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AI Statement

This explains FAWM’s perspective on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and sets out some expectations for how we think these could and should be used (or not) in the context of our songwriting challenges.

FAWM AI Survey Summary

In our 2025 annual post-FAWM survey, we included some questions about AI. Here are the highlights...

  • 63% of fawmers said they had not used AI in any way
  • The most common use cases were:
    • AI-assisted lyric help (11%)
    • AI vocal or instrument plugins (10%)
    • Automated mixing/mastering plugins (10%)
    • AI-generated prompts and constraints (6%)
  • Fawmers were most negative on the idea of using audio platforms like Suno/Udio to generate demos
    • Specifically: 56% rated their approval 1-2 (on a 7-point scale)

Songwriting With AI

Our position is that some AI-based music tools are exactly that: tools.

As with other tools and technologies — from pitch correction to arranger keyboards, drum machines, MIDI, samplers, rhyming dictionaries, or even a capo — there are varying opinions about whether using it is "cheating." In principle, FAWM encourages you to use any tool at your disposal that helps you grow as a songwriter and a musician... and that might include AI.

That said... $#!% is getting ridiculous.

What Is OK

Acceptable uses of AI in your FAWM songs include (but are not limited to):

  • AI tools to generate prompts, titles, or other ideas that you significantly edit, modify, (re)arrange, or (re)perform yourself
  • AI vocal or instrument plugins used to generate tracks in a larger arrangement
  • Automated mixing/mastering assistants to improve audio quality in your demos
  • AI tools to expand or augment lyrics or audio tracks you create yourself

What Is Not OK

Inappropriate uses of AI for your FAWM songs include (but are not limited to):

  • Letting AI create lyrics or audio that you pass off as your own
  • AI software as a "push-button" solution to boost your song count
  • Posting AI-generated demos for "lyrics-only" songs — if you are strictly a lyricist, consider collaborating on music, or be satisfied with feedback on your words only
  • Using FAWM as a platform for "deep fakes" of music in the likeness of another artist

Be Transparent

FAWM is a community of human creatives, and a challenge focused on human creativity. We encourage all fawmers to act honestly.

Please mention any tools (AI or otherwise!) in the "liner notes" section when posting songs. That way, fellow fawmers can learn from what you did! If you do use AI as part of your process, you should also consider using appropriate hashtags (#AI, #ChatGPT, etc.).

Be Civil

All that said, avoid policing or disparaging another fawmer's use of AI. If you want to avoid AI songs, you can simply mute accounts or forums that are posting or discussing AI stuff.

Those of use who run FAWM are a little taken aback by the AI drama in the challenge (and music-making generally) over the past few years. The capabilities of AI products to generate lyrics, music, and even entire audio tracks will also only continue to grow. And if we remain focused on community and creativity, there are fruitful discussions to be had about all this.

There is an invisible line where: on the one side you use AI as a tool, and on the other side it is a crutch. FAWM cannot tell you where that line is, but we ask you to reflect on how you engage with it when participating in our songwriting challenges.

AI In The FAWM Platform

Some background

Founding fawmer @burr is actually an AI/ML researcher by profession, and is excited about the potential for AI as a tool for human creativity. In fact, as far back as 2010 @burr even created muse.fawm.org to explore ML-based songwriting tools specifically for the FAWM community (research paper here).

We plan to integrate more machine learning (ML) into the FAWM website to enhance moderation, inspiration, and search & discovery features.

As ML systems are deployed at fawm.org, this document will be updated and we will publish model cards (think "nutrition labels" for AI) to be as fair and transparent as possible about how your data are used, and what role AI plays in your experience.

More complete documentation to come. For now FAWM has deployed two ML models:

  • A spam account classifier (available to moderators only). This model is trained on historical FAWM data to predict whether an account should be suspended; as a function of profile contents. The AUC for this model is 0.98 (1.0 is perfect). Account suspension is still a manual process carried out by the moderators, but AI model helps us prioritize and protect you from unwanted forum posts and song comments.
  • A song popularity predictor (used by the shuffle buttons). This model is trained on historical FAWM data to predict if song will receive 5 or more comments (the average comment count); as a function of its demo, liner notes, lyrics, and tags (but not authors). The AUC for this model is 0.85, and the correlation with actual comment count is 0.78 (1.0 for both is perfect). While this model does influences shuffle buttons, it is only one of many factors.

Note

FAWM does not send data to third-party AI APIs, and uses no third-party AI models except for occasional (offline, local) use of Stable Diffusion to partially generate images (e.g., for social media or weekly challenge art).

Any AI/ML models deployed on the FAWM platform are "in-house" and developed by @burr.

Note

Most Internet platforms train AI/ML systems to maximize the time or money you spend on it.

FAWM is different. We are supported by your donations (not ads or sponsorships), so our systems are trained and used to try and optimize for songwriting output, collaborations, and other goal-oriented and pro-social behaviors (see our previous research on this here and here).

Copyright is probably the murkiest and most controversial topic in generative AI and art.

We ask that you stay focused on original songs or compositions that are yours, and that you represent to be your own, for the purposes of FAWM challenges.

Tip

For a good primer, we recommend this testimony from one of @burr's research colleagues to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing on AI and Intellectual Property.

What We Will Remove

FAWM will remove any media that violates copyright per our existing copyright policy.

We reserve the right to remove any AI-generated content, particularly if it attempts to represent the likeness (including the voice) of another artist or copyrighted work/entity (e.g., "deep fakes").

While one can make the argument that such works are part of one’s own creative practice, there are also many other outlets on the Internet for such things, so why post them to FAWM?

Your Songs & AI Training

If you are concerned about your music or lyrics being scraped by bots to train generative AI systems, we have done the following since 2023:

  • FAWM implements the noai directive (info here) on all pages of fawm.org. This tells bots not to crawl or cache FAWM pages for training AI systems. These directives work on the honor system, however, and developers of AI systems may not be honest, so...
  • We have a privacy feature for accounts that requires viewers to be logged in to see your profile by default. (You may change this in account Settings). This is also the default setting for posting new songs, and all forums now require viewers to be logged in. This is a step we've taken to try and make FAWM songwriting events more of a safe space for musical exploration and experimentation.

Will FAWM train generative AI using my data?

Hard no. Not in any way that infringes on your copyright (see Terms of Service).

As stated above, we plan to add more AI/ML features to FAWM, but these are mainly search & discovery tools to help find fellow fawmers and their music, which includes analyzing any song content that your post to the site.

However, FAWM has no interest in training generative AI to make robot music.