Our AI policy

Made by people. No AI music.

Triple C is for the people who make music and the people who come out to hear it. Here's where we use AI, where we never will, and what we mean by AI music.

Where we use it

  • Finding shows: reading venue and artist websites for show dates, for the gig guide.
  • A first check on comments and photos against our community rules. Anything it isn't sure about waits for a person.
  • Station IDs and content warnings: synthetic voices for now, to be replaced by people over time.
  • Starting descriptions of bands and venues. We'd much rather they wrote their own, and they can by claiming their page.
  • Building the website.

Where we never will

  • No AI music, on the radio or on artist pages.
  • No AI hosts or DJs.
  • No AI-written messages to artists. When we write to you, a person wrote it.
  • Choosing the songs isn't AI. When nobody's in the studio, simple rules we set pick the next song, rules a person could follow by hand.

That's a fair bit of AI for a station that won't play AI music, and we know it. We use it on the plumbing so we can spend our time on the music.

What is AI music?

People have argued about "real" music with every new tool. Each one was going to kill music. They became instruments.

  • 1975Queen prints "No synthesizers!" on A Night at the Opera (Classic Rock History).
  • 1982A branch of the UK Musicians' Union votes to ban synthesizers and drum machines from sessions and live work. It was lifted in 1997 (MusicRadar).
  • 2009The Auto-Tune backlash: Death Cab for Cutie wear blue ribbons against it at the Grammys, and Jay-Z releases "D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)" (Open Culture).
  • 2026Bandcamp bans music made wholly or mostly by AI (TechCrunch).

Fine: tools a person plays

Synths, drum machines, samplers, Auto-Tune, vocoders, effects, mixing and mastering.

Not on Triple C

AI writing the melody, lyrics or arrangement, or generating the performance. That includes AI songs, cloned voices and AI-trained singing voices.

The test: did a person make the musical decisions?

Grey areas we judge one track at a time, and we'll tell you how we decided. Think we got one wrong? Tell us. See also our privacy policy.