Sting says AI music is singing a borrowed story, and the labour economy is what worries him

Sting said on September 20 that he feels no competition from AI in music, then said AI is a danger to the labour economy and that everyone is in that danger. The 74-year-old, whose real name is Gordon Sumner, made both remarks on the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg, reported by Casey Cooper-Fiske of the Press Association.

The two halves of that don’t contradict each other, and the second one is the sharper claim.

On the music, his test wasn’t audio quality. It was whether anybody chooses to listen.

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I think AI can make perfectly serviceable pop music that you might hear in a railway station or a hotel lobby, and you can hear it, but would you listen to it?

Sting’s argument is about biography, not audio quality

“Because AI has never had its heart broken, it doesn’t have a story, it has a borrowed story, so you’re not really hearing a song,” he said. That is a claim about where the lyric came from, and it survives a model getting better. A cleaner drum sound doesn’t give the song a biography.

He put live performance on the same footing. “People still want to come and see live concerts, they want to see a human being, a vulnerable human being who can make mistakes and not a machine that is perfect,” he said.

Which is a comfortable position to hold if your musical, The Last Ship, opens in the West End next week.

Why the labour economy line is the one worth reading twice

Sting then moved off music. He said there is a “danger right now with AI potentially destroying the labour economy”, and that “we’re all in that danger”.

That’s a different argument from the first one, and it doesn’t come with the same comfort. A touring artist at his level is insulated by exactly the thing he described: people buy tickets to watch a person. A session player, a jingle writer or a library composer has no equivalent shield, and the work goes first where nobody is buying a ticket to see who made it.

He’s the latest in a run of artists saying this out loud. Paul McCartney warned about AI ripping off artists, SZA went after training data on her own catalogue, and Beyoncé wrote a line about it into Cowboy Carter. Tony Visconti told the Press Association this month that David Bowie would have experimented with the tools, while calling the output disgusting himself. Nia Archives said in July she doubts AI music lasts.

If you want the other half of the picture, my roundup of famous artists already using AI in their own work covers the ones who went the other way. Sting’s position needs both to be true at once: the songs are borrowed, and the jobs are still going.