US singer Kehlani has criticised an AI-generated ‘artist’ bagging a $3 million record deal.
The artist in question is Xania Mone, the creation of Telisha Jones, who is the person who presumably signed the deal and received the advance from Hallwood Media. Apparently, Jones feeds her poetry into Suno, which transforms them into songs for the AI avatar to ‘sing’.
Monet is a blemish-free avatar who ‘sings’ polished 90s-influenced R&B. But does it (it feels odd to affix the pronoun ‘she’ to something that’s essentially artificial) have that most indefinable quality: soul? You be the judge...
Anyway, Kehlani isn’t very impressed. “I don’t respect it,” she told her followers on TikTok. “There is an AI R&B artist who just signed a multimillion-dollar deal … and the person is doing none of the work. This is so beyond out of our control.”
One wonders if she has a problem with Gorillaz, who are a cartoon group currently signed to Sony. The four characters in that ‘band’ do none of the work, leaving it all to some fella called Damon Albarn.
In her TikTok post Kehlani went on to talk about the power of AI to ‘write’ fully formed songs without its creators having to “credit anyone” involved in making the copyrighted works on which such generative systems were trained.
“Nothing and no one on Earth will ever be able to justify AI to me,” she added.
Xania Monet at present has 465,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Speaking to Billboard last week, Jones’s manager Romel Murphy defended the Monet project, saying “This is real music - it’s real R&B. There’s an artist behind it.” He also said that plans were underway for Monet’s debut live performance.
That will certainly be interesting. The only successful avatar concert thus far – Abba Voyage – had a budget of $175 million and after more than three years of performances has yet to recoup those costs. You have to wonder how much Hallwood has to sink into establishing the live reputation of an unknown ‘artist’ who has yet to reach half a million Spotify listeners?
