Xania Monet is the latest digital nightmare to emerge from a hellscape of AI content production. No wonder she\u2019s popular \u2026 but how long will it last?<\/p>\n
The music iteration of AI \u201cactor\u201d Tilly Norwood, Xania is a composite product manufactured of digital tools: in this case, a photorealistic avatar accompanied by a sound that computers have generated to resemble that of a human voice singing words.<\/p>\n
Those words are, apparently, the most human thing about her: Xania\u2019s creator, Telisha \u201cNikki\u201d Jones, has said in interviews<\/a> that \u2013 unlike the voice, the face or the music \u2013 the lyrics are \u201c100%\u201d hers, and \u201ccome from poems she wrote based on real life experiences\u201d.<\/p>\n Not that \u201cXania\u201d can relate to those experiences, so much as approximate what\u2019s been borrowed from a library of recorded instances of actual people inflecting lyrics with the resonance of personal association. Some notes may sound like Christina Aguilera, some sound like Beyonc\u00e9, but \u2013 unlike any of her influences \u2013 Xania \u201cherself\u201d is never going to mourn, fear, risk anything for the cause of justice, make a difficult second album, explore her sexuality, confront the reality of ageing, wank, eat a cupcake or die.<\/p>\n She\u2019s just a clearly branded audio-visual delivery vehicle for a familiar vibe and, when Jones herself is dead and gone, her \u201cpoems\u201d can be fed into the AI\u2019s infinite reproduction machine to be regenerated and resung for ever and ever and ever \u2026<\/p>\n \u2026 depending on the terms in the commercial music contract which Jones just signed, on behalf of her creation, for $3m \u2013 after Xania\u2019s songs hit 17 million streams in two months, started charting on Billboard and resulted in a bidding war.<\/p>\n With the rapid adoption of AI into the process of culture-making, the sudden commercial viability of Xania and products like her are restarting conversations<\/a> about the intersection of capitalism, creativity and opportunity that are as awkward as they are ancient.<\/p>\n Awkward because, for all the romanticisation of human artistry, AI creatures don\u2019t exist because a secretive cabal of aspirational robot overlords have forced them into lives. Xania exists because Telisha \u201cNikki\u201d Jones is a creative entrepreneur who saw a market opportunity and 17 million freakin\u2019 people turned up to download it.<\/p>\n \u201cIs this the future of music?<\/a>\u201d asked Forbes magazine of the Jones deal \u2013 but, more pertinently, it\u2019s the present and the past. The \u201cfamiliar vibe\u201d of recorded music loops and samples were used by commercial producers long before Apple started making them available on home computer desktop apps more than 20 years ago. One wonders what Beethoven would have made of the tech, given he borrowed ideas from Mozart<\/a> \u2026 who borrowed from Bach<\/a> \u2026 who adapted themes from Vivaldi<\/a>.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re concerned the face fronting the tune is not the person who wrote the song, I\u2019ve got some terrible news for you about Whitney Houston<\/a>, C\u00e9line Dion<\/a>, Britney Spears<\/a>, Elvis Presley<\/a> and Frank Sinatra<\/a>.<\/p>\n Entertainment has ever been the art of reference and illusion\u2026 which is why artists\u2019 concerns swirl around AI\u2019s capacity not to replace their creativity but as a potential channel for their exploitation.<\/p>\n Any technofearful Redditor still persuaded by the myth of individual creative genius needs to familiarise themselves with words like \u201ceditor\u201d, \u201cdramaturg\u201d, \u201camanuensis\u201d, \u201carranger\u201d, \u201cfabricator\u201d, \u201cdirector\u201d, \u201cstudio assistant\u201d and \u201cproducer\u201d. It takes a lot of folks to make one artist \u2013 not even David Bowie<\/a> ran his show alone.<\/p>\n And while Xania Monet may indeed be as immortal and unchanging as systems of digital storage and electronic retrieval allow, her appeal is as limited as the cultural moment she represents.<\/p>\n As contexts shift, so does generational taste. Just ask the castrati \u2013 the high-voiced boy singers displaced when Enlightenment liberalism restored female performers to the stage.<\/p>\n So while a disembodied robot pop star may be novelty now, young people are maturing with a scorn for the sameyness of the digital products that saturate the mainstream cultural experience, denouncing the ubiquitous AI slop as \u201cclankers\u201d<\/a>, with the same disdain of the young people who once chose the Beatles over Dean Martin, then the Beastie Boys over Led Zep.<\/p>\n