I think Arnold was on to something in the Terminator movies…A.I. is taking over the world, and it’s scary.

During summer breaks from school, I encourage my kids to read a select number of books and write a one-page report on them. Yeah, I’m that dad. The plan was to keep their mushy little heads working during the three months of sleeping in and watching YouTube videos.

We all watched a YouTube video together last night with a guy named Rick Beato, a well-known musical YouTube personality, music producer, writer, and musician. It was about the sweeping A.I. influence on the music world. To be clear, computers have forever changed the world of, well, everything, and music was no different.

When the Auto-Tune program exploded onto the scene in 1998 with Cher singing “Believe,” all bad singers had new hope. The program could take a bad note, say a bit flat or sharp, and “tune” it to the correct note. Although pitch correction had been in the industry for several years prior to that, Auto-Tune make pitch correction a one button process, instantly correcting an entire song’s worth of bad notes. Darius “Hootie” Rucker could now sing in key!

Content creators could now use digital audio workstations like Pro Tools and without playing a single note, create an entire song from scratch, using pre-recorded samples of instruments and pasting them into the spots they want. You no longer had to play the guitar to have a guitar in your song.

Well it’s now happened, and A.I. has created an entire band with a full album and back story (with the push of a button) with nearly 1.5 million listeners on Spotify. No notes were played by an instrument, no lyrics were written on a napkin in a coffee shop, and no words were sung by a real singer. With one sentence typed into a program like, “Create a four-piece Indy-Rock band with a full album, give them a name, and create a backstory,” the Velvet Sundown was created. What took me four years to write took one guy only four minutes with the help of A.I..

I caught one of my kids using an A.I. program to help write their book report this summer. They all must use a pencil and paper now. Yup, I’m that dad.