An AI Liza Minnelli is the star of the ‘Eleven Album’

Eleven Labs announced today that it worked with artists such as Liza Minnelli for the Eleven Album, a collection of songs created to promote the company’s new AI music generator, Eleven Music.

Many of the songs on the album are now streaming on Spotify in a public playlist. Additional tracks, including the new Liza Minnelli song, “Kids Wait Til You Hear This,” can be heard on the ElevenLabs website. An ElevenLabs spokesperson told Mashable all of the songs will be available on Spotify soon.

Spoiler alert: The new Liza Minnelli song is… not great!

Introducing the Eleven Album

ElevenLabs is an AI audio company. It recently partnered with celebrities (including Minnelli) to launch the Iconic Voices Marketplace, which lets users license cloned celebrity voices in commercial or editorial work. The company’s new AI music generator, Eleven Music, launched in December.

An ElevenLabs blog post describes the album as “a landmark musical release,” but the album feels more like an advertisement for Eleven Music than genuine musical expression. Minnelli and Art Garfunkel are the biggest names on the album, which also features producers, songwriters, and musicians from a variety of genres.

“When you see people get involved in [AI projects], I think the first thing you gotta look at is how much money did they pay them?” said Justine Bateman, a filmmaker and author who has been an outspoken critic of generative AI in the arts, in a phone interview with Mashable. “Nobody is making partnerships with these tech companies — nobody legitimate in the business — is making any sort of partnerships with these tech companies for free. So they pay these people a lot of money, whoever it is, to partner with them, as marketing, to try and legalize themselves to their target audience, which is everyone who is not a filmmaker, or a musician.”

In a press release provided to Mashable, ElevenLabs described the creative process as a collaboration. “Each contributor produced a fully original track that blends their signature sound with the capabilities of Eleven Music, showcasing new creative possibilities without compromising human artistry.” The press release also stated that the artists will maintain “full authorship and commercial rights” to the music.

Minnelli is a beloved EGOT-winning icon, though it’s not clear how much involvement she had with the actual production of the track credited to her. The 79-year-old artist has largely stepped away from public life in recent years while dealing with health issues.

A quote from Minnelli is included in the blog post:

I’ve always believed that music is about connection and emotional truth. What interested me here was the idea of using my voice and new tools in service of expression, not instead of it. This project respects the artist’s voice, the artist’s choices, and the artist’s ownership. I grew up watching my parents create wonderful dreams that were owned by other people. ElevenLabs makes it possible for anyone to be a creator and owner. That matters.

What does Eleven Album sound like?

Minnelli is known for her alto singing voice, stage presence, and larger-than-life personality, but the new song “Kids Wait Til You Hear This” sounds absolutely nothing like Minnelli’s body of work. I was expecting a Broadway-style showtune, but the track is actually an obnoxiously generic EDM song. It sounds to me like the producers were trying to ape the classic 2010 dance song “Barbra Streisand” by Duck Sauce, but if so, they’re way off track.

Other songs, such as “Uno, Dos, Tres” by Kai.wav and “She got that fire” by Kondzilla, are painfully derivative, a common problem with AI-generated music. However, some of the tracks could easily be mistaken for music fully created by human beings. Composer Demitri Lerios has an instrumental song on the album, and if you heard the track in a movie score, you’d likely have no idea it was co-created with generative AI.

Personally, I find AI music to be quite soulless, and the album has done nothing to change that impression. As I said, it’s really more of an advertisement than anything else, which undercuts any artistic value it’s trying to achieve.

Why do so many artists object to artificial intelligence?

AI in music and the arts remains extremely controversial, and many artists take a hard line against the use of AI in any context. Whenever a company uses generative AI in commercials, music, video games, or filmmaking, it faces fierce backlash from AI critics.

Many musicians criticize the AI industry for training audio models on copyrighted works without permission or payment. The industry’s environmental impact is also a sticking point among critics. Other artists worry that AI technology will take jobs from artists, actors, musicians, and other creative professionals. And on a creative level, some people passionately believe that AI-generated art is an oxymoron in and of itself.

“If you took three meals that were made by really great chefs and you smushed your hands up into all this food and you mashed it all together, and then you sort of treated it like clay and molded something that looked like a chicken breast and put it on a plate — did you cook that? And are you a chef? That’s what it is,” Bateman told Mashable.

“People need to stop talking about AI like it’s some independent entity,” the filmmaker said. “It is an algorithm made wholly of — 99.9 percent of the time — made wholly out of completely stolen work, that some human is using to try to approximate what they think will sell. Is that art?”

Of course, the backlash (and lawsuits) from artists hasn’t stopped major Hollywood studios, music labels, and advertising agencies from embracing AI technology in various forms.

There are also promising use cases for AI audio technology, such as the ability to translate podcasts or music into any language on the planet. As stated previously, ElevenLabs said the album showcased “new creative possibilities without compromising human artistry.”

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.