Sheryl Crow criticizes Drake’s use of AI

Kendrick Lamar has perhaps already prepared the stage well, but now everyone’s rushed to attack Drake. The latest to join the hate parade was “First Cut Is The Deepest” singer Sheryl Crow, who added her own harsh words about the rapper’s use of AI technology.

“You can’t bring people back from the dead and expect them to tolerate it,” Crow said in an interview with BBCIn April, Drake used AI to recreate the voices of Snoop Dogg and late rapper Tupac Shakur for his song “Taylor Made Freestyle.” The song was eventually pulled after Tupac’s estate threatened to sue.

“I’m sure Drake was thinking, ‘Yeah, I shouldn’t do it, but I’ll apologize later.’ But it’s already happened and people are going to find it even if he takes it down,” Crow continued, stressing that the stunt was “hateful” and “antithetical to the life force that is in all of us.” Elsewhere in the interview, Crow also called AI a “treason” and a “slippery slope” that “goes against everything humanity is based on.”

This is not the first time Crow has spoken out against AI. Earlier this year she said The Tonight Show (above diversity), “I did a session the other day and this young songwriter had this incredible song, but she needed someone to sing it so she could pitch it to male singers in Nashville.” She apparently “paid $5, put in John Mayer’s name and she played it for me,” she continued. “You just couldn’t tell the difference and it just blew me away. And it didn’t just sound like him, I mean, like his intonation.”

“For me, art is like the soul; it’s connected to the soul,” she said, adding that the experience left her “really scared.” “When you get involved in something that’s so much more advanced than our brains are right now, you take away the soul, you know, and that’s scary.”

At his celebratory “Pop Out” show recently, Kendrick also said changed one of the lyrics to his diss track “Euphoria” to denounce Drake’s use of AI in more detail. “Give me back Tupac reputation and I might give you some respect,” he sang. Maybe we’ll see a collaboration between Kendrick Lamar and Sheryl Crow in the future.