Teddy Swims has admitted that he sometimes uses AI when he is in the studio making music.
While speaking at the South by Southwest Sydney conference in Australia, the 33-year-old Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter said he thinks AI tools are "truly amazing" for artists to have at their disposal.
"We've used AI in some things that have been really super helpful for us," he said to the crowd (via ABC).
One example he gave was his producer using artificial intelligence to change one of his song lyrics, which saved him the trouble of re-recording part of a song.
"Rather than me going [to] the studio and doing the line 15 times and spending that time and money and effort, he's actually been able to go in and just change the word," Swims said. "And then put my AI voice over it and just plug it right in like a bandaid and you won't even tell the difference. And something small like that, I think AI has been very helpful."
Swims (real name Jaten Dimsdale) also shared that he uses AI tools while he's on tour to hear his songs played in different genres of music.
"What we'll do is maybe just take an acoustic and write the melody and the lyrics and just get the song done and upload it into it and say, 'OK, I want to hear this song as a country song' or 'I want to hear this song as a rock and roll song,'" he explained. "And within seconds, it could kind of give us a general idea of what that thing could be, fully fleshed out."
"Instead of taking time to reproduce something over and over and over again in so many different ways that would take months sometimes to do, you can get the idea of what something would be fully fleshed out in this lane," he added. "If you use it the correct way, I think it's a beautiful tool. It doesn't have to take your job from you."
Of course, he has seen the downside of this technology, saying he's discovered plenty of "goofy" videos using his image and voice.
In the discussion, Luke Conway, Swims' manager and and creative partner, admitted that his team finds "thousands" of Teddy Swims AI songs to be uploaded to YouTube just about every day.
"If ten per cent of music that's listened to becomes AI music, that means that the real artists make ten per cent less money," Conway explained. "And that's an important piece for people to understand. The streaming platforms need to find a way to identify: is this a real artist?"
AI-generated music has become increasingly popular on streaming services this year. Just last month a song called "Walk My Walk" by Breaking Rust, who is completely AI, reached number one on Billboard's Country Digital Song Sales chart. Breaking Rust currently has almost three million monthly listeners on Spotify.
Other AI-generated acts like retro rockers The Velvet Sundown and HAVEN. have raised red flags in the industry. The latter, whose EDM track "I Run" has become wildly popular on both TikTok and Spotify, has been accused of using an unauthorized AI “deepfake” of R&B singer Jorja Smith’s voice, forcing it to be taken down from DSPs.
Smith's label, FAMM, issued a statement on Instagram, arguing that, “This isn’t just about Jorja. It’s bigger than one artist or one song. We cannot allow this to become the new normal.”