About three months ago, producer Dylan Lee started working on an album called Christmas, which he tried to make completely using artificial intelligence.
"I’ve been using technology with music for a very long time — and this year, I've just started noticing AI starting to become interesting and useful and starting to see people use it."
He decided 2025 was the year to give an AI-produced album a try.
The album is "sung" by a "synthetic" artist called "Tom Shuremann".
Mr Lee described Tom and his music as a "golden-age jazz crooner", whose music "blended with easy listening and a touch of modern pop".
"To anyone that's used ChatGPT, it's not a million miles away from that at all — it's just effectively versions of that for music."
When he first thought about making an AI album earlier this year, the technology was not quite there.
However, by the middle of the year, the technology was making leaps and bounds.
By next Christmas, he said he would have been "too late".
"If I had to make predictions, I'd say next year, 2026, it's going to be everywhere."
Mr Lee said some people would care that the music was AI made while others would not.
"I've been a bit of a closet Christmas fanatic for a while — and I think this is a banger of an album.
"If they just judge it, on ‘Does this sound good? Am I enjoying it?’ I think it would stand up to anything."
While AI-made music would always have its critics, he said he "didn’t really mean to offend anyone" with the creation of the album.
However, technology had been heavily involved in the making of music for a very long time already.
"In music today, you could go and see a pop act and they're just a bunch of backing tracks and an auto-tuned vocal — you might not even hear a vocal, you might see someone dancing to a backing track.
"That's not even the future, that’s now — this isn't that different.
"It's just a slightly different way of using technology for music."
Tom Shuremann is able to be streamed on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube via Dunedin independent label Studio Generica.
