In today’s “what the hell did you think would happen?” news, Capitol Music Group has had to ditch rapper FN Meka after a huge backlash against his lyrics. The difference from your standard “moralising scolds get mad about art” story is this: FN Meka isn’t real.
FN Meka was signed by Capitol earlier this week, having amassed millions of followers since the “virtual record company” Factory New created him. They also have an artist called Lil Bitcoin whose first single was an NFT, which probably tells you everything you need to know about them.
“We’ve developed a proprietary AI technology that analyses certain popular songs of a specified genre and generates recommendations for the various elements of song construction: lyrical content, chords, melody, tempo, sounds, etc. We then combine these elements to create the song. As of now, a human voice performs the vocals, but we are working towards the ability to have a computer come up with and perform its own words — and even collaborate with other computers as ‘co-writers’,” Factory New co-founder Anthony Martini proudly announced back in April.
You’re never going to believe this: it went horribly wrong. FN Meka used racial slurs, lived up to every regressive Black American stereotype, and made light of police brutality and incarceration. Activist group Industry Blackout called the project “an amalgamation of gross stereotypes, appropriative mannerisms that derive from Black artists complete with slurs infused in lyrics”.
The group also pointed out that Gunna, a rapper who guests on FN Meka’s track “Florida Water“, is currently incarcerated under RICO charges. Gunna’s lyrics, which cover the same themes as this made-up rapper, are part of the evidence used against him.
In the only way this absurd story could resolve, Capitol “severed ties” with FN Meka, who, again, is a collection of pixels and algorithms. In a statement, the label said: “CMG has severed ties with the FN Meka project, effective immediately. We offer our deepest apologies to the Black community for our insensitivity in signing this project without asking enough questions about equity and the creative process behind it.”
FN Meka’s Instagram account still exists but has been set to private, another weirdly human thing for a robot rapper copping a huge backlash to do.
This, of course, is only the latest example of the “poison in, poison out” process that has infected several artificial intelligence projects with horrifying racial bias. There’s the facial recognition technology more likely to misidentify people with darker skin. The risk assessment software used by US Courts that was biased against Black people. And the robots trained using AI who became racist: scientists asked them to scan blocks with people’s faces on them, then put the “criminal” in a box. The robots repeatedly chose a Black man.
The future of racism is now, I guess.
