Shooter Jennings Found AI To Be Wildly Inaccurate During The Research Process Of ‘Songbird’ – “I Have No Faith In It”

No AI on Songbird, and it was hardly used in the research process.

Earlier this month, Shooter Jennings, son of the famed country outlaw icon, Waylon Jennings, released an album called Songbird. The tracklist featured a ton of archival songs that he recently discovered, which were all recorded in the prime of Waylon’s career. It’s the first of a three-part project, and, of course, Shooter produced it at Sunset Sound Studio 3, which Jennings renamed “Snake Mountain,” where he’s currently producing all the music he’s working on.

When he initially announced the album, Shooter said they actually didn’t need too much work, but he added some background vocals and other instrumentation to polish it up and make it ready to be put on a professional album in the modern world of 2025.

When Shooter Jennings announced Songbird, a number of acts were utilizing artificial intelligence to bring back the voices of other famed icons, like Randy Travis for example, and there was some speculation that Shooter was using AI to make the record.

However, that was far from the case. During an appearance on The Drifting Cowboy podcast, Shooter put those rumors to bed, saying he actually went out of his way to do it all as old school as possible and did not use AI for any aspect of the project, including marketing or artwork:

“Oh, the AI thing? It’s so amazing that like like right when AI happens, we get a new Waylon record. I mean, I would probably be the guy saying that, you know, cause I’m cynical… that’s why we took so many painstaking steps to ensure that… of course, it’s not AI.

Like, I don’t even know how to use AI to make music right, and I’d rather think it would be able to do that. But also just as far as everything involved with it, like making sure there’s nothing AI related, or there’s no steps even in the art or in anything. Because I can’t pollute the material.

Because the Waylon thing, man, what’s so cool about it is like, if we mixed it, I mixed it on a 1976 custom API in the Sunset Sound using only outboard gear. We didn’t use any kind of digital processing.”

He explained how much he went through to ensure the state of the tapes stayed at the highest level of integrity:

“I used ProTools to prepare the tracks in the sense where, when they were open, they were exactly as they were put. They were digitized, but they were exactly as they were on those those tapes.

So they were like 24-track sessions; the older stuff was 16-track, but most of it was all 24-track. What I didn’t wanna do is do anything that would degrade that, the state of it. So what I did, some of them had like five vocal takes or six vocal takes, so I used ProTools to comp the way I would comp Charley’s records or Turnpikes.

In the sense that out of those five vocals, I’ll go through and make a vocal track of the best vocal, which was really cool to do on my Dad, right? Just to hear all the different takes and go through it.”

Shooter also explained how the whole process worked, mixing the previous vocals and instruments, each with multiple takes per song, and there were over 100 songs.

Respect.

During a recent sit-down on Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast, Shooter Jennings again discusses AI and its role in the making of Songbird.

Starting this portion of the conversation, Shooter talks about how many of the songs on Songbird are, in theory, covers, since Waylon is not the songwriter on most of the tracks. While some of the songs may never have been released or were shared by small, obscure artists, they somehow caught Jennings’ attention, leading him to record them himself.

But Shooter once again reiterates that no AI was used to make the music:

“AI is so ridiculous, like I hate it. People ask me all the time, or make comments about how… ‘Oh, the new Waylon comes out right when AI happens.’ You know? I’m like, ‘Dude, if y’all knew like I’m a computer nerd, but I have no idea how to do that.’ Like, make an AI Waylon track? It just makes no sense.”

However, he did attempt to use it while researching these unearthed songs, hoping it would help speed up the identification of songwriters on some of these tracks. However, Shooter said he quickly shut the door on using AI because it could not comprehend Shooter’s request to identify lyrics and didn’t provide accurate information:

“But what one of the early times I realized how we’re being gaslit about how powerful AI is, is that I would ask it… because I’m trying to find these songs and I can’t find it in a traditional Google. So I would ask it about this song, and it would say, ‘Oh, that’s a song by Crystal Gayle.’ And I’m just making that up because there is a song that Crystal Gayle did on that record.

But it would be someone else, and I’d be like, ‘Oh my god! Okay.’ I’d go, ‘What are the lyrics to that?’ And it would repeat back what I asked it. But then it’s not really, at all. I don’t know what it was doing. It was just so confused by me asking for lyrics that I immediately shut the door on that, man.”

Joseph Hudak chuckles at Shooter’s story and suggests that Skynet is what he should be using. Shooter jokes that the AI platform he was using had half the brainpower of Skynet, and he doubles down on his little faith in AI’s future.

“Well, Skynet was mentally impaired. I have no faith in it, honestly, it’s all bullsh**.”

Amen to that. While I don’t blame Shooter for asking AI to help him speed up the research process, this is a prime example of how AI is not all that it’s cracked up to be. I mean, anyone who spends five minutes Googling something should realize that their AI Overviews are downright wrong sometimes… all you kids out there using it to do your homework… I’d really be double checking that information if I was you.

I think it’s safe to say that AI won’t be used at all in any of Shooter’s upcoming projects or research phases. Check out the entire interview while you’re here.

The post Shooter Jennings Found AI To Be Wildly Inaccurate During The Research Process Of ‘Songbird’ – “I Have No Faith In It” first appeared on Whiskey Riff.