Liza Minnelli uses AI to release first new music in 13 years

Liza Minnelli has released her first new music in 13 years, adding vocals to an AI-created dance track.The track, Kids, Wait Til You Hear This – also the title of her upcoming memoir – is an unexpected foray into deep house for the 79-year-old Minnelli, who adds a handful of spoken declarations to the pumping backing.Minnelli hasn’t released new music since 2013, when she performed a track for US TV musical drama Smash, and she expressed great faith in the potential for AI-created music.On her Facebook page she heralded the company behind the track, ElevenLabs, as “a six billion dollar techno behemoth [doing] amazing things … What I will not allow this great company to do? Create, clone or copy my voice! … We used AI arrangements. Not AI vocals … The shout outs are all mine!”In an accompanying press release, she said: “I’ve always believed that music is about connection and emotional truth. What interested me here was the idea of using my voice and new tools in service of expression, not instead of it. This project respects the artist’s voice, the artist’s choices, and the artist’s ownership. I grew up watching my parents create wonderful dreams that were owned by other people. ElevenLabs makes it possible for anyone to be a creator and owner. That matters.”The track is part of a compilation of other music created or modified by AI, and Art Garfunkel is among the other artists featured. His track Authorship features a spoken excerpt from his memoir What Is It All But Luminous, paying tribute to his father over an AI piano backing.“Music has always evolved alongside technology, from microphones to multitrack recording,” Garfunkel said. “What impressed me about this experience was the respect for musicianship. The human remains at the centre. My voice plus the technology simply opens another door.”The pair’s enthusiastic uptake of AI is in marked contrast to others in the industry: there are fears that AI-generated music will undermine the employment of human musicians, and imitate the work of others without properly compensating them.Ed Sheeran has said: “If you’re taking a job away from a human being, I think that’s probably a bad thing. The whole point of society is we all do jobs. If everything is done by robots, everybody’s gonna be out of work. I just find AI a bit weird.”And Lil Wayne has doubted that AI could accurately replicate his own voice: “I am naturally, organically amazing. I’m one of a kind. So actually, I would love to see that thing try to duplicate this motherfucker.”A wave of new “generative AI” companies such as Udio, Suno and Klay are nonetheless forging ahead, striking deals with record labels to allow users to manipulate artists’ work with AI tools, or create entirely new tracks using text prompts, based on the AI absorbing the work of others and using it to inform new compositions. The artists can choose whether to opt into these services.Record labels were initially hostile to the companies, threatening legal action, but there have since been a number of settlements and partnerships.After settling with Universal and Warner, Udio announced this week that it was partnering with Merlin, an umbrella organisation representing indie labels such as Beggars Group, Epitaph, Domino, Sub Pop and Warp – meaning that artists from Arctic Monkeys to Aphex Twin could make their music available to Udio’s AI tools.Speaking to the Guardian this week, Suno founder Mikey Shulman said the use of AI in music was already very widespread. “It was described to me that we’re the Ozempic of the music industry – everybody is on it and nobody wants to talk about it,” he said.