Beyoncé has openly spoken out against AI music following the release of her Cowboy Carter album

Beyonce / Parkwood

Beyoncé's new album Cowboy Carter, released a few days ago, is already breaking listening records on streaming platforms. However, in an accompanying press release, the singer suddenly spoke out against the use of artificial intelligence in the music industry.

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"The joy of creating music is that there are no rules," stated the singer.

Beyoncé added that with the rise of AI technology, she felt a "deeper connection to purity" and decided to return to real instruments instead of digital filters and programming.

The main reaction against AI art has to do with the way music generators work. They can create new tracks in minutes and mimic artists' vocals to a frightening degree of convincingness. In some cases, this is because the AI is trained on the work of the musicians themselves, whose jobs it can eventually replace.

Large AI companies like OpenAI and Stability AI use databases with copyrighted artwork without the authors' consent to train their models. Stability AI's VP of audio, Ed Newton-Rex, even resigned because of this, disagreeing that training AI on copyrighted content is "fair use."

Cowboy Carter does not explicitly address the topic of AI. However, Beyoncé does raise issues of appropriation of Black musicians' work by white performers, particularly the history of the country music genre. The album's title also refers not only to the singer's last name, but also to the Carter family, who created country music based on the work of Black artists.

Thus in Cowboy Carter one can trace parallels between cultural appropriation in the past and present. Only now the music is being encroached upon by artificial intelligence.

Source: TechCrunch