You Won’t See AI-Generated Songs Winning Any Grammy Awards

Music created by artificial intelligence isn’t eligible for one of the industry’s biggest awards. The Recording Academy updated its rules for Grammys this week to clarify that only humans are eligible to win awards. 

The Grammy Awards will only consider music made by humans to be eligible for the 2024 award show that airs on Jan. 31. “Only human creators are eligible to be submitted for consideration,” read the Grammy Awards new rules, according to Variety. “A work that contains no human authorship is not eligible in any Categories.” 

Artists can still utilize AI tools to create music but the work submitted must be “meaningful and more than de minimis.”

Even though AI-created music won’t qualify for next year’s biggest night in music, artists are still playing with these technologies and testing the limits of music making. Musician Paul McCartney told the BBC he’s using AI to extract the voice of John Lennon for a “final Beatles record” that’s in the works. 

In April, an AI-generated song that mimicked the voices of rapper Drake and R&B/pop artist the Weeknd went viral for its uncanniness to the real artists. Its meteoric rise in popularity on TikTok, YouTube and Spotify ended when the song was removed from the platforms, due to copyright claims with Universal Music Group. 

Artificial intelligence technologies have been around for years, but the field has advanced rapidly and begun to seep into everyday live. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Dall-E kicked off a rush of new generative AI tools and products released from Microsoft, Google, Adobe and others. While these tools have vast potential to help people on tasks big and small, they’ve also sparked concerns. 

Editors’ note: CNET is using an AI engine to help create some stories. For more, see this post.