There’s no denying that learning to play your favorite song on guitar or dissecting a track to create your own remix can teach you a lot about songcraft and help you appreciate your favorite artist more. But those benefits don’t exist when you just prompt AI for a bluegrass version of Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul.”

Frankly, the whole thing feels disrespectful to the concept of human creativity and to the artist serving as the source material.

There’s also a tinge of narcissism at play here. Learning to play or sing a song creates a connection to a work and helps you develop a skill. An AI cover is just about shouting, “Look at what I made.” Or, more accurately, “Look what I asked a machine to make for me.” You can see this at play in the Suno subreddit, where people frequently say they only listen to their own music. People there proudly proclaim that they don’t listen to artists on Spotify or other streaming services anymore, they only listen to what they generate using Suno.

Those are the people who will pay for Spotify’s remixing tool. Not Swifties looking to build a deeper connection with Taylor. It will be people who think that, somehow, whatever they generate will be better than what a skilled remixer can create. They will convince themselves that they can somehow improve on the work of an army of the most talented songwriters in the industry, with some clever prompting. But, they’re not actually engaging with the art in any meaningful way, and they’re certainly not creating art themselves.