For a bit of context here, late 2025 I won a singing competition and the prize contained a collaboration with a studio out of town.
The studio made a bunch of advertising online, over how they'd offer the winning participant their 2500€ production packet and they'd produce, record, and even promote a song for you.
It sounded amazing, and since I'm right at the border of going off to uni and not being able to participate in children's singing competitions anymore, it felt like a sign from the universe to keep going with music, which I've already been doing for over 10 years.
Time skip to a few months after the competition, no one has contacted me, and I started getting worried that they might've given the opportunity to someone else, and so I contacted one of the competition's organizers (who was very nice btw), who contacted the main producer, who ended up later contacting me that week.
After that ensued a lot of this guy ghosting me, we were literally supposed to meet in real life since he was in town, but he left without ever actually seeing me about the song. After MONTHS of this, I eventually got redirected to another producer in their studio, who sat for 30 minutes on a zoom call with me about the song.
At the time, it was very obvious that they had specific expectations from me, they wanted a commercial like song to promote on some children's radio station, but my vision steered more towards gothic music, which they really didn't like. (I was thinking something similar to Nightwish or Malice Mizer)
He also told me I should write the lyrics myself, which, I agreed to, because I already had some lyrics written for this.
Which, btw, are about being an artist.
The song is about passion, painting, sculpting, and writing because I love art, I love making art. The song is a dedication to my passion.
After another month of waiting, I got sent a WAV file and- it had a voice already singing my lyrics on it, an ai generated voice. I asked for the instrumental, and it felt AI generated too, you couldn't really distinguish the instruments at any point in the song, it feelt like a cacophony of instruments blended and mixed together.
(Also... the song kinda just sounds like the charlie k*rk song ngl... )
I felt really pissed at the time, because they obviously fed my lyrics into ai, and all the songs of the artists I recommended them. I was already against having a very commercial sounding song, but not only did they use AI to make this, they also made it sound commercial anyways.
I thought I would ask for a few specific changes in the song and do my best to sing this song and produce a music video artistic enough to overshadow the AI usage, but it just feels wrong for my debut song, the first original song I ever get, to be AI.
I want to mention again, this was a free thing, so I don't know if it's appropriate to complain here, don't look a horse gift in the mouth or whatever.
I also thought about the possibility of turning this song into a duet, asking the competition's previous winner if he wants us to share the opportunity, because this song thing wasn't a prize last year, and ik that I would be pissed if the roles were reversed and I won last year and he did this year lolol.
Anyways, I just genuinely don't know what to do about the situation, I can't afford to piss this studio off and ruin my only opportunity to continue with music since very soon I'll be going off to uni for art. Am I an asshole for being so picky over a free song and critiquing them so much?