Queen Gayle King! LOVE to see some hard-hitting journalism in action!
The CBS Mornings interviewer invited on new singer Xania Monet as her guest on Wednesday morning. Or rather, she invited the person behind the creation that is Xania — a woman named Telisha “Nikki” Jones.
OK, if you haven’t heard the name yet, Xania Monet is what Billboard has dubbed the “first known AI artist to earn enough radio airplay to debut on a Billboard radio chart.” Xania looks like a model and sings like Whitney Houston… except she doesn’t because she doesn’t exist. She’s a completely fabricated singer, created using AI.
Xania made headlines when she scored a multimillion dollar record deal, prompting actual human singer Kehlani to go off about it on TikTok. Can’t say we blame her.
Related: Suzanne Somers’ Widower Created An AI Clone Of Her — And Can’t Tell The Difference
So Gayle spoke to the woman behind the fake woman. And Nikki defended herself after Kehlani’s attacks, saying:
“Technology’s evolving. Everybody has different ways of putting in work to get to where they’re at. I don’t feel a way about it. I still love Kehlani’s music. I still listen to her every day.”
Here’s what we’re loving though. Gayle confronted Nikki with a big problem — that many people who hear these songs are going to be fooled into thinking Xania is a real person. Nikki responded:
“Xania is an extension of me, so I look at her as a real person.”
And Gayle replied:
“But you can’t sing.”
WHOA!!!
Gayle continued by explaining how, “in that sense, she’s not a real person.” In that, what people are hearing is not a woman singing her songs that she wrote, with her human emotions and soul poured into it. It’s just not real. Gayle asked:
“What do you say to the people that say, she may be an extension of you, but other singers who have actually worked hard, who have practiced their craft, who are really struggling to get heard, who are really doing the actual singing that you seem to have taken a shortcut to all of that?”
Nikki responded:
“I wouldn’t call it a shortcut because I still put in the work, and anytime something new challenges what we’re used to, you’re going to get strong reactions behind it. I just feel like AI is the new era we’re in, and I look at it as a tool, as an instrument, utilize it.”
The work Nikki put in was learning how to give prompts to an AI program a couple months ago. Again, she claims to have written the lyrics on her own, but the face, the acting, the singing, it’s all just a computer program that “studied” the work of real singers and is emulating it. Clearly Jones isn’t going to be convinced she’s doing anything wrong, but we imagine a lot of the audience will.
See the full profile, with the real fireworks at about the 3:00 mark (below):
What do YOU think, Perezcious readers??
[Image via CBS Mornings/Xania Monet/YouTube.]
