Will Songwriting Robots Want Royalties? Maybe.

The fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning are tearing things up right now. Some robots/machines/programs are even learning to express themselves musically.

Taryn Southern is a performer fascinated by these possibilities. She’s working on what she believes to be the first AI-composed album that she will call I AM AI. It’s not entirely computer generated–Southern was in control of the melody and lyrics–but she says the machine did most of the work using a program from a company called Amper. She just told it what she wanted in terms of style, mood and tempo and hit “Auto-Compose.”

As Fast Company points out, the album will be distributed through a platform called Stem, which allows royalties to be divvied up amongst multiple composers. Theoretically, that opens the door to the machine getting cheques.

Here’s the kind of stuff Taryn Southern is into. You can read more about what’s going on with her project here.