Beyoncé Challenges AI Music with Her New Album ‘Cowboy Carter’
Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” has been out for only a few days, yet it’s already obvious that we’ll be talking about it for years to come — it’s breaking records across streaming platforms, and the artist herself calls it “the best music [she’s] ever made.” But in the middle of the press release for “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé made an unexpected statement against the growing presence of AI in music.
“The joy of creating music is that there are no rules,” said Beyoncé. “The more I see the world evolving the more I felt 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 significance — these remarks are among few jumping-off points fans get to help them puzzle through each element of the album, and how they all fit together. So her stance on AI isn’t just a throwaway comment made in conversation with a reporter. It’s deliberate.
The central backlash against AI-generated art comes from the way this technology works. AI-powered music generators can create new tracks in minutes and emulate artists’ vocals to a scarily convincing degree. In some cases, that’s because the AI is being trained on the work of the artists whose jobs it could end up replacing.
Large language models and diffusion models both depend on huge databases of text, images, and sounds to create AI-produced works. Prominent AI companies, such as Open AI and Stability AI, often use datasets that include copyrighted artworks without permission. While Stability AI’s music model used licensed stock music, this isn’t true for the company’s image generator, Stable Diffusion. Stability AI’s Audio Vice President, Ed Newton-Rex resigned over this conflict as he did not agree with the company’s stance of using copyrighted works for generative AI models as ‘fair use’.
It’s understandable why artists like Beyoncé are apprehensive about this technology since many AI models have been trained on their work without consent. This can be especially detrimental for upcoming musicians who lack the influence to safeguard their work, making it difficult for them to establish themselves in an already competitive industry. Beyoncé’s perspective becomes even clearer when considering her song, “Cowboy Carter”.
Although “Cowboy Carter” doesn’t directly address AI, it does deal with unpermitted theft and appropriation of artworks. Through the album, Beyoncé educates listeners about the instrumental role Black musicians played in shaping country music, which is typically misconstrued as representing Southern white culture.
The title “Cowboy Carter” is indicative of the appropriation of Black music for the benefit of white people. “Carter” could refer to Beyoncé’s married name, but it also alludes to the Carters, regarded as the “first family” of country music. The Carters used the work of Black musicians to devise the genre we recognize as country music today, a genre that continues to exclude Black artists. This is exemplified by an Oklahoma country radio station’s recent refusal to play Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em” as she didn’t align with their definition of a country artist. Beyoncé’s seemingly random opposition to AI uncovers a similar issue: artists’ work is taken without permission and warped into something else, leaving them bereft of remuneration or recognition for their cultural contributions.
There are a few instances on the album where Willie Nelson, the ninety-year-old country legend, features on a radio program named “Smoke Hour”. The first instance of this is before the track “Texas Hold ‘Em”. This positioning of the song takes on additional symbolism due to the Oklahoma radio incident, with Nelson taking a subtle swipe: “For this next song, I want you all to sit back, take a deep breath, and let your mind wander to its happy place. And if you don’t want to go there, find yourself a jukebox.”
In Beyoncé’s universe, the jukebox and radio are back in vogue, Black artists have the freedom to create any type of music they desire, and artistic theft is non-existent.
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