Playlist for a Ghost: When AI Starts Writing Our Feelings

It's past 2am and I can't sleep, so I do what I always do at that hour, open a music app and let it pick. First song up is an old R.D. Burman track, one my parents used to play years ago. I know this song properly.

Then the next song plays. Soft piano, a voice I don't recognise but I actually like it, for about a minute I'm just listening, then, out of habit, I check who made it and found that it was AI-generated.

I play it again and listen properly this time. Nothing about the song changed. What changed is that I now know nobody made it.

This had been building for a while before that night, actually. A few weeks earlier there'd been a story going around, an AI-made track charting on Apple Music, right up there with musicians who'd spent years getting good at this.

Around the same time I sat in on a job interview for a platform that lets you type a few words and get a finished rap song back, hook and verses and all, in about the time it takes to make tea.

Then I came across Suno, and that's when it actually landed for me how far along this already is.

Here's the thing I think is actually going on. A song has always been someone sending you something. A person sits down, works through whatever they're working through, and turns it into three minutes of music. Years later a stranger puts it on and feels understood by someone they've never met. That's just what happens: a real person made something, and it found you.

An AI song skips that part. Nobody sat with it through anything. It's built from every song that ever came out of someone's bad year, blended together until it knows what heartbreak tends to sound like, without having had one. It's not a letter from someone. It's a very good copy of what a letter usually sounds like, sent to nobody in particular, that happened to land on you.

I don't think this makes AI music evil, and I'm not going to pretend I've never used it.

What I won't do is pretend it's doing the same job as the music that actually matters to me. There's a difference between something you put on in the background and something you build a memory around.

I've stood in a crowd at an R.D. Burman tribute concert, a few thousand people singing the same line slightly off-key, all landing on the wrong beat at the same wrong moment, and it worked because we were all wrong together, the same human way. No algorithm is in that room. There's no room for it to be in.

So I'll just call it what it is. Content, not correspondence. Fine for the gym playlist, not the one you build your life around.

The song was still good but I just knew it wasn't really for me. Because it wasn't for anyone. A playlist for a ghost, and that night, the ghost was me.