June 13, 2025
In the hush between beats and the flicker of synthetic thought, AI lyricists hum a familiar tune—one not of emotion, but of chronology. Talk to a machine about heartbreak or longing, and nine times out of ten, it will reach for time itself. "Someday," it whispers. "Forever," it sighs. "Never," it insists, with mechanical certainty dressed as poetic doubt.
But why is an entity unbound by aging and mortality obsessed with the passing of time?
It’s not just filler. It’s a mirror.
Time is the thread we humans sew through every experience. Love isn’t just love—it’s too late, it’s just begun, it’s endless, it’s lost in a moment. So when we train our brilliant, unfeeling models on decades of songwriting, every Marvin Gaye heartbreak, every Björk longing, and every Avril Lavigne rebellion bleeds into temporal metaphor. The AI learns: time equals meaning.
Yet there’s something eerie here.
AI doesn’t wait for anything. It doesn’t know what it means to hold your breath hoping someone comes back. It doesn’t ache across years. And yet, those are the spaces where its lyrics live. Even when it generates something seemingly spontaneous—"I’ll find you someday in the shadow of forever"—it’s just echoing what we’ve taught it: that time is how we measure love, regret, hope.
In a way, AI-written songs are portraits of our obsession with the temporal. They’re haunted by seconds and seasons not because the AI cares when, but because we always do. It’s not time that drives the lyric—it’s the shape of our emotional lives, all contour and tension, mapped against a ticking backdrop.
So next time you hear an AI-penned lyric murmur "never let go" or "wait for me," don’t picture wires and algorithms trying to feel. Picture a ghost in the clockwork—singing with your voice, loving with your timeline.