AI can't actually write better lyrics than you.

I want to tell you something important, songwriter to songwriter: AI cannot write better lyrics than you can.

I'm going to tell you why, and it's not what you think. Not "AI can't feel," or "your perspective is totally unique" (both true, but easy to dismiss when AI spits out something that resembles feeling, and is a passable equivalent of lived experience).

I went to AI school

These past two weeks, I've been taking a short course on AI for company directors at Sydney University, led by two of the world's leading academics, researchers, and consultants in AI. Not random people with vested interests shouting on the internet; actual experts with decades of experience.

Here's the important truth about AI:

Generative AI at its core, is probabilistic. It predicts the most likely next word based on patterns in its training data. What looks like originality is the output of an incredibly large pattern-matching process, trained entirely on what humans have already made. And pattern matching, by definition, gravitates toward the familiar—toward what has already been seen, and what already tends to go together.

What this means for your lyrics

It means generative AI will always give you something that has already existed, and will default to the most obvious answers.

Even if you prompt it with something like: "Give me unusual metaphors and novel word combinations that retain emotional authenticity." It has no actual access to the unusual or the novel. It can only search within what already exists in its training data, and return what most frequently sits alongside those concepts. You're not unlocking originality. You're narrowing the probability field.

But you're not a probability engine

Down here in the human realm—where complicated, fleshy people with artistic souls are striving to express themselves—the debate over AI is actually simpler than it looks.

The songwriters in our community aren't interested in outsourcing the parts that give them joy. It doesn't really matter to them whether AI could write something more "original." They aren't in it for the output, they're in it for the process. The personal expression. The spiritual widening that blooms through effort.

And in that realm, there are exercises, tools, techniques, and methods you can practise to cultivate your own lyrical expression — tools that:

• widen your expressive capacities
• give you access to truly novel language (not just regression to the mean)
• maintain the authenticity of your desire to express your own life and meaning

Over the next few emails, I'll be sharing some of my favourites.

Watch out for tomorrow's—the first in the series!

x Keppie

PS — If you want to practise alongside us, join us for the upcoming live Workshop: Advanced Lyric Writing Techniques. More info here.​