The Reconstruction of Artistic Subjectivity and Its Ethical Issues in AI-Based Music Composition

Abstract

Artificial intelligence has altered the material and conceptual conditions of music-making. Composition is no longer imagined solely as a human practice grounded in intention and lived experience; it increasingly unfolds through interactions among users, datasets, models, and platforms. This study considers how AI-based composition reworks artistic subjectivity and with what ethical consequences. It first outlines the technical foundations of AI music generation and then examines shifts in creative agency, aesthetic judgment, and the relation between human creators and algorithms. The argument is that AI does not simply replace human creativity. It helps produce a distributed human–AI subject of creation. As a result, artistic production moves from experience-based creation toward a hybrid process in which human experience, aesthetic judgment, and algorithmic generation all play a role. The same movement raises ethical questions about authorship, responsibility, creativity, data dependence, and aesthetic homogenization. AI-based music composition is thus better understood as a reconstruction of artistic subjectivity and human–technology relations than as a self-contained technical innovation in music production.