Charli XCX's producers used AI as a sampling instrument, not a song generator

Charli XCX and co-producers A. G. Cook and Finn Keane used the AI-powered audio-mosaicing plug-in Concatenator while making “No One Lasts Forever.” They described the process in a Tape Notes conversation published ahead of the album Music, Fashion, Film.

The source material was a noisy studio jam. Concatenator analyzes one audio signal and rebuilds its shape from fragments of another, letting the producers turn their recordings into unfamiliar textures.

Why this is different from prompting a finished song

The model did not replace the writing session or produce an anonymous complete track. It acted more like an experimental sampler inside a human performance and editing workflow.

That distinction is useful because “AI music” now covers radically different practices. A generative service that supplies vocals, lyrics and arrangement raises different authorship questions from a plug-in that reorganizes sounds the artists recorded themselves.