SZA has been raging against what she dubbed the “Ghost in the Machine” on her Billboard 200 No. 1 album SOS for years. In her case the “ghost” she was referring to on that song from her 2022 breakthrough LP was artificial intelligence, which she took on by 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.”
Now, in an interview with i.d., the Grammy-winning singer is sharpening her knives to a high sheen in what she tagged as a potentially existential crisis for Black artists in the face of the rapidly expanding use of artificial intelligence in music.
“I feel like I’m at war because of AI,” she told the magazine, which noted that in the time since she released that song AI-generated tunes and artificial artists including Xania Monet, Unbound Music and Breaking Rust have impacted the Billboard charts and put up notable streaming numbers.
SZA lamented that the AI creep is happening “disproportionately with Black music,” wondering, ” Why am I hearing AI covers of Olivia Dean, when Olivia Dean just came the f–k 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.”
Last summer, SZA posted about her feelings about AI’s harmful environmental effects in an Instagram Story in which she wrote, “Hey I hate AI … ppl and children are dying from the harm n pollution Ai energy centers are creating,” seemingly in reference to the enormous amounts of energy and water sucked up by the sprawling AI data centers going up around the country, often disproportionately affecting Black and brown communities.
“Please google how much energy and pollution it takes to run Ai,” she added in an comment on Instagram. “Please google the beautiful black cities like Memphis that are SUFFERING because of twitters new Ai system … “PLEASE JUST GOOGLE ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM. AI doesn’t give a f–k if you live or die I promise. THERE IS A PRICE FOR CONVENIENCE AND BLACK AND BROWN [people] WILL PAY THE BRUNT OF IT EVERY-TIME.”
Wary of where AI may take the music industry and creativity, SZA told the magazine that it’s not her vs. her pop chart peers, it’s her vs. the infernal machine. “I’m not up against the pop girls. I’m not up against the R&B girls,” she said. “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–k with. I want to just let this angst drive me into bizarre directions.”
One way she’s fighting back is by getting into the studio to work on her follow-up to SOS. She described wanting to “set myself apart” and let people know she could write songs with her 2017 debut album, Ctrl, and then setting her sights on breaking into the “mainstream space” on SOS, which spent 13 nonconsecutive weeks atop the Billboard 200 chart. While she didn’t reveal much about the sessions, in August she teased a bit of a string-spiked track featuring the lyrics, “Can’t take what’s meant for me/ It lives inside/ Can’t miss what’s meant for you/ Enjoy the ride/ Cycles, enjoy the cycles” on her @notmusicatalliswear IG burner account.
What she did say is that she’s been “dabbling a little bit in everything” during the sessions, which have included work with a live band who cook up live beats from scratch as she freestyles. The sessions have included drop-ins by Steve Lacy for what she described as an unspecified “random little project.”
“I’m trying to just open my brain and open my heart, channeling awesome humanity s–t right now,” she said of dipping into her flesh and blood side to combat the inexorable march of the machines. “Humanity is my ‘why’ — preservation of what’s left, extreme expression of what is, and a desperate plea … I feel insufferably human right now.”
