Mariah Carey wants her fans to know that a recent video of her on Spotify was not AI-generated. The video, she says, was just poorly lit. The pop music queen’s insistence that she’s real reminded me of one of my long-held fears about our AI future. Any significantly popular and profitable media personality could stay alive forever, an ersatz version of them keeping up appearances long after the real person behind the persona has passed.
That’s right. We’re never going to be free of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” AI could keep it alive forever.
This all started because of a Spotify Wrapped video. This year, artists recorded personalized messages for their mega fans on the music streaming service. If you were in the top listenership for someone, you got a little video from them saying thank you. Carey’s video feels off.
.@MariahCarey with an exclusive message for her top fans on Spotify Wrapped.
— Mariah Carey Charts (Fan Page) (@chartmariah) December 4, 2024
Wearing uncharacteristic red lipstick and staring forward, Carey runs through her lines and thanks fans for 30 years of support. It’s stilted and awkward. Her head seems to stay in place, eyes locked forward, while her body shifts around. A lot of people who watched the video thought Carey had used AI to communicate with her fans.
She denied it. “Bad lighting and a red lip have you all thinking this is AI??” She said in a post on X. “There’s a reason I’m not a fan of either of those things!”
Regardless of the video’s authenticity, there will come a day in the near future when we do see an AI Mariah Carey. There’s too much money to be made. As these systems have become more sophisticated, no corpse is sacred. In 2012, Snoop Dogg danced with a hologram of Tupac Shakur at Coachella. Twelve years later, Drake used an AI-powered Shakur to rap in a diss track about Kendrick Lamar.
Disney has leveraged AI to augment Star Wars films with both the living and the dead. AI Peter Cushing haunts both Rogue One and a Hammer horror documentary. Mark Hamill is 73, but his younger self will play Luke Skywalker forever thanks to the glory of AI. James Earl Jones died this year but his voice, frozen in time and captured by computers, will play Darth Vader forever.
Ian Holm died four years ago, but he starred in Alien: Romulus this year. The members of Swedish pop sensation ABBA are in their 70s, but the younger digitized versions of themselves are vibrant and have been selling out stadiums for three years. The Elvis version of this is coming to London in 2025.
One day, Mariah Carey will be scanned and cataloged. Machines will capture her perfect voice and pour over every photo and video of her captured in the 1980s. She’ll be reduced to her essence and broadcast back to an adoring audience who does not want her as she is and who will not let her die.
There should be a natural churn to pop culture. Songs, movies, and ideas should age and die. Art should be forgotten, rediscovered, and recontextualized. These new AI systems promise to freeze a moment in time, trapping both the art and the audience in a moment they can’t escape.
All this old art sits on top of us, stultifying the culture. The young have a harder time breaking into the cultural consciousness when the old are kept young by machines. Every year since I was a child, Mariah Carey signaled the beginning of the Holiday season. We’ll be trapped with her forever, her iconic voice floating from the mouth of a simulacrum. In the future, everything will be bad lighting and red lipstick.
English (US) ·