In the year of our lord 2024, I’ve started tracking everything just for fun. I have a cry log, a Twitter discourse log, a more specific gaming discourse log, and more. I had some idea of the beef we were going to be privy to in the new year, but I also know that the things people say on the internet can be stranger than anything I could make up. The 30-50 feral hogs tweet, for instance, we could never have found in fiction. I also could not have imagined Nicki Minaj arguing with a Naughty Dog developer over her use of AI-generated art, and yet that’s what happened this weekend.
How On Earth Did This Happen?
Drawing from my investigations (i.e. going down long thread rabbit holes), I’m going to try and break down the people involved and what happened. Nicki Minaj is, of course, a world-famous female rapper, largely considered one of the best and most original artists in the hip-hop scene. While she is undeniably a contemporary icon, she is not known for particularly nuanced takes. Del Walker is a senior character artist at Naughty Dog and has worked at BAFTA, Respawn, Rocksteady, and Sony.
It started whenMinaj tweeted a collection of very obviously AI-generated images– the garbled text and incorrect number of fingers were dead giveaways. The images were as promotion for her new track Press Play, a collaboration with rapper Future that appears on the new “Gag City PLUTO Edition” of her album Pink Friday 2. Walker thenquote tweeted Minaj’s tweet, saying that using AI images in marketing campaigns sends out the message that the artist has no budget and makes the brand look “feeble and impoverished”. Ouch.
Minaj thenquote tweeted that tweetwith more AI-generated images, andWalker replied, “Hi Nicki Minaj. Nice of you to Retweet me. I hope you understand that by promoting Ai generated images, which are scraping my industry’s artwork illegally- you are undermining our craft. It also opens up precedent to normalize Ai generated versions of Your songs and voice. Thanks [sic]”. A firestorm of Barbz calling Walker broke and jobless ensued.
See, this is why most musical artists let their labels handle their social media: it looks ridiculous to see a millionaire rapper beefing with a regular person over their own bad marketing decisions. Does Minaj not have people around her to point out such bad optics? It seems not, especially considering her latest tweets.
A bizarre theme in Minaj’s tweets is that she talks a lot about ‘paid moles’. Anybody who criticises Minaj can be considered a mole, which apparently includes Walker. Nine hours after initially first quote tweeting Walker,she posts that “anyone retweeting it or discussing it is a paid mole”. She doesn’t make it quite clear what ‘it’ is, but we can guess. I’m not sure if she understands that moles are usually within your organisation rather than criticising from afar, but that’s the least of her worries now.Walker then respondsthat he’d like to know who is paying her detractors, because they’d all like to know who to invoice.
It’s all very petty and not very serious. I find it deeply entertaining to watch anybody beef on Twitter, of course, just because I’m messy and I love spectating people’s arguments. In this case, however, there is a clearly correct side and a wrong side, and I regret to inform the masses that Nicki Minaj is extremely wrong for this.
Capitalism Strikes Again
For one, Del’s argument that AI art makes campaigns look cheap is valid. It’s objectively true that people who see AI art being used in a campaign know that you’ve chosen to use a free engine that scrapes from existing artwork instead of paying to hire an actual artist. It’s not that Minaj, one of the most famous women in the world, can’t afford to hire artists to create promotional material: she just doesn’t care.
I’d be remiss not to mention that fans say this AI art might not have been created by her or her team – according to the replies to Walker, she was just sharing AI art generated by her fans. This isn’t stated in the original tweet, nor does she say it herself. I also can’t find the exact photos on Twitter and can’t prove who originally generated them, butthere’s definitely been a coordinated effort from the fanbase to post AI-generated images of ‘Gag City’since the announcement of her album Pink Friday 2. She is also the kind of artist who engages heavily with her fanbase, which is what made them so loyal in the first place. Reposting their images isn’t a stretch.
I’d usually be annoyed that she didn’t credit the original posters, but AI generators scrape from existing artists anyway – it’s not like the people who generated these images actually created them.
It’s very hypocritical to post this and call an artist concerned about the use of AI art a paid mole when she’s also made it clearshe doesn’t want people sharing AI-generated songs using her voice because she’s not getting paid. Apparently, she grasps the ethical issues of AI generation when it’s her voice being used without her permission, but it’s fine when it’s other people’s work getting ripped off to promote her work and make her money.
In the end, it all comes down to whether the ‘art’ can make her money or not. I’m not surprised. There are public figures I expect to have nuanced opinions on salient issues, and those I don’t. Historically, Minaj is more likely to clap back than she is to approach something with empathy and understanding. That’s beside the point. I’m more interested in the damage that gets done by stars who are happy to undermine creatives and encourage their huge fan bases to do the same.
While it does nobody any good to paint groups with a broad brush – there were plenty of Minaj’s fans in her comments sounding disappointed that she was posting AI art – it’s also a fact that stan culture has been wielded as a weapon by famous artists, creating huge online conflicts to drum up interest and draw attention. It’s all a game of getting as many eyes on a marketing campaign as possible. But normalising the use of AI art in one industry for profit can only backfire when it inevitably gets used in every other industry. The beef is funny, but the consequences are not.
