Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ has only been out for a few days, but it’s already clear we’ll be talking about it for years to come – it’s breaking records on streaming platforms and the artist herself calls it “the best music [she’s] that ever happened.” But in the middle of it Press release for “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé made an unexpected statement against the growing presence of AI in music.
“The joy of making music is that there are no rules,” Beyoncé said. “The more I see the world evolve the more I feel a deeper connection to purity. With artificial intelligence and digital filters and programming, I wanted to go back to real instruments.”
Beyoncé rarely does interviews, giving each of her comments about the new album more weight — these remarks are among the few points fans can get to help them get through each element of the album and how it all fits together. So her stance on artificial intelligence isn’t just an offhand comment made in conversation with a reporter. It’s intentional.
The central backlash against art created by artificial intelligence stems from the way this technology works. AI powered music generators can create new tracks in minutes and imitate the vocals of the artists in a frighteningly convincing degree. In some cases, this is because the AI is trained on the work of artists whose jobs it could end up replacing.
Large language models and diffusion models require extensive databases of text, images and sounds to be able to generate AI-generated projects. Some of the best-known AI companies, such as Open AI and Stability AI, use datasets that include copyrighted artwork without consent. Although Stability AI’s music model was trained on licensed stock music, this is not the case for the company’s image generator, Stable Diffusion. Stability AI Vice President of Audio Ed Newton-Rex he quit his job on it, because he “[doesn’t] I agree with the company’s view that training AI models created on copyrighted works is “fair use”.
It’s no wonder artists like Beyoncé have strong feelings about this technology – too many AI models have been trained on artists’ work without their consent, and especially for up-and-coming musicians who don’t have the clout to help them, it will be even more difficult to break into an already ruthless industry. Beyoncé’s stance makes even more sense in the context of “Cowboy Carter” itself.
While not explicitly discussing artificial intelligence, “Cowboy Carter” already deals with the theft and appropriation of art without his consent. On the album itself, Beyoncé gives listeners a history lesson on how black musicians shaped the foundations of country music, which is too often seen as representing white Southern culture.
Even the title, “Cowboy Carter,” is a nod to the appropriation of black music for white profit. While “Carter” could refer to Beyoncé’s married name, it’s also a nod to the Carters, the “first family” of country music — and Carters got them work by black musicians to develop the style we now know as country, which continues to exclude black artists (just recently, an Oklahoma radio station denied a listener’s request to play Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em” since Beyoncé didn’t fit their definition of a country artist). Beyoncé’s seemingly random stance against artificial intelligence reveals a similar truth: Once again, artists’ work is being stolen without their consent and distorted into something else, leaving them without payment or credit for their cultural contributions.
There are a few moments on the album when ninety-year-old country icon Willie Nelson appears on a radio show called “Smoke Hour” and his first appearance precedes “Texas Hold ‘Em.” The track’s placement takes on an extra layer of meaning in light of the radio incident in Oklahoma, and Nelson takes a slight jab: “Now for this next tune, I want you to sit back, breathe in, and go to the good place where your mind likes to wander. And if you don’t want to go, go find a jukebox.”
This is Beyoncé’s world: The jukebox and the radio are back in style, black musicians can make whatever kind of music they want, and no one’s art is stolen.
