How Much AI Am I Already Listening To?
I wasn't looking for AI music. I was listening to YouTube, letting one song lead to another, when several began stopping me for reasons that had nothing to do with technology.
There was So Rise by Sweet YankeeBelle, I Don't Shrink to Fit by Raine Cross, and I Just Need to Know the World Is Beautiful by Hybrid Hits. Then came Confidence Ain't Competence by Delta Blues Brother, which appealed to a slightly different side of me—the side that appreciates somebody willing to call things as they see them.
The first three spoke in different ways about something I know well: overcoming adversity, moving forward without making yourself smaller, and still recognizing beauty after life has given you reasons not to. Confidence Ain't Competence came with more bite. Experience can teach you resilience, but it can also teach you to recognize ignorance, pretense and fakeness when you see it.
I liked what these songs were saying. Then I discovered that AI tools were involved in some of the music reaching me, and a question occurred to me:
How much of the music I'm listening to nowadays is being made with AI?
So I started looking.
Why These Songs?
Before I went looking for the technology, I had to recognize why these particular songs had caught me.
Taken together, they sound strangely familiar.
Farmstracts itself came out of adversity and reinvention. Even the name I use as an artist, Reena Adair, belongs to that reinvention. I rose. I learned not to shrink myself to fit. I came through it still believing the world is beautiful, although not so blindly that I confuse confidence with competence or appearance with substance.
I didn't choose these songs because they told my story. I noticed after I had chosen them that, in different ways, they did.
Following the AI Trail
The clearest trail came from I Just Need to Know the World Is Beautiful (Jules Delaney) by Hybrid Hits. Its commercial credits name Kevin McVeigh as songwriter, McVeigh and Matthew Kalyani as producers, and both Kalyani and Suno AI on vocals. Suno is a generative AI music platform.
There they were together: humans and artificial intelligence in the same credits.
Sweet YankeeBelle, the artist behind So Rise, led me to a public presence on Suno. That establishes a connection between the artist and the AI music platform. What I could not establish was exactly how So Rise itself was made or the verified identity of the human behind Sweet YankeeBelle.
Raine Cross and I Don't Shrink to Fit proved harder. I found the artist and the song, but not reliable documentation that allowed me to say what role, if any, generative AI played in that particular recording.
Then there was Delta Blues Brother. I found human composers and producers credited on releases under that name, but I could not reliably establish that Confidence Ain't Competence was created using generative AI at all.
It may have been. It may not have been. That's where the evidence stopped, so that's where I stopped.
If I want people to be accurate about the role AI plays in my own work, I owe other artists the same courtesy. Suspicion isn't evidence. A sound, an image or an impression isn't enough for me to label someone else's work AI-generated.
My simple question had become harder to answer than I expected.
What Does “AI Made It” Really Tell Us?
Music was already deeply shaped by digital technology long before generative AI entered the conversation.
Even when AI involvement can be established, saying AI made it doesn't tell me very much about what the human actually did.
Did someone write every word, or begin with an idea and allow AI to develop it? Did they make twenty versions and reject nineteen? Did they change the arrangement, voice or lyrics? Or did they enter a few instructions, like the first result and publish it?
Those are very different creative processes.
I understand that distinction because I work with AI myself. Someone looking at one of my finished pieces cannot see all the decisions between the photograph I started with and the artwork I eventually chose to put my name on. They see the result. I know the road that led to it.
That doesn't mean every use of AI involves the same degree of human creativity. Clearly it doesn't. AI-assisted tells us something important about the tool. It doesn't necessarily tell us enough about the artist.
That's one reason I've chosen transparency for Farmstracts. It's built around photography and AI-assisted art, and I've identified it that way from the beginning. Not because I want everything here to be about artificial intelligence. AI is a tool in what I do, not the reason I do it.
New Tools, Old Things to Say
For all the attention surrounding the technology, there is very little new about what these songs are trying to say.
People have always had to rise after being knocked down. We've always struggled with making ourselves smaller to fit places where we no longer belong. We've always needed reasons to believe beauty can survive ugly circumstances. And I'm fairly certain humanity did not have to wait for artificial intelligence to produce people with more confidence than competence.
The technology is new. The subjects aren't.
We're using remarkably new tools to talk about some very old things: loss and hope, foolishness and wisdom, courage, beauty, survival and what it takes to keep moving.
That's why this belongs in Field Notes. Farmstracts isn't becoming a music blog or an AI blog. But a place built partly through AI-assisted creativity shouldn't be afraid to look beyond its own walls when the same questions begin appearing in another creative form.
I started with a simple question: How much of the music I'm listening to is being made with AI?
I still don't know.
What I do know is why I want to be transparent about my own work. Calling it AI-assisted doesn't tell someone what to think about my art. It simply tells them something true about how I made it.
What they think after that belongs to them.
Listen for Yourself
These are the four songs that sent me down this particular rabbit hole. Listen for yourself.
Sweet YankeeBelle — So Rise
Raine Cross — I Don't Shrink to Fit
Hybrid Hits — I Just Need to Know the World Is Beautiful (Jules Delaney)
Delta Blues Brother — Confidence Ain't Competence
