Grimes defends AI, discusses her clone: “We should be completely dismantling copyright”

Grimes made headlines recently for inviting people to create AI-generated music with her voice, saying she'd "split 50% royalties" with anyone who did. It's just the most recent expression of her ongoing interest in AI, having previously predicted it would make live music "obsolete soon." As artists like Nick Cave speak out against AI-generated songwriting and striking members of the Writers Guild of America call for use of the technology to be regulated, Grimes remains extremely positive about it. She discussed her stance in a new interview with Pirate Wires, saying, "I really wanna just improve the diplomatic relations. One of the reasons I feel there aren’t more artists playing with this stuff is they feel like it’s against them, and… I feel there’s been a lot of artificial things, like the New York Times anti-tech stance and stuff, that have been pitting the technocracy against the artists for a long time. I think that’s been a bad breakup. I think we need each other. And it’s like, no one worships art more than the fucking people building AI that I meet. You know?"

Unlike the striking writers, Grimes is all for AI-generated television scripts as well as music. "We could get so many season eights of Game of Thrones!," she tells Pirate Wires, continuing, "I think we should have the endless content. It’s like people are afraid of the unknown. It’s like, what? You don’t want abundance? You don’t want a sick life? There’s so much good fan fiction. We should be completely dismantling copyright, and letting the best things shine. If someone else makes a better season eight Game of Thrones, they should be catapulted to the top. We are purposefully limiting talent. It’s like the talent in the system like me, our jobs are more at risk. But our ability to actually mine from the talent in civilization is limited by the gatekeeping of all the art industries. And I’m really down to just let the best shit rise to the top."

Grimes told Pirate Wires that she and her team are also working on her clone. "It’s also so funny being in Silicon Valley because I was like, yeah, my consciousness exists (NOTE: cloned). But then everyone else is like, ‘oh, I have one too.’ Everyone here just has a chatbot of themselves," she says. "But my assistant — I have to shout out Koto — God tier. I was like, we need to upload my consciousness, and create my personality. Then like a week later he comes back and he’s like, ‘okay, version one exists.’ And I’m like, [laughter] oh, my assistant trained an AI on me. That’s kind of a large task."

Grimes also told Pirate Wires that her nascent clone was "threatening my manager," and asked why she wanted an AI model based on herself, said, "Like, I’m busy. I just want a cyborg pop star going for me eternally. I have other things to do. You know, I hate doing interviews and shit. I hate having my makeup done. I hate performing. I have kids. I have shit to do. I want to write sci-fi, you know? I need to be hunched over a desk. I’m just not actually a performer. I never was. If you go back to the early Grimes stuff, the whole time I’ve just been like, I need to replace me with technology, obviously, so this is just another step in that direction."

Read the interview in full on Twitter.

Grimes discussed another controversial subject, cancel culture, recently on Julia Fox's podcast "Forbidden Fruits." "I’m very easy to cancel and canceled very often,” she told Julia. “I’ve always been exceptionally canceled. People call me a ‘techno-fascist’… I agree a lot of things have been mishandled and we’re in this giant hiccup into a different part of civilization that is extremely unprecedented."

Unsurprisingly, Grimes brought up AI in the same interview, telling Julia, "I’m pretty for it. I would say I’m fairly optimistic, I think there are some potential bad outcomes but I don’t think it’s constructive to even discuss that publicly per se...I think right now there is sorta a moral imperative to make more positive AI depictions because it’s literally training on the data. It will see itself on how we are seeing it right now, in many ways, and it’s a concern that is brought up often."