective, or turning. As AI improves its ability to auto-generate any sound imaginable, it will continue to change the appeal of what it means to produce sound recordings. The musical recording was once an imperfect capture of a performance, which itself had to be experienced live. Over time, the live performance gradually became less essential and eventually subservient to the record. The studio’s bells and whistles changed how music should sound. Since then, we have been living in the age of producers and sound technicians. Music production has become widely adopted with computer interfaces and plugins making the process increasingly frictionless. Independent music distribution services support millions of users, most of whom identify as producers. Now with the dawn of AI music, the novelty of producing sound recordings is approaching triviality. In the AI age, music appreciation may need to be re-centered around performance—a beautifully fleeting connection between musician and audience—back to music’s roots. In fact, the art of recording might return, with a new type of intentionality, to capturing this inexplicable shared moment.
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