In April of this year, a man named Diplo set off an internet firestorm. The Grammy-winning music producer — best known for hits like Justin Bieber’s “Where Are Ü Now” and M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” — declared that AI is the future of music. He chided musicians skeptical of AI, suggesting they’d be “left behind” like a sad coachman with a flaccid buggy whip.

In a “Behind the Wall” podcast interview, he put it bluntly: “I can get the best voice from AI. I don’t need anybody to sing the song anymore.”

Diplo — a 47-year-old Miami native whose real name is Thomas Wesley Pentz Jr. — went on to suggest that not only is AI-generated music “better,” but if artists use AI to make music, the audience won’t even care.

“You’re never going to be like, ‘I’m going to choose the artistry and the hard work,’” he said. “You can talk that all you want, and some people will love that, but … 99% of people are going to wanna love the best product made the quickest, made the cheapest — that’s what the American economy is.”

When users on X pushed back, Diplo doubled down.

“If you are a creative, you need to adapt or just like give up and become an Uber driver…” he wrote. “I know it’s not cool or classy to speak like this, but I’m not gonna candy-coat the future.”

But for music lovers on the other side of the argument, that’s when Austin-based alt-country singer Zack Telander came to the rescue. Telander spliced a video of Diplo’s AI comments together with his own song on May 3, telling Diplo simply, “Shut up, nerd.”

A war of words broke out1 on Instagram between the two men, and in a later video, Telander summed up a widely held view among musicians:

“The parts of artistry that mirror the soul and the intent of your heart — those are the parts that Diplo can't quite optimize.”

Online beefs aside, Telander and other musicians may have good reason for concern, as the topic of AI continues to spark debate across the industry.

Since 2024, over 100 million people have used the AI-generated music platform Suno. Spotify has allowed untold millions of AI-generated songs to proliferate without informing listeners, including a fully AI-generated band called The Velvet Sundown that fooled many into believing it was real. Like Diplo, many industry titans seem to have embraced AI music without embarrassment: Hip-hop producer Timbaland launched an AI-generated “singer” in 2025 with a titillating title: TaTa Taktumi.

But as Diplo and Co. feast on AI opportunism, recent audience data may tell a different story.

Survey: People don’t want AI

In May, a bespectacled music mogul stood before a crowd of eager young graduates at the Middle Tennessee State University commencement ceremony. Scott Borchetta, who was the original record exec to sign Taylor Swift, praised the use of AI in music. He was promptly booed. And if surveys are any indication, the young graduates of Middle Tennessee State University aren’t alone.

A 2025 survey launched by French-founded music streaming platform Deezer employed a sample size of 9,000 people across eight countries — the United States, Canada, Brazil, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Japan — to find out what people really think about AI in music.

First, the depressing news: When asked to distinguish between AI-generated songs and human-made songs, music listeners struggled to tell the difference. The survey had respondents listen to three tracks and pick out the fully AI-generated songs — 97% couldn’t do it.

The good news? When listeners know that a song is AI, they often reject it.

On Deezer, where they label fully AI-generated songs, AI music represents 44% of uploads but only 1-3% of actual streams. Apparently, the platform is flooded with AI songs — but few are listening.

Survey respondents also made clear they are on Team Human: A full 82% said that AI-generated music should be clearly labeled. They also worried that AI erodes the art itself. Almost two-thirds said they feared that AI could lead to a “loss of creativity in music production,” and 51% think that AI will lead to the creation of “more low-quality, generic-sounding music on streaming platforms.”

Another survey conducted by journalist Deni Ellis Béchard and neuroscientist Gabriel Kreiman for Scientific American, broadened the scope to creative media in general — music, movies, novels and paintings. Again, the audience’s view on AI was clear.

“The results were striking,” the authors wrote. “The majority of people who participated disliked the idea of AI-generated art and held the view that human art has an emotional depth that machines either can’t or shouldn’t reproduce.”

The authors designed a clever thought experiment. They asked respondents to think of their favorite piece of art — works like J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye; Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night”; the musical Hamilton; and music by the Beatles, Metallica and Cat Stevens. They then asked respondents to imagine those works were made by AI, with no humans involved. More than 67% of respondents said they would like the art less.

Human is practical

As Diplo and his cohorts appear to believe that audiences are mere pigs at the trough — hungry for the fastest and the cheapest — surveys suggest he’s wrong. The audience wants the real deal.

For musicians, expressing themselves was always the point. Like the 18th-century Romantic poets who embraced emotional ecstasy over the mechanical logic of the Industrial Revolution, musicians like Telander declare that music “mirrors the soul.” But for those who care deeply about music — and may also want to make a living at it — the truth may be less romantic and more practical: Fans don’t want AI.