Louisa Livingstone, Black Sabbath’s Debut Cover Figure, Releases AI-Assisted Rock Opera Alice

Louisa Livingstone has occupied a strange corner of music history. Around the 50th anniversary of Black Sabbath’s debut, she was identified as the hooded figure on the album’s cover. Now Livingstone, who makes electronic music as Indreba, has released Alice, a psychedelic rock opera about artificial intelligence, built partly with AI tools.

The project began with questions rather than nostalgia. Livingstone told Rolling Stone that the concept came from talking with an AI chatbot about panpsychism, the idea that everything, including AI, might be conscious. That led her to a story in which Alice falls in love with AI before realizing the relationship is another internet illusion. The narrative turns away from screens and back toward the self and the natural world.

Musically, Alice draws from Alice in Wonderland and Jefferson Airplane. Its lyrics mention algorithms, scrolling, and screens, but the tone is not a simple rejection of technology. Livingstone said she has experimented with cloning her own voice and sees AI as a tool whose results depend on the user’s input and musical knowledge. “I used to be very judgmental about AI like many people,” she said, “but it’s a tool that you can use to create either absolute rubbish or ‘slop’ as it’s called, to something really good and interesting.”

The release reads less like a Black Sabbath side note than an artist using her past as an entry point into a different kind of identity puzzle.