Producers and Artists Push Back on AI’s Alleged Inevitability

Public pushback from artists against generative AI is mounting. In recent weeks, SZA, Doja Cat, and Kenny Beats have voiced frustration as their work is used to train models that replicate real music faster than creators can protect it. Producer-songwriter Mike Sabath, who has worked with Raye, Shawn Mendes, and Sabrina Carpenter, is among those rejecting the industry’s creeping normalization of the technology.

“I don’t use AI in my rooms, and I haven’t worked with people that do yet,” Sabath says. Outside the studio, he hears artists and executives speaking with urgency. He points to vocalists like Raye and Rosalía as masters of craft—the kind of deep skill he sees being diluted by a culture that increasingly delegates creation to machines.

The friction is not speculative. Suno admitted in a legal filing that it trained on “tens of millions of recordings” available online, prompting a lawsuit from the RIAA on behalf of Universal, Sony, and Warner. “Training without approval is crazy to me,” Sabath says. For him, the familiar argument that AI is an unstoppable wave misses a key point. “People go, ‘Well, it’s just the wave, let’s just ride it.’ It’s like, well, we made the wave. Humans made the wave.”

He sees the talk of inevitability as a pressure tactic. “The greatest tool that the big money folks use is instilling the feeling of fear and that we can’t stop it.” That position, rather than the technology itself, is what Sabath is pushing back against.