Can AI win a Grammy? Recording Academy CEO weighs in on music’s most explosive debate
And the Grammy will never go to—a robot.
That’s the main takeaway that the CEO of the Recording Academy would like music fans to understand when it comes to the growing debate over AI and music. Although he is quick to acknowledge that the discussion is fraught with caveats, Harvey Mason Jr., who has led the music industry’s foremost organization since 2021, said that while there is a place for technology in any creative business, awards are meant to recognize human achievement.
“If there’s AI performing the song but there are humans writing it, then it’s eligible for a writing category,” Mason said at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York last week. “And vice versa: If AI wrote the song but a singer—a human singer with arms and hearts and stuff—is singing the song, then it’s going to be eligible for performance category. I feel like that’s pretty straightforward.”
Straightforward, that is, until it’s not.
Mason, who appeared on stage in a historic EGOT-themed panel alongside the leaders of all four major entertainment awards, quickly conceded that the debate gets tricky when artists work in collaboration with AI tools to produce award-worthy work, a possibility that many saw as more plausible earlier this year when an anonymous creator released a viral song featuring the AI-replicated voice of rap superstar Drake.
“You start looking at some of the voice modeling, some of the other things, where a human is actually singing but they’re using a plug-in to make it sound like somebody else,” he said. “Is that AI? Is that not AI? Is the human singing it originally eligible, or are they not? There’s a lot to think about.”
Adam Sharp, president of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, interjected that “we technically have given Emmys to AI,” pointing out that companies have received Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards for software that is able to simulate crowds in TV shows.
“The key is that you don’t want to be so ham-fisted here that you’re stifling creativity,” he said. “AI has the potential to be a very powerful tool for creativity and to be an assistive tool that allows creativity to be even further unleashed.”
While the topic might seem head-spinning in the wake of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools unleashed on the public last year, creatives could take comfort in the notion that such debates are not new in the world of entertainment. Recall that more than a decade ago, motion-capture master Andy Serkis sparked rumblings of Oscar worthiness for his performance in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, in which he played a CGI chimpanzee. At the time, the idea raised legitimate questions of whether the actor or the team of animators who created the effects should be eligible to receive the statuette.
And in a way, AI is just the latest in a long list of societal discussions—from gender-neutral categories to entirely new genres of music—that have prompted awards programs to reevaluate their eligibility guidelines and adapt with the times over the years.
“This is going to change quickly, and we are going to change quickly,” Mason said. “We have to be able to adjust, and AI is going to force that on all of us to make sure we’re listening and we’re learning.”
In addition to Mason and Sharp, last week’s panel also included CEOs Maury McIntyre, Bill Kramer, and Heather Hitchens of the Television Academy, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the American Theatre Wing, respectively.
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