Posting on Instagram Stories post, she shared the results of a search of her name on an AI music database, with the search allegedly revealing that 238 of her songs had been used in AI training datasets.
“[Just] checked and music AI has trained off 238 of my songs. I’m certain some unreleased. If you’re a musician and you support this degenerate shit? You’re disgusting and there’s NOTHING YOU COULD EVER SAY TO ME TO MAKE THIS OKAY. I hope u have the life u deserve.”
She has been a long-time critic of AI, and on 2022’s album ‘SOS‘, lamented the increasing use of the technology, singing: “Let’s talk about AI, robot got more heart than I/ Robot got future, I don’t/ Robot got sleep but I don’t power down,” on ‘Ghost in the Machine’.
Back in March, she also shared her thoughts on the crisis AI was continuing to foster in the industry, particularly for Black artists. “I feel like I’m at war because of AI,” she told i-D Magazine.
“It’s happening disproportionately with Black music,” she went on. “Why am I hearing AI covers of Olivia Dean, when Olivia Dean just came the fuck out? She can’t even collect the streams. I’m also really offended by the type of Black music that’s coming out of AI. Weird, stereotypical struggle music.
“I’m not up against the pop girls. I’m not up against the R&B girls. I’m up against anti-intellectualism and doing things easy. The type of blend of information my human experience provides, AI can’t even be prompted to fuck with. I want to just let this angst drive me into bizarre directions.”
Those comments followed the emergence of AI-generated artist Xania Monet, who made headlines last year after signing a multimillion-dollar record deal and becoming the first AI artist to chart on the US Billboard rankings. The poet and designer behind the project said she saw Monet as “a real person” who was “challenging the norm”.
Kehlani has also hit out at the success of Monet, telling fans that the proliferation of AI in music was “so beyond out of our control.” She went on to highlight the power of AI to create fully formed songs without users having to “credit anyone” involved in making the copyrighted works on which such generative music systems are trained.
It’s not the first time SZA has criticised AI. Last summer, she hit once again hit out at users of the technology for being “codependent on a machine, telling fans to “please Google how much energy and pollution it takes to run AI”.
The new track, “Save The Day,” comes ahead of the films’ release next month and is set to play during the film’s credits. The song can be found on the official Disney Music YouTube channel.
The short song is carried along by an uplifting repeated piano medley with alongside SZA’s vocals. The instrumentals and especially the vocals all carry with a positive vibe, expected of a song with a name like “Save The Day.”
Hoppers director Daniel Chong stated in an interview that he and fellow director Nicole Grindle came to reach out to SZA to write for the film after using her songs “Good Days” and “Saturn” as placeholders for the film’s credits.
“I think there was an intuitiveness in talking with SZA that when she saw the movie,” Chong said, I think she immediately knew what the movie needed.”
Hoppers is set for release on March 6th, and is set to follow the adventures of Mabel who uses technology to transfer her consciousness into robotic animals to learn more about the animal world. The film’s voice cast includes actors such as Dave Franco, Sam Richardson, Meryl Streep, Jon Hamm and more.
