Bette Midler raged against the “cultural genocide” that is generative AI in the arts, sharing in a fiery Instagram post Friday her disdain for the viral hit song “Celebrate Me” from AI-generated artist IngaRose.
“This song, currently on the charts, is AI-generated. It’s a good song, created and sung by a machine that stole every lick, every riff, every thought, phrasing style, every choke in the voice, every sorrowful sound from thousands of human artists since the beginning of recorded music, with zero compensation for the artists on whom they trained the machine,” Midler wrote. “This is #culturalgenocide.”
The song comes from AI music generation company Suno and is “performed” by its rising AI pop star IngaRose. “Celebrate Me” topped the iTunes charts in the United States and a number of other countries in April and IngaRose currently boasts over 315,000 followers on TikTok.
Ironically, “Celebrate Me” is an impassioned R&B empowerment anthem about the tough curveballs life can throw and finding your way “through the nights I thought I wouldn’t see another day.” In other words, it’s an AI avatar singing about living.
“Ain’t nobody clapping for me so I’m clapping for myself / All the times I held on when I needed help,” a raspy, riff-heavy, AI-generated female vocalist sings on the track. “Oh, I celebrate me / For everything I survived / All the nights I cried, but still I stayed alive.”
IngaRose may be AI-generated — and even has a female visual persona on TikTok and YouTube to pair with its audio — but it states on Instagram that the songs are “Human written lyrics” whose “real stories” are paired with stems and arrangements “refined” using Suno.
Comments on Midler’s Instagram post were largely celebrating the “Hocus Pocus” star’s hot take — “It horrifies me that I might be grooving along to AI slop,” one fan wrote. But one prominent actor and musician opposed the criticism.
Six-time Grammy Award nominee and “Fast & Furious” franchise star Tyrese Gibson commented exclaiming, “AI isn’t going anywhere.”
“Complain, complain and it just makes it more popular,” he wrote. “This song is actually a great song I know it’s Ai so many are so many depressed, divorced, and discouraged. This song has inspired even ME!!!!!! The last song that inspired me from a real artist that was ON MESSAGE was AUDRA DAY!!! What HUMAN writer and SINGER IS gonna write a song that’s better than this?? Don’t complain … Just step your shhhhhhhh up.”
He concluded: “The world needs HOPE.”
IngaRose, meanwhile, shares some apparent DNA with singers like Andra Day — a soulful rasp, dexterity that tap dances across octaves. The AI product’s echoes of real-life artists wasn’t lost on another Grammy-nominated musician in Midler’s comments.
To the screen legend’s point, “Unwritten” singer-songwriter Natasha Bedingfield said the song is “so wrong” in the way it appears to steal from other artists. She determined that “Celebrate Me” “sounds like a lot of” Olivia Dean’s “voice was used” in its Suno creation.
Check out Midler’s full post below:
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