Charlie Puth is getting all in on AI.
The music-tech company announced Wednesday that Grammy-nominated singer Puth has been tapped as its chief music officer, a role that guides its creative and product direction.
“Every musician I know uses Moises, and I’ve used it in my own creative process for years,” Puth said in a statement. “This opens up the possibilities of taking hours or expensive studio setups that isolate vocals to study technique or experiment with arrangements in real time.”
For years, there have been contentious debates in Hollywood about controlling AI. Many creatives are wary of AI technology, especially when content generation capabilities are involved.
But in recent months, more AI companies have struck licensing deals with talent across fields — from film and TV to video games — to avoid a blowback from artists worried their voices and likenesses are being used without their consent.
Notably, AI voice generation platform ElevenLabs teamed up with actors Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine to license their famous voices for productive audio uses. Singer Liza Minnelli also collaborated on an AI-generated album produced by the company.
Puth has been a public supporter of AI experimentation.
In 2023, he was one of a handful of celebrities signed to the AI Music Partnership. Puth collaborated with Google to make his voice available for AI-generated YouTube Shorts soundtracks.
He is a longtime user of Moises, recently partnering with it to launch a “Jam Sessions” contest for his fans.
“AI, when done right, is not here to replace musicians,” Puth said in a statement about his new role.
Founded in 2019 as an AI-powered service marketed to musicians, Moises is primarily used to separate vocals and instruments, which is often needed to remix or sample songs. The company — which has 70 million users worldwide — also offers tools to detect and change song keys, or to detect and generate the right guitar chords for songs.
Last year, it made further forays into generative AI by building an AI-enhanced music studio that lets users generate song stems, individual music files that make up tracks, text prompts, or by entering their own audio snippets as references.
Co-founder and CEO Geraldo Ramos said he wanted to differentiate Moises from AI music generators “where you can just bang a keyboard and get a full song.”
“You can create musical building blocks with text. So, for example, you can start with a guitar and say, ‘I want a funky and catchy bass here.’ And then it creates a bass that fits your initial input,” Ramos said. “But you can’t go from zero to full song with just one prompt. We don’t offer that solution.”
Ramos said Puth used the stage before his performance of the Super Bowl national anthem.
Moises was put on loaded tracks to practice on and even used to experiment with different keys and other elements for his upcoming album, “Whatever Clever!”
In recent months, record companies have tried to embrace the rise of AI in music by negotiating contracts that compensate human artists.
Late last year, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group signed major licensing deals with AI music studios Stability AI and Udio — both music labels settled their copyright infringement lawsuits against Udio. At the same time, UMG, WMG and Sony Music Entertainment also announced separate AI licensing agreements with Clay, a small music technology company based in Los Angeles.
Many such licensing agreements stem from a continued push by artists and concerns about the use of their work and likenesses to train AI models without permission or compensation. In 2024, more than 11,000 creative professionals signed an open letter banning the use of human art to train artificial intelligence without permission.
Moises also has licensing agreements with singers for its own AI voice models. Ramos said the company is recording their voices in a studio for about a week, paying for their time and licensing the vocals they produce. Then, a portion of the platform’s subscription revenue is distributed to those singers on a recurring basis, he said.
As AI-generated music proliferates online, some listeners have lamented its quiet integration into streaming services. Last year, nearly 6,300 Spotify users voted in a live poll for the platform to “introduce a clear label for AI-generated songs and provide the option to filter them out entirely.”
The industry has struggled with technology. Harvey Mason Jr., president and CEO of the Recording Academy, told Billboard in December that how the Grammys handle AI-generated or AI-assisted music is “the hardest part of my job.”
He said he saw uses ranging from someone composing an entire track to someone producing their own entire song and then adding little tidbits with AI.
“These people who are professionals are usually somewhere in the middle, where they’re using it as a tool,” Mason said. “They’re unlocking something when they’re stuck on lyrics, or they’re trying to find 15 things that rhyme with ‘it.'” Also, people are using it as inspiration, not taking away what it gives you. They’re using it as a launching pad.
He noted that using AI does not disqualify entry to the Grammys, but requires promising nominees to “select the right categories to be considered.”
Ramos said much of the pushback comes from people’s annoyance that the outputs of AI models are undermining a market once filled with the creations of human artists. Because Moises doesn’t compose full songs, it largely avoided that kind of backlash, he said.
“I think we have less resistance on that front because of the nature of the products we’re making. So we’ve been able to partner with artists like Charlie,” Ramos said. “I think we’re better positioned in a different space compared to these generators.”
Puth has stated that he does not believe that AI will “ever completely take over human-made music, especially since human-made music is special because of its imperfections”.
He said in a social media video last year that AI would erase human mistakes that would otherwise “add to the vibe,” adding that too much technological perfection could take away from music.
“AI is never going to wipe us off the planet creatively. Like every new technology that comes along every decade, we have to learn how to work with it to make music that no one has ever heard before,” he said. “We are all imperfect beings, but that makes art relatable.”
