Edwards, who ended up using the actual, flesh-and-blood human Hans Zimmer for the soundtrack of his movie, said he played the AI-generated track back to the composer. Zimmer, he said, found it amusing. Zimmer wasn’t reachable for comment. 

Edwards’s experiment speaks to a difficulty at the center of one among the largest fights facing Hollywood today. Artists and creatives are up in arms over generative AI. Hollywood is currently at a standstill as actors and writers are striking over fairer labor conditions and the usage of generative AI within the film industry. There may be also fierce pushback from authors and artists who argue that tech firms steal their mental property by indiscriminately scraping the net for images and text. Distinguished artists resembling comedian and creator Sarah Silverman have sued AI firms for copyright infringement. 

It’s still early days for music-generating AI, which could explain why Edwards got the outcomes he did, says Henry Ajder, an authority in generative AI. 

“From my experience, some quite easy AI music is pretty convincing. It’s difficult to inform the difference between an AI-generated composition and a human performed composition,” he says.