Taryn Southern is no newcomer to music. She first appeared on American Idol in 2004 and already released two albums that may not have been known for their creativity, but at the moment, her music has become quite popular. Southern has had more than 500 million views on YouTube, the video for her song, "Hot for Hillary" from 2007, has 2.3 million views and she currently has over 450,000 YouTube subscribers. But for her new album, titled "I AM AI," Southern is taking a different route - except for her vocals, the music was composed, performed and produced by "Amper" - an Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed by a startup company "Amper Music."

A musical win for artificial intelligence

The "I AM I" album does not contain the first music composed and performed by AI.

Artificial intelligence was already taught to compose music in the style of classical composers like J.S. Bach and pop stars like The Beatles. But Southern's new album is the first that has been entirely prepared and composed by AI. While Southern did provide her vocals and lyrics to the songs, AI did all the instrumentation, notation and chord progressions. In the previous musical projects involving AI, there was always involvement from a human curator, making sure everything is suitable for human consumption.

The AI involved in the project was developed by a musical start-up Amper Music. CEO Drew Silverstein explains that Amper, their musical AI was designed to specifically work in collaboration with human musicians and that the speed with which it develops and performs the music will "save 10,000 hours and thousands of dollars from buying equipment to share and express your ideas." Amper is actually credited as a composer, performer, and producer in the album credits.

Where's the human element?

In the case of Amper, it is another first in the use of AI in music. So far, the music developed by AI was mostly reinterpreted by humans. Living musicians were making manual changes to chords and melodies. This time around, all this work was assigned and done by Amper. The only human inputs were style and rhythm of a certain song.

And as Silverstein stressed, it does it in seconds.

Taryn Southern has obviously had a lot of success so far, and the expectations for "I AM AI" are quite high too. This is sure to create a rush of other artists and the music industry itself to let AI do all the "hard work." But some questions on the creative role of the human element are raised further.

And then there are the questions like who will own the copyrights and can anybody come up with lyrics, slap them over the music created by an AI and become a fully fledged artist? It seems we might find out the answers to these questions sooner than we expect.