Gangai Amaran launches Uyirinaiyae with a warning about AI

Gangai Amaran has been writing lyrics for half a century, so the room paid attention when he used the Chennai launch of Uyirinaiyae to say the technology now reshaping music is quietly ruining it. He had written the words for the song; he spent most of his time on stage urging the people in front of him not to hand the rest of the work to a machine.

Uyirinaiyae is produced by Glady Gerad under the Drums Jerry Entertainment banner, composed by Sada Sudarsanam and sung by Thavaseeli Dhanraj and Farhan Navas. The single is built around everyday human bonds, its story told through AI-assisted visuals and actors. Gangai Amaran opened warmly, crediting Gerad’s intentions and calling the track the work of a producer who genuinely cares about the music.

From there he was blunt. Songs that were once sung as a single unbroken take are now recorded line by line and fed into AI, he said, and he could not see where the pride was in that. “If I am to tell the truth, I say with conviction that AI is spoiling us,” he told the gathering. “If we keep depending on it for our work, in time the brain will stop working. Give it a theme and it writes the song itself. How do we then put our name on it?”

He framed it as a question of who teaches the next generation. He and his peers grew up on the playing of his elder brother Ilaiyaraaja, the composer he calls Isaignani, and still send their own children to him to learn voice. The two remain collaborators; Ilaiyaraaja is scoring Lenin Pandiyan, the film that hands Gangai Amaran his first lead role. “We had the fortune of growing up with such gurus. Do today’s children have that? I don’t know.” His wish, he said, is that children learn to think and write for themselves and bring out what is original in them, rather than lean on a tool that does it for them.

Composer Sada Sudarsanam, Kannan, singer Thavaseeli Dhanraj, visual creator Sago Ganesan and producer Ravikanth shared the stage with him. Gangai Amaran closed on the line he keeps returning to after fifty years in the field: dream or memory, music is his breath. Uyirinaiyae’s video, teased with the words ride starts soon, releases shortly.