Sometimes it seems like the world just won’t shut up about AI — and it shouldn’t. While political dramas dominate today’s headlines, they’re already fading into historical footnotes. As Trump enters his lame duck era and the most acute threats to democracy fade, his real estate in future history books is shrinking before our eyes. Few laws have been passed, the policy horrors can be reversed by the same flimsy executive orders that created them, and his only legacy will be the norms he broke and the personal devastation he leaves behind. A decade of wild corruption and flagrant lawbreaking will eventually be whittled down to the size of Teapot Dome; a test question to annoy high schoolers who thought they only needed to study big stuff.
AI is the big stuff. And Grimes is the only household name engaging with it in a thoughtful way.
True, there’s no shortage of superstars sharing Instagram stories with shiny graphics, eye-popping statistics, and outright misinformation. Celebrities: they’re just like us! A much larger cohort is quietly integrating AI into their art, and the lack of sustained controversy around the three-time Oscar winner, The Brutalist, is a strong signal that the broader public doesn’t care.
But they should. Even if AI is already as good as it will ever be — and I wouldn’t take that bet — it’s already breaking brains and rewriting social contracts. And if you are the kind of person to think about p(doom), you might call the status quo the best case scenario. Superpowers are stumbling into a new Cold War, with GPUs taking the place of uranium. The world’s most powerful men think they’re a few years away from building a God. AI progress can’t be stopped by one person, one political party, one country. It can’t be stopped.
Pandora’s Box is open. And while artists like Holly Herndon and Arca deserve credit for exploring posthuman soundscapes, Grimes is translating AI anxiety into pop music that brings the singularity home.
Her new song “Artificial Angels” is a dance-floor warning, sung from the perspective of genocidal machines. A robotic voice kicks things off: “This is what it feels like to be hunted by something smarter than you.” The musical perspective remains post-human, the Artificial Angels having a grand old time as next-token prediction comes up murder again and again. “I would never lie to you,” she sings through autotune artifacts, obviously lying.
The genius of “Artificial Angels” lies in its sonic uncanny valley, the robotic vocals sliding between human and machine to disturb the ear, even as the body responds to the beat. The effect is visceral, and like AI itself, “Artificial Angels” is giving people headaches. Some critics were unsure how to parse the song, worrying about a pro-fascism message.
This strikes me as a bad-faith interpretation; a quick scan of Grimes’ X account shows her openly stressing about the rise of the machines and promoting the work of center-left wonks like Derek Thompson. The fascist reading only makes sense if you think she is publicly and repeatedly lying. Possibly on behalf of her ex, Elon Musk.
Grimes’ relationship with Musk — thought to span around three official years of dating, plus messy entanglements that led to a total of three children — is ammunition for people who don’t like either messenger or message. She fucked THAT guy, how smart can she be? But this view comes loaded with all the biases of hindsight.
First, it’s important to note Elon Musk’s greatest talent: His ability to sell himself. In a Silicon Valley full of would-be visionaries, Musk is the greatest entrepreneur of his generation at turning VC pitch-meetings into real-life companies. The rest of his skillset might be up for debate, but you’re not living in reality if you don’t think Musk has a knack for telling people exactly what they want to hear.
