Google’s announcement that its Gemini app now writes music for you isn’t just one of those “blowing my mind” product updates. It feels like a symbolic surrender to a long-standing refrain from Big Tech: creative work is now just another checkbox for a machine.
If you don’t know what I am talking about, yesterday Google launched a new feature, Lyria 3, in the Gemini app, that allows us to cook up 30-second tracks complete with lyrics and cover art from a text prompt or a photo, of course, generated by Nano Banana; basically, no instruments, no experience, no pesky tactile skill required.
It’s essentially a LEGO set for “songs” that lasts about as long as a TikTok loop. They say it’s designed for YouTube Creators, and I tend to agree with them, because you can’t make to much with 30 seconds.
Still, the underlying problem is another one, as I am seeing different projects/songs made with AI, including AI artists. And this is what I want to highlight in this piece.
“Behind every beautiful thing, there’s some kind of pain, “ said Bob Dylan, and I could not agree more.
If we take a look at the history ( art, music, literature, poetry, and so on), the main fuel for creation was indeed pain.
Now, how should I put this? Probably the only pain that Lyria can feel is more like a faint server-overload alert than heartbreak.
Real songwriters know that soul isn’t born in a 30-second prompt, it’s extracted through years of mistakes, late nights, losses, and tiny revelations.
Call it a toy if you like. Google will, too.
They even watermark the outputs with a SynthID tag so the 30-second ditties are officially AI-generated, not “inspired.” That’s a nod to copyright concerns, but it also reads like an admission: these aren’t really art, they’re chemical by-products of pattern statistics.
What’s striking isn’t the novelty. Much of this has been possible in labs and APIs for years, and creators have been experimenting with generative music tools as collaborators.
What Lyria 3 does, and what makes this moment worth watching, is normalising the idea that anyone can “write” a song with a chatbot and a mood descriptor. That’s not empowerment; it’s a devaluation of craft.
Just because you pay a subscription to Suno, that’s another AI music generator, and that one is more complex, that doesn’t make you an artist or a singer. Just because you learn how to write a prompt for any LLM model and generates you pages, you are not a writer.
Imagine a world where every blog has AI-generated copy, not that we are not almost in the middle of this, and every company can churn out half-baked music for their ads or social posts.
In that economy, a professional songwriter’s unique skill becomes as optional as knowing how to use a metronome.
You could ask Gemini for an “emotional indie ballad about a lost sock,” and voilà, you have something. Whether it has actual coherence or soul is left to the listener to decide. It is fun to use it with your friends, shorts, to impress your date.
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