Jamin Bradley

Awhile back I released a new album, Jamin.exe: AI Updates to My Human Source Code, which spans over 2 hours and comprises 35 tracks. And yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like: it’s all made by AI.

But wait! Hear me out before you hate on or bail on enjoying this project! I am well aware that there are environmental, sociological, and legal issues that are important to address regarding AI, and I hope we all continue to work together to sort them out. But in the meantime, I’ve tried to discern the best ways to interact with it in my life, and this album was, in a way, very healing for me to make.

I’ve been writing original music since high school, and I’ve always been passionate about it. When I was younger, I hoped it would lead somewhere big, but then I had the chance to attend an event and meet some of the people in the Christian music industry during my college days, and my dreams crumbled. They were clear that everything was about money and business, and not so much about music, which was the only piece of the puzzle I cared about. Indeed, I especially cared about creativity in music which generally does not turn into money. The event organizers gave us cutting-edge ideas as to how to spread our music without a record label, but I was already doing all of those things at the time. When I returned home from the event, I gave my original music one last big push, and then realized it would likely never be what I hoped it would be. While there was a great amount of sadness in this revelation, letting go also paved the way forward for me to write the best music I’ve ever written.

However, nothing I’ve recorded back then or right now has ever captured the fullness of what I desire it to be. While I’ve been recording music since middle school, you need to know something about the science of sound to create the kind of mastered music you hear on the radio. I never had the money to go to a real studio, nor the equipment to capture the world’s greatest sound at home. The central benefit to doing music on my own was that I could do whatever I wanted with it and be as creative as I desired, even if it never sounded like what I hoped it would.

And that’s why this AI album was really healing for me: It made me feel like a legitimate songwriter. While AI was giving my music its own spin, it was working with my words, melodies, and chord progressions. I fed it songs I wrote in high school, college, and modern day, and it turned them all into something I hoped they could have been on a record. It was able to synthesize the kinds of instruments I could not afford to record or had the skill level to digitally recreate. It mastered the songs as though they were recorded in a real studio. And it did it all without needing to change my music so that it would be accepted by the world for the sake of business and money. (Does AI have more of a soul than some of the music industry I wonder?)

We indie artists don’t get to hear our songs covered by others. But now I have. We solo artists get stuck in a rut because we play all of our music in a very similar way. But this felt like having other musicians in the studio feeding my ideas. And while AI had plenty of glitchy moments and especially struggled to capture the bridges of my music for some reason, this artificial re-imaginging of 20+ years of my music gave me the musical pickup I didn’t know I needed.

Yes, I’ll continue to write and record my own unprofessionally recorded music. I take joy in that. I generally don’t want to hand my lyrics over to AI so that they can make their own melodies and music for my work when I can do that myself. I’m not trying to hide behind AI and pretend it’s me—that’s why I’ve been very straightforward with this project being AI. ChatGPT made the name of the album and gave me prompts for Midjourney to design a picture for the album cover. ChatGPT also made me prompts for Suno to capture my music as I hoped it might. Between these three AI sources, Jamin.exe is very much an AI imagination of my humanness.

I realize that some artists detest AI artistry and have many valid reasons for their reservations. I also have reservations, as I think there are numerous ways to misuse and exploit AI. But I don’t see the need to write it off completely. And this album is an example of how I, as an artist, found meaning in AI.