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If you’re using AI to try and make “art,” Madonna Ciccone has some bad news for you.
In a new interview with Vogue Italia, the Queen of Pop emphatically declared that AI is antithetical to art itself because it stifles creativity and pushes you down the boring and safe route.
“Algorithms and artificial intelligence are the opposite of taking risks and to me that is the opposite of making art,” Madonna said.
Her comments on AI were part of a broader missive on the post-influencer state of the music industry, which has reshaped how artists collaborate and bounce ideas off each other — for the worse, she says.
“Once you were around painters and musicians and dancers and artists in one place and working from a very pure place for each other. I value that experience a lot,” Madonna told the magazine. “Now to have a record deal you think about how many followers you have.”
Madonna is singing the same tune as many other artists, who view AI as trained on stolen artwork. AI, simply put, is regurgitating the images, videos, writings, and songs that were fed into it, repackaging it in predictable fashion; many AI outputs have a recognizable AI “aesthetic” to them that many people find immediately off-putting.
Madonna, however, has used AI in the past. Fans have complained on the numerous occasions that she’s posted AI slop on her Instagram, including bizarre photos of her meeting the late Pope Francis. She — or her team — also used AI in promotional videos for “Veronica Electronica” and “The Untold Chapter” last year.
And back in 2024, Madonna’s creative team were highlighted in an Associated Press piece for using AI to generate the background visuals used on stage for her tour.
But even a “Material Girl,” it seems, has her limits. Those were pretty limited applications of the tech, and weren’t involved in her music writing process. There was a brief period that some artists were intrigued by AI’s possibilities, but the longer it’s stuck around, the more polarizing it’s become. Some become outright repulsed, while others seemed to get wooed by the pull of the AI industry’s money.
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