Cher is unlike anyone else alive, but she nevertheless shares many of the same concerns that the common man does today. Namely: artificial intelligence taking real people’s jobs and standing in solidarity with her fellow laborers. She communicates all of this, by the way, while promoting her new Christmas album, titled Christmas.
Cher tells the Associated Press she has no roles lined up amid the current SAG-AFTRA strike, and didn’t even want to do a special around the album. “They said, ‘Well, we can do it in England.’ I said, ‘We can do it on the moon, but I’m not doing it’” until a resolution is reached, she pledges.
The legendary performer is also incredibly skeptical of artificial intelligence in the music business and beyond. “Someone did me doing a Madonna song and it was kind of shocking. They didn’t have it down perfectly,” she says. “But also, I’ve spent my entire life trying to be myself, and now these assholes are going to go take it? And they’ll do my acting and they’ll do my singing?”
“I’m telling you, if you work forever to become somebody—and I’m not talking about somebody in the famous, money part—but an artist, and then someone just takes it from you, it seems like it should be illegal.”
A.I. is, of course, an extremely heated point of contention in the actors strike (as it was in the now-settled writers strike). Musicians have also been taking up the rallying cry. “It can’t create something based on a human experience,” Hozier said recently, “so I don’t know if it meets the definition of art.” Similarly, Nick Cave has called A.I. a “mockery of what it is to be human,” saying, “Ultimately, it has no limitations, so therefore can’t inhabit the true transcendent artistic experience. It has nothing to transcend!” He added, “A.I. may very well save the world, but it can’t save our souls. That’s what true art is for. That’s the difference. So, I don’t know, in my humble opinion ChatGPT should just fuck off and leave songwriting alone.”