SZA has said that she feels like she’s “at war” because of the rise in AI in music.
On her 2022 album ‘SOS‘, the musician lamented 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’.
Now, she’s shared her thoughts on the crisis AI is creating in the industry, particularly for Black artists. “I feel like I’m at war because of AI,” she said in a recent interview with i-D Magazine.
“It’s happening disproportionately with Black music,” she added. “Why am I hearing AI covers of Olivia Dean, when Olivia Dean just came the f*** 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.”
She went on to say: “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 f*** with. I want to just let this angst drive me into bizarre directions.”
Her comments follow 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 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”.
“Please Google the beautiful Black cities like Memphis that are SUFFERING because of Twitter’s new AI system. PLEASE JUST GOOGLE ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM,” she added. “AI doesn’t give a f*** if you live or die I promise. THERE IS A PRICE FOR CONVENIENCE AND BLACK AND BROWN [COMMUNITIES] WILL PAY THE BRUNT OF IT EVERYTIME. We won’t get it til it’s too late. Y’all don’t hear me tho.”
As for SZA’s mention of environmental racism and how Black and Brown communities will pay the price for the use of technology, her claims are backed by the National Resources Defence Council (NRDC) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
The NRDC reports that environmental racism is defined as the “intentional siting of polluting and waste facilities in communities primarily populated by African Americans, Latines, Indigenous People, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, migrant farmworkers, and low-income workers.”
In other AI news, Apple Music will now let users know if they are listening to music that was made using the technology, following a study last year that revealed that 97 per cent of people “can’t tell the difference” between real and AI music. Before then, figures in 2024 warned that people working in music were likely to lose a quarter of their income to AI over the following four years.
As well as Apple, Deezer has also tackled the rise of AI-generated content – which it said in September made up 28 per cent of content on the platform – sharing that it had demonetised 85 per cent of all AI-generated tracks on its site using an AI-detection tool.
Bandcamp has banned all AI-created tracks too, saying: “We reserve the right to remove any music on suspicion of being AI-generated.”
Last year, Spotify confirmed that it was cracking down on AI as well, and removing 75million “spammy tracks” and targeting impersonators. That statement followed a report which claimed that AI-generated songs were being uploaded to dead musicians’ Spotify profiles without permission.
Paul McCartney, Kate Bush and Elton John are among the major British artists to have urged Keir Starmer to protect the work of creatives, and the Prime Minister told NME in 2025 that the government were working to “get the balance right.”
As for SZA, she recently shared an uplifting new track called ‘Save The Day’, which is set to feature in Disney and Pixar’s Hoppers.
Elsewhere in her i-D interview, she looked back on the release of ‘SOS’, recalling her label’s warning that the album was unlikely to beat Taylor Swift in the charts – which it ultimately went on to do.
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