The Question Concerning AI Music: Authenticity and Heidegger’s Saving Power

Generative AI music platforms (e.g., Suno, Udio) and viral chart-topping AI-generated tracks (e.g., "Walk My Walk") have sparked industry upheaval and ontological questions: What is real music in the age of algorithmic creation? This paper applies Martin Heidegger’s philosophy to illuminate AI music’s implications. Drawing on The Origin of the Work of Art, authentic music emerges as poiesis: truth-disclosure (aletheia) through Dasein’s strife between world and earth—requiring lived thrown-projection and historical situatedness. Fully AI-generated music, by contrast, exemplifies Enframing (Gestell): reducing creativity to calculative optimization and standing-reserve, fostering inauthentic “idle talk” (Das Man). Yet Heidegger’s “saving power” suggests reflection on this danger may provoke a turning: recentering music on performative unconcealment while subordinating AI as techne. Engaging Iain Thomson’s recent book, the paper argues generative AI threatens authenticity but harbors promise for rediscovering music’s world-disclosing essence.