Jerry Heil wants AI tracks banned from Ukrainian radio: “It’s killing the economy”

Jerry Heil has called for a ban on the rotation of AI-generated tracks on Ukrainian radio. The singer believes such songs are killing the economy of the business, destroying the industry and shaping the taste of whole generations of listeners.

Jerry Heil wrote this on her Telegram channel on the evening of 9 November.

“Ukraine must ban the rotation of AI on the radio. It’s unacceptable, it’s killing the economy, destroying the industry and shaping the taste and the level of cultural need of generations and of the nation as a whole. This needs to be tightly controlled, as Australia has already done. For now I believe it will happen,” she wrote.

“How wrong I was”

At first, Jerry Heil writes, she thought AI tracks would push the industry to grow: “to write from the soul, to write the real thing”. Now she admits she was wrong, at least about the Ukrainian market. In her words, there are people here ready to turn radio into an “AI cesspit”: “Why pay artists if you can generate flat ‘tracks’ and stuff the airwaves with them?”

Fellow artists got their share too: the singer criticises those who make “cheap polyester sound” part of their music instead of going all the way from the first note to the master. “And the listener can surely hear when it’s someone’s ‘income’ playing and when it’s ‘beloved craft’. But somehow that changes nothing,” she writes. In her words, nobody regulates this at the legislative level.

What Australia actually did

Australia did not ban AI from radio rotation. In August the Australian Recording Industry Association, ARIA, as ABC reported, excluded songs created mostly or entirely by AI from its official charts. Recordings where AI only assisted can still chart if they are “substantially human-made”. The trigger was Queensland DJ Josh Fawaz’s cover of Madonna’s Like a Prayer: it became the most-played song on Australian radio and in July reached number four on two ARIA charts. Fawaz later noted on Spotify that the vocals and drums on the track were AI-generated.

ARIA’s decision draws on principles from the global recording body IFPI, which said in July that more than 20 official chart programmes were adopting rules to distinguish human recordings from wholly generated ones. Jerry Heil has been on our air too: this summer her Dark Disco was played on ONE//FM more than a hundred times.

We looked in August at how the global industry is already restricting AI in music: courts, chart rules, labels on streaming services.