I think AI-generated songs should not be nominated for the Grammys. To start off, let’s get the definition and history of the Grammys straight. A Grammy Award is a prestigious honor presented annually by the Recording Academy in the United States to recognize outstanding achievements in the music industry. It is an award for an achievement. According to the Cambridge American Dictionary, an achievement is ‘something that you did or got after planning and working to make it happen, and that therefore gives you a feeling of satisfaction, or the act of working to make this happen.’ When you make AI generate a song, I acknowledge, you make it form the song. But giving a prompt is not hard work, it’s not exclusive, it doesn’t require the same talent and skill a musician acquires through ‘work’, and it isn’t deserving of a prestigious honor that has been given to artists since 1959. The amount of work in composing a song, from the instrumental and singing to production, is just unparalleled to giving a prompt and letting an Artificial Intelligence generate a song for you. And then we would still not have addressed the issue of possible copyright in the generated songs. From my standpoint, the unparalleled amount of work, the lack of artistry, and the pure definition of an achievement and a Grammy Award alone are enough to argue that AI-generated songs shouldn’t be eligible for the Grammys.

I want to address that in my last reply, I had not seen your standpoint first, so I’ll reply to your standpoint. It is true that any song can make you feel something real, regardless of how it was made. But even if an AI-generated song touched 8 billion souls, then the award would go to the AI, which is no one. The AI did not put in ‘hard work’. There was no direct human intervention in the song, only a group of people who programmed the AI through data sets. You cannot award a Grammy to an AI company that generates songs, especially when the award, mind you, is a ‘prestigious honor for hard work that gives recognition to that hard work’. By definition, it is meant to recognize that hard work. Maybe another institution can create an award for ‘Most Touching, Meaningful Song, Including AI-Generated Songs’, but the Grammys are so prestigious and have such a long history that awarding AI-generated songs would ruin their reputation and is, by definition, not applicable. Thinking further, it could discourage artists and people from creating songs, and all this could even pose a financial risk to the Grammys, so they would probably not accept it either. A song can be touching, but the Grammys is not the place to acknowledge that.

The track can be considered by people to be good enough for a Grammy, since there is freedom of speech, but that doesn’t mean it should be nominated for one. An AI-generated song would have to be nominated through another form of award that is not the Grammys, for all the reasons I mentioned before: the definition of ‘achievement’, ‘Grammy’ and ‘hard work’, the discouragement of artists, the financial risk and the possible copyright issues. Another type of award is possible, but not a Grammy.

I disagree. The Cambridge Dictionary describes eligible as ‘having the necessary qualities or satisfying the necessary conditions’. To even be nominated for a Grammy, the necessary conditions are that it is not AI-generated. A song that moves people can’t just erase the fact that the award is made for human artists who, by definition, put in ‘hard work’. Therefore, a track cannot be nominated, and that is without even addressing the issues that could come along with it and the reasons why the Grammys themselves would not nominate one. You can believe it should be eligible, but that doesn’t make it eligible when it fails to meet the very conditions that define a Grammy-worthy achievement.