Problems of Using AI-Generated Music in Your Videos

The biggest issue with AI-generated music is something nobody likes to talk about: who actually owns the rights? Is it the AI company? The artists whose work trained the AI? The person who wrote the prompt? The answer is more complicated than you might think.

In March 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in Thaler v. Perlmutter that works created solely by artificial intelligence cannot be granted copyright protection. The court emphasized that only human authors can hold copyrights, and that AI lacks the legal personhood and human qualities of creativity necessary for copyright.

Since AI-generated content can’t be copyrighted, it also can’t be protected. You might think this is great if you’re looking for "no copyright" music for your videos. In reality, it creates a huge problem. The music you generate might not be completely unique to you – AI tools can create the same or very similar tracks for multiple people. Just like ChatGPT can give the same answer to different users, AI music generators can produce identical or nearly identical songs.

Here’s why this matters. At Free To Use, we work hard to protect our artists' music. But AI-generated music has no protection because nobody owns the copyright, which may create several problems. For example, it opens the door to Content ID hijacking, where bad actors upload AI tracks to YouTube’s Content ID system and steal ad revenue from creators using that same music in their videos. Without copyright protection, there’s also nothing stopping someone from claiming they created the music you’re using, leading to disputes and potential content takedowns.

Platform policies are also constantly changing. YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are all updating their guidelines around AI-generated content. Some require you to declare when content is AI-generated, others are removing AI content entirely, and policies shift regularly. Using AI-generated music puts you at risk of copyright claims, demonetization, or content removal as these platforms decides how to handle AI-generated content.

AI-generated music often sounds technically fine, but it feels empty. That’s because AI creates music by copying patterns from millions of songs. It makes what’s most common, not what’s most interesting.

What’s missing is the human touch. Real artists take risks and make creative choices that surprise you. They add personality and emotion to their work. AI can’t do this – it just follows rules and patterns.

You might think: Does the human element really matter for background music? It’s just playing in the background anyway. It’s true that background music is often simple and repetitive – it’s not supposed to take over your video. But there’s still a difference.

Human-made background music has layers, small imperfections, and subtle choices that make it feel alive, even when it’s simple. Think about your own videos – you probably wouldn’t just upload your clips to an AI and let it generate some generic edit. You want to put your own personality into your work, use your own style, make your own creative choices.

AI-generated tracks come from real artists who spent years developing their skills. Suno, Udio, and other platforms have used millions of copyrighted songs to teach their AI how music works – often without permission or compensation to the original artists.

If you work in the creative industry, you know how frustrating it is when your hard work doesn’t get recognized or compensated. That’s exactly what happens with AI music – it exists because real artists spent time and effort creating the music it learned from. When you use AI-generated music, you’re benefiting from thousands of artists who never got paid for their work being used this way. The AI companies profit while the artists who made it all possible get nothing.

This also affects working artists trying to make a living. Every time someone chooses AI-generated music over licensing from a real artist, that’s one less opportunity for a human artist. In an industry that’s already challenging, AI music threatens to devalue creative labor even further and make it harder for artists to sustain their careers.

With the rise of AI-generated content, many royalty-free music platforms have been flooded with AI-generated music tracks. This makes it very difficult to find royalty-free music that’s actually made by real artists.

At Free To Use, we’ve taken a different approach. We only release music created by real human artists. Every track in our music library is made by actual artists and producers who created their work with creativity and skill. When you use music from our platform, you’re getting original, high-quality tracks – and you’re supporting the artists who made them.

To sum up: We genuinely believe the problems we’ve outlined above are real and serious. For most creators, using music made by real artists is clearly the better choice – both for practical reasons like copyright protection and quality, and for ethical reasons like supporting real people instead of AI companies. We hope you can see why these issues matter, even if you don’t take our word for it.