Ashlee VanceNYT Best Seller | Reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek

What Nashville Thinks of AI

14 Nov 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:27

In this on‑the‑street YouTube segment, Ashlee Vance interviews Nashville songwriters and aspiring musicians to gauge their attitudes toward artificial intelligence in music creation. The participants voice a spectrum of opinions: some express outright hostility toward AI, others adopt a cautious, exploratory stance, and a few see it as a double‑edged technological trend. A recurring theme is the tension between authentic, personal songwriting and the use of AI tools. The segment highlights Shane Mack, a former Silicon Valley tech worker turned local musician, who has trained a custom AI model on his favorite country singers. Mack demonstrates how narrowing the training dataset can produce more stylistically coherent AI‑generated songs, illustrating a practical intersection of tech and Nashville’s music culture.

Since Nashville is full of songwriters and aspiring musicians, I came here to take a temperature check on how people are feeling about AI.
How do I feel about AI? I do not like robots. I do not like AI. I do not support AI.
I don't think we've seen enough of it in play yet to really see the ultimate good or the ultimate bad of it. We're still kind of forging that path.
Honestly, I'm kind of against it. I think the whole thing is scary as fuck.
If you wanna write something that's relatable and true and resonates with people, If you're writing about people, why would you use AI? Why wouldn't you want to write something true to yourself? That's the whole point.
It feels like it's like this double-edged sword, which I think all technology trends, whether it's in music or not, all kind of feel like that.
One Jolton regular is Shane Mack. He's a tech dude who did his time in Silicon Valley and then came here for something different. As it happens, Mack dabbles in music too. And he's been training an AI model on his favorite country singers. So we decided to put the model to work.
People will say AI doesn't write very well, which is true because it's writing general, it's writing broad, and great writing is usually really specific. The secret to trying to make AI write better for you is to draw a smaller box around the dataset.