Sting says AI music ‘leaves a lot to be desired’ with The Police frontman ‘unimpressed’ by ‘copyist’ tool

Sting has hit out against artificial intelligence in songwriting and says the work it churns out “leaves a lot to be desired”.

In an interview to promote his stage production, The Last Ship, the veteran songwriter behind hits like Roxanne and Every Little Thing She Does is Magic confirmed that AI-reliant work did very little to impress him. Speaking to Laura Harding of the Press Association, The Police frontman suggested that he was not currently concerned about the use of artificial intelligence in songwriting, as it could not form emotive music. Sting said: “Not really. I mean, I think we should be concerned about AI for our safety, I’m talking about autonomous weapon systems, and whatever. But artistically, AI can write a perfectly serviceable pop song that you would hear in an airport lounge or a hotel, but would you actually listen to it?

“A difference between hearing something and actually listening to it. I know AI has never had its heart broken, it’s never broken anybody’s heart, intentionally anyway. So, and there’s no story, there’s no DNA, there’s no childhood, it’s just a copyist. So I’m not particularly impressed by it at the moment. I may be surprised down the line, but artistically it leaves a lot to be desired.”

Artists have come under fire in the last year or two for featuring artificially generated items in either their lyrics or music videos. The Jarvis Cocker-fronted band Pulp made use of the AI tool as a statement against its use in art, with the Disco 2000 songwriter explaining why the band had used artificially generated images for their lead single, Spike Island.

He said: “I was told that someone was interested in investigating A.I. & did I have any ideas? The first idea I had was to animate the photographs that Rankin & Donald took for Different Class: after all, back in 1995 they had been an ‘artificial’ way of dropping us into real-life situations & getting an album cover done whilst we were too busy recording the music for that album to pose for pictures. No brainer.

“It was my initial idea to produce a kind of ‘making of’ video that showed how the photos had come to be taken – but as soon as I fed the first shot into the A.I. app I realised that wasn’t going to happen. So I  decided to ‘go with the flow’ and see where the computer led me.

“All the moving images featured in the video are the result of me feeding in a still image & then typing in a ‘prompt’ such as: ‘The black & white figure remains still whilst the bus in the background drives off’ which led to the sequence where the coach weirdly slides towards the cut-out of me.

“The weekend I began work on the video was a strange time: I went out of the house & kept expecting weird transformations of the surrounding environment due to the images the computer had been generating. The experience had marked me. I don’t know whether I’ve recovered yet…

“I have to thank Julian House for some expert post-production work & Rankin & Donald Milne for allowing me to use their work in this way. As it says in text at the end of the video, I think what they did for Pulp back in 1995 was ‘Human Intelligence at its best’. My final thought? H.I. Forever!”