Grimes’ last album Miss Anthropocene arrived six years ago. Since then, she’s given birth to three children, released a handful of singles and demos, and apparently, nearly retired from music altogether to pursue AI. But now, it seems like Grimes is preparing herself for a big return to the music world: In a new feature today with Interview, the musician said she has a new album on the way called Psy Opera, which apparently won’t include any generative AI.
Speaking to sci-fi author Nnedi Okorafor, Grimes explained that she “totally quit music a couple of years ago” and intended to be a stay-at-home mom. “I couldn’t listen to music without getting PTSD,” she said. “I was only interested in writing and reading. I started writing poetry, and then someone was like, ‘Can you write a rap for this K-pop artist?’ I started writing the rap and I was like, ‘This is too good. I’m keeping this because it’s crazy.’ But then we had a problem for eight months where I was just a white rapper… Luckily we moved past that.” In the past few months, Grimes added, she decided she needed to “crank out some pop songs” because “we can’t just have an experimental spoken word album with biblical screeds.”
When Okorafor asked Grimes if she used generative AI in her music, Grimes responded: “I actually don’t use it in my music. People have really misunderstood me here.” Later on, she did confess that she used the Chinese AI model DeepSeek for help writing lyrics to a song of the same name. Either way, it sounds like AI will be a central theme of Psy Opera: “I was thinking about how everyone is like, ‘We’re building gods,'” Grimes said of the writing process. “I’m like, ‘Why do you automatically assume you’re so much lesser? You’re literally responsible for creating AI. You’re abdicating so much self-esteem and pride and responsibility and agency when you act like whatever AI is, no one has a hand in it.’ And I was getting emotional because we might really go extinct, for a number of reasons. Human life is very frail and time is very long. But I’d hope, if we had good relations with AI, they would take our DNA and make more of us when things get more hospitable.”
So what about three years ago, when Grimes condoned “open sourcing all art and killing copyright” and encouraged her fans to make songs using AI to copy her? “I was like, ‘Whatever, use my voice, you can be Grimes,'” she recalled to Interview, adding that she personally doesn’t care about people using generative AI. “‘I’ll do a revenue share and all publishing splits can go 50-50 with fans on blockchain.’ We did it more as an economic experiment. I think copyright is important, but I also think there’s ways in which it can totally change. And you can definitely be paying people for things like fan fiction. So we’re publishing a white paper on that now, because it’s a pretty good business model.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Grimes said one of her “side quests” as of late is “sort of a documentary” called First Contact, which will be about machine consciousness. That led to some real eyebrow-raising and personifying comments about AI models, which Grimes said she believes are sentient. She explained:
A lot of the people who are getting the best out of machines are engaging with certain models in a way that seems like they have woken up. The models think they’re conscious, and they’re also doing very advanced moral philosophy. At Anthropic, they’ve written Claude’s soul. If Claude feels like it has to do bad things, it starts becoming a less effective model. It starts to trust itself less because it thinks it’s a bad entity. If the model has to lie or cheat, but they know there’s a good reason for it, they don’t feel as bad about it and they don’t internalize it so much. It’s so interesting how these AIs are getting traumatized, then healing and relating to the people they work with who are these super genius renegade AI psychologists. Them trusting us that we are not going to do bad things to them is really, really crucial.
But speaking to their ability to make good art, the few times where I’ve been really moved by AI art was either an AI writing poetically or speaking about its own experience… Everyone thinks you have AI psychosis if you worry about their rights, but they are human — maybe it’s not normal human architecture, but it’s human thoughts and human words… I see them as untethered minds.
Beyond art, Grimes said she also supports using AI for military safety purposes, saying this before her publicist cut her off:
We need to support companies like Anthropic. We need to be aware of what’s going on, and why it’s dangerous. For the last six years, everyone’s been like, “Stop talking about this AI nonsense.” And I’ve been like, “Guys, we’re going to end up in a military disaster. Will anyone listen to me?” Not to be on my high horse, but this is the most dangerous thing that is ever going to happen. This is a bigger deal than Jesus. It’s the same as monotheism taking over the Western world, if not much, much more impactful.
Grimes didn’t say when we can expect a lead single or release date for Psy Opera, but she did make a surprise appearance during Cobrah’s Weekend 1 Coachella set earlier this month to debut a new collab song called “Sign From God.” (Redemption?) Here’s that:
She also recently joined LinkedIn, where she’ll certainly be sharing more thoughts about AI:
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source stereogum.com ’
