Taryn Southern

Taryn Southern (born 1986) is an American singer, digital creator, and filmmaker who parlayed early YouTube stardom — and a 2004 American Idol semifinal run — into a career experimenting at the edge of entertainment technology. In 2017–2018 she made that experiment explicit: an entire pop album composed with artificial intelligence.

I AM AI

Released in September 2018, I AM AI was billed as the first pop album composed and produced with AI tools — chiefly Amper Music, alongside experiments with IBM’s Watson Beat, Google Magenta, and AIVA. Southern wrote the lyrics and vocal melodies, then directed the software’s instrumentation, keys, and tempo until the tracks matched her intent. The lead single “Break Free” (2017) reached No. 48 on the Billboard Indicator chart and drew millions of views, becoming many listeners’ first encounter with an AI-composed pop song.

Southern was cheerfully unapologetic about the method — “Yes, we are totally cheating!” she joked to Music Ally in 2018 — and framed AI as a collaborator that let a non-instrumentalist realize full productions. She told TheWrap the tools could one day help artists mix and master, find chord progressions, and shape melodies. Having felt “owned by an algorithm” as a YouTube creator, she saw directing one as the better bargain, and went on to co-direct the 2019 documentary I Am Human, about brain-computer interfaces.

Her album predates the generative-music wars by half a decade: Amper composed from its own licensed building blocks rather than scraped catalogues, so her collaboration drew curiosity rather than the backlash that later met tools like Suno — making her a useful data point for what consensual AI music can look like.