By Quinn Smalley
The imaginary person infiltrating the charts, Xania Monet.
Seemingly out of thin air, AI has emerged as an everyday consumer product with — checks notes — no regulations in place as guardrails to protect us and other industries that rely on human innovation and ideas to thrive. This includes music, movies, TV, writing and visual art. Any creative endeavor is at risk of being replicated by a machine.
While AI is useful to humans and can alleviate labor-intensive tasks, we’ve seemingly shifted from using the technology as a tool to assist us to using it to replace human effort and creativity. What AI generates is not from its own imagination; it doesn’t have one. It’s not magic. Like all of us, it has to be taught. This is called training. AI is essentially fed terabytes of human creations, and nothing is off limits: art, music, TV, books; anything that can be digitized and is relevant to that model’s purpose is fed into it.
The training itself is controversial. Meta was revealed to have torrented (a form of peer-to-peer downloading) at least 81.7 terabytes of data from sources like LibGen and Z-Library. The data included pirated books, and Meta is currently tied up in litigation for allegedly stealing content that everyone else is expected to pay for. Because AI requires human reference points in order to create what we prompt it to do, it repurposes already existing works, further infringing on human creators’ rights.
Lately the trend has been AI artists. These “artists” simply enter prompts into their chosen AI model describing what they want it to generate. It may take many attempts to get the desired outcome, but in the end, the person who prompted the generated work posts it online or prints it and calls it their own. But is it?
If you ask Telisha “Nikki” Jones, the AI prompter responsible for the AI “artist” known as Xania Monet, she would tell you the work is all hers and that Xania is an extension of herself, therefore they are one and the same. Barring the fact that Jones lacks the same vocal ability as her AI counterpart and is unable to produce music without AI prompting, the only part of Xania’s body of work that is organically conceived are the lyrics, which Jones claims as her own in an interview with Gayle King on CBS Sunday Morning. Jones essentially hides behind an impossibly gorgeous avatar and the fantasy of a flawless, pitch-perfect chanteuse without any of the credentials or presence of an actual pop star.
Xania Monet’s prompter, Telisha “Nikki” Jones being interviewed by Gayle King. Screencap by CBS.
Prior to the widespread use of generative AI, a similar concept existed with VTubers online personalities who stream content through animated avatars that conceal their identities. Famous examples include Corpse Husband and Dream, both of whom eventually revealed their faces and created all their content themselves. The persona was just a costume; the effort, voice and footage were their own.
If we go further back, in the 1990s and 2000s we saw notable attempts at creating virtual actors. One early example appeared in video games: the blonde-haired protagonist of the D series and its spinoff Enemy Zero. In these games, you play Laura. She has different surnames across the series but is clearly intended to be the same “digital actress.” She played similar roles: a mostly unvoiced final girl who survives but somehow leaves the ordeal with less than she entered it with.
Laura’s appearances throughout the years. The top left is Laura in her debut game, “D.” Bottom left is Laura’s appearance in her second game, “Enemy Zero.” The image on the right documents Laura’s last appearance in media, as the lead in the Dreamcast title, “D2.” Photo from Dreamcast Junkyard.
The most notable attempt at a digital actress in film was Aki Ross from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. In 2001, Square Soft (now Square Enix) attempted to create a photorealistic CGI actor who could be used in their films and potentially cast in other Hollywood CGI features. Aki was voiced by Ming-Na Wen, who also voiced Fa Mulan in Disney’s Mulan, and the two were marketed as a package deal. Aki did not appear in any other films. Her model was used only twice more: once for a Maxim magazine “Hot 100” spread and once in a short animated scene included as bonus content in “The Animatrix.“
Aki Ross on her only movie “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” (2001).
What these examples all have in common is the enormous amount of human labor, creativity and craftsmanship that went into them something that cannot be said for Jones’ work. In fact, during her interview with Gayle King, she demonstrated how quickly she can generate multiple songs using a music-focused AI tool. Apparently, for the price of a premium Suno subscription, you can make your own chart-climbing song. Xania has two. “Let Go, Let Go” peaked at No. 3 on the Gospel charts, and “How Was I Supposed to Know?” debuted at No. 30 on the Adult R&B Airplay chart.
Xania Monet is not the only AI act charting. According to Xander Zellner’s reporting for Billboard, the AI act Breaking Rust reached No. 14 on the Digital Country Song Sales chart with “Walk My Walk,” and ChildPets Galore’s “The Only Thing I Can Take to Heaven” debuted at No. 14 on the Christian Digital Song Sales chart. Interestingly, a large concentration of the AI-generated songs, Zellner notes, are impacting Christian music charts.
Over the past few years, the evolution of AI has gone from laughably bad to eerily realistic. You can see this progression in the popular meme “Will Smith Eating Spaghetti,” which has been used as a benchmark to test the generation ability of different image models. With its rapid growth, it’s clear AI is here to stay, and its usefulness will only continue to expand. Maybe the question of whether AI artistry can be considered real art will finally be answered and perhaps regulated.
However, despite the rapid success of AI music, media companies like iHeartRadio and Clear Channel have seemingly taken the stance against hosting “AI generated personalities” and featuring AI music on their respective platforms, with iHeartRadio specifically dubbing this their “Guaranteed Human” program.
Jones is convinced she has put in the work and chalks up critics to the initial backlash that accompanies new technology. To her, this is the curse of the early adopter. And one thing is for sure: the creations Jones has released are an interesting exploration of the question of what can be considered art.