If you're considering commissioning a memorial song and you've stopped to wonder whether it's appropriate that AI is involved in making it, you're asking the right question. This article is an honest answer.
I'll start with the conclusion and then work backwards through how I arrived at it.
The conclusion: a memorial song made with the help of AI can be just as meaningful as one made entirely by human hands, but only if the people running the service are honest about what AI does, what humans do, and what the meaning comes from in the first place. The technology isn't the question. The honesty about the technology is.
When someone asks whether AI memorial songs are appropriate, they're usually not asking a technical question. They're asking a moral one. Most often it's some variation of three concerns:
The first concern is dignity. The person they've lost was a real human being with a specific life, specific habits, specific people who loved them. Is it disrespectful to have anything to do with their memorial produced by a machine?
The second concern is authenticity. If a computer generated the music, is the song really for their loved one in any meaningful sense? Or is it just a pattern, a template, a thing that could have been made for anyone?
The third concern is judgement. Will the family find out it was AI? Will they be upset? Will it cheapen what we're trying to do?
These are good questions. They deserve good answers rather than reassurance.
Most discussions of AI-generated music skip the question of what the AI is actually doing in a given workflow. This vagueness is part of why people are uneasy — it lets imagination fill in the worst possible interpretation.
So here's the honest picture of how a memorial song comes into being at our service, step by step:
A person fills in a questionnaire. That person — usually a family member — shares specific memories: the person's name, what they were like, their habits, the small details that made them who they were. These are the words of a human being who knew and loved another human being.
A human team member reads those memories and writes lyrics. Not a template — actual lyrics composed by a person who has read what the family wrote and is trying to honour what they shared. This is the creative work. It is done by a human.
The lyrics, along with style direction (the genre, tempo, mood) are then processed by an AI music tool to produce the audio. The AI is doing the orchestration, the vocals, the instrumentation. It is not writing the lyrics, choosing the meaning, or making the editorial decisions about what to include or exclude.
A human reviews the output. If something is wrong — a mispronounced name, a tonal misstep, audio quality issues — it is regenerated or revised. The version that goes out has been checked.
A human masters the audio. The final step of polishing sound quality is done in software by a person who listens to the track and adjusts it.
So when people ask "is the song AI-generated?" the honest answer is: parts of it are, in the same way parts of most modern music production are. The meaning, the words, the editorial choices — those come from humans. The audio production is AI-assisted. The final quality check is human.
Here's what I'd argue, having thought about this a lot: the meaning of a memorial song does not come from how the audio is produced. It comes from somewhere else entirely.
It comes from the act of someone sitting down and trying to capture who their mother was. It comes from the specific details they remember — the way she said hello on the phone, the colour she always wore, the song she sang under her breath when she cooked. It comes from the way those specifics are honoured in the lyrics that get written.
If the lyrics capture her — really capture her, the way only someone who knew her could — then the song is hers, regardless of whether the violin was played by a person in a studio or generated by an algorithm. The medium isn't the message. The remembering is.
The same is true of any memorial expression. A eulogy isn't meaningful because of the typeface it was printed in. A photograph isn't meaningful because of which model of camera took it. A flower isn't meaningful because of where it was grown. The meaning sits in the human act of choosing, attending, and remembering — and in being received by people who knew the person well enough to recognise themselves in what's being honoured.
I want to take seriously the strongest case against using AI in memorial work, because dismissing it would be cheap.
The case goes something like this: when a human musician spends three weeks writing a song for your mother, they are giving you something irreplaceable — their time, their attention, their craft. The song carries the weight of that human investment. An AI generating audio in 90 seconds doesn't carry that weight. Even if the lyrics are good and the audio sounds nice, something fundamental is missing — the gift of time from one human to another.
This argument has real force. I don't think it's wrong, exactly. I think it's correctly identifying something real that AI-assisted work does lack. The three weeks a human composer spent are a kind of gift, and that gift cannot be replicated by faster tools.
But here's the trade-off that has to be honest: that gift comes at a cost most families cannot pay. A truly bespoke human-composed memorial song from a professional musician costs thousands of pounds and takes weeks. It is not available to most people. The choice for most families is not "human musician versus AI" — it is "an AI-assisted song from us at £89, or nothing at all because the alternatives are out of reach."
And in that frame, the question shifts. Is a song that captures the person, produced with the help of AI, better than no song at all? For most families, I think the answer is yes — provided everyone is honest about what was made and how.
Here's the thing that resolves most of the discomfort: when AI involvement is hidden, it feels dishonest. When it's openly disclosed, the entire emotional dynamic shifts.
If a family is told their song was "composed by professional musicians" when it was actually produced by an AI tool, they have been deceived, and the song is poisoned by that deception when they find out (and they often do). If a family is told upfront that the song is written by a human team, produced with the help of AI, and mastered by a person — and they make an informed choice to commission it anyway — then the song is theirs, fairly, on terms they understood.
This is why we're explicit about the AI involvement on our website, in our process page, in our terms, in our privacy policy. Not because we're proud of using AI — we're not particularly proud or ashamed of it. It's a tool, like a guitar is a tool, or like a synthesiser is a tool, or like a digital audio workstation is a tool. We're explicit because hidden tools poison gifts. Disclosed tools don't.
People often ask whether they should tell extended family or funeral attendees that the song was made with AI help. The honest answer: it's up to you, but if you do, the most graceful framing is usually something like:
"I had this song written for [Name]. The lyrics came from what I shared about her, and a small UK company put it to music. It's the song that came out when someone tried to capture her, and I wanted you to hear it."
That framing puts the meaning where it belongs — in the act of trying to capture her — without overclaiming or hiding anything. If anyone asks how it was produced, you can answer truthfully without it changing what the song means.
Most attendees, in our experience, don't ask. What they hear is a song about a person they knew, with details only the family would know, sung at their funeral. The technical production process matters far less to them than the recognition that someone took the time to have this made.
If you've read this far, you're probably not someone who's going to decide this question based on a single article. You're someone thinking carefully about what to do, and I respect that. So I'll leave you with the questions I think are actually worth asking, rather than telling you what to conclude:
For some families, the answer to "is this appropriate?" will be no. For most, in our experience, the answer is yes — once they understand what's actually happening and why. We don't try to convince anyone whose answer is no. We try to be honest enough that the people whose answer is yes can proceed with peace of mind.
The technology is not the question. The honesty about the technology is. And on the honesty front, we try to be as straightforward as it's possible to be — including in articles like this one.
Our process page explains what the human team does, what the AI tools do, and how the final song reaches you. Honest detail rather than reassurance.
Read the full process →