How Mary J. Blige Got Dragged by Fans for a Suno AI Deal She Never Made

Adario Strange
Sept. 4, 2026

🎤 Suno Reverses, Mary J. Blige Has No ‘Real Love’ For AI

1. Despite music industry heavyweights like Dr. Dre embracing AI, many music fans are still not on board, and generative AI music platform Suno was reminded of that this week. The company circulated a brief video ad that featured singer Mary J. Bligeseemingly approving of the AI music generated by Suno. In the video clip, Blige is shown in a music studio being shown how Suno works to duplicate her vocal style, and she responds, “This is pretty dope.”

The response on social media and in the music media was swift and harsh, with many criticizing her support of AI music. The only problem is that Blige never agreed to promote Suno’s AI product. “We entered into a business deal with someone who presented themselves as Ms. Blige’s official representative,” a Suno spokesperson toldVariety. “As soon as we learned this was not the case, and that Ms. Blige was uncomfortable, we terminated the advertising campaign.”

Reality Check: Suno is currently banking $300 million in revenue and boasting around 2 million users. AI music has flooded Spotify, prompting some high-profile music artists like Timbaland, to begin using AI to produce their own music. When Timbaland announced his partnership with Suno in 2024 and launched his AI artist Tata in 2025, he was widely mocked by music insiders and fans alike. And while tastes change quickly in this social media era, it seems that—at least for now—most music fans still want their music produced by humans, and if AI is involved, they don’t want to know about it. I suspect, as with movies, a lot of attitudes on this topic may change when the first major music and film production becomes a hit and is revealed to have been created via the heavy use of AI tools. It’s not a matter of if, but when.

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🎬 Gal Gadot Is Scared of AI

2. “I absolutely did not want the AI to have anything to do with my performance. So we had to protect that. By the way, to an extent that SAG had called my lawyers to ask for pointers to update the SAG contract to protect other actors. So as far as the performances, for me, it’s all me. I’m afraid of AI, but I am gonna be afraid and look away? No. I am afraid, but I am playing with it and learning it and trying to educate myself with it because I think that the train has left the station. It’s either you’re gonna [work with it] or be out of the game completely. So I’m trying to make the best of it and protect what I can protect. But the AI component in this movie was for sets and for the lighting. We still had a very broad crew and a lot of people were working on this film. Essentially, the experience that I had was as if we were doing theater.”
—Gal Gadot, actress, Wonder Woman, on filming Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi
*Source: Happy Sad Confused Podcast

🎨 ArtStation Tries to Calm Artists’ AI Complaints

3. From the very start of AI’s commercial rise, around 2022, the most heated debates around generative AI have been in the visual artist community. Many artists went from making fun of how generative AI had trouble producing realistic hands to waging all-out war against AI companies and AI users as the hands, and nearly every other generative AI aesthetic, were fixed, gradually putting an untold number of human artists out of work.

The debate around whether generative AI art should be allowed to live next to traditional art continues, but at least one artist hub is attempting to address the concerns of anti-AI artists. This week, ArtStation, which hosts the online artwork of roughly 10 million artists, announced new protections against AI.

“ArtStation is making protection against AI training the default. Artists should not have to opt in to ask us to safeguard their work,” the website’s team stated on its website. “We’re working with Cloudflare, using their bot-management and AI crawler tools to proactively identify and block known AI crawlers and automated scraping activity before they can access ArtStation content at scale. We’re updating ArtStation’s existing NoAI tag setting so it is enabled by default for new projects, making clear that your work may not be used for AI training unless you choose to turn it off.”

Too Little, Too Late: The problem with this update from ArtStation is twofold. First of all, it’s about five years too late. All the scraping needed to train some of the most widespread generative AI models, both commercial and open source, has already occurred. The AI art genie is already out of the bottle. Attempting to shove an opt-in cork into that bottle in 2026 isn’t particularly meaningful to the artist community in general. Second, ArtStation still allows AI-generated art to sit alongside any other art on the platform. Many artists complain that the flood of AI-generated art on ArtStation essentially crowds out non-AI art, or at best makes it harder to find.

Of course, there’s the stance by some that AI is merely another digital tool. The thinking being that those who use it only to enhance their work (like Photoshop, for example), rather than do all the work for them, are difficult to differentiate from those posting fully AI-generated images. Differentiating between the two is currently nearly impossible. In my view, this nuance in provenance and methodology explains ArtStation’s decision to allow AI art on the platform. However, this has also fueled other platforms like Cara, which has completely banned all AI art. It’s difficult to predict whether this friction against AI art is permanent or a transitional phase that leads to eventual audience and client indifference regarding the AI-or-no-AI origin of their art consumption.

🎭 George Clooney’s AI Predictions

4. “[AI is] going to hurt us in a lot of ways. If you’re a visual effects supervisor, you’re going to have trouble coming up because that’s going to be a lot of jobs taken away. Probably about 30 percent of the jobs. I don’t know what the real number is, but there’s going to be a big number of jobs that are going to be taken away, and we’re kind of on our back foot on it. We’re not taking the lead on it… [As for AI deepfakes] Well, I would like to avoid being in a tampon commercial 20 years after I’m dead. I would like to avoid that.”
—George Clooney, actor, Ocean’s Eleven, Gravity
*Source: Variety

RANT!
🦜 What Lanterns Teaches Us About AI & Creativity

HBO’s Lanterns, based on the DC Comics series Green Lantern, is officially a hit, with positive fan ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, and the social media hive mind. Even Google has gotten in on the act: If you enter the search term “HBO Lanterns” or “Lanterns (TV series),” a green bird (a reference to John Stewart’s ring-created bird from episode two) flies across the screen. Yes, there are the usual anti-woke review podcasters on YouTube slamming the show for talking about racial politics too much, but overall, everyone can see that this is the best version of “what if True Detectiveintroduced superpowers?” we could ever hope for.

But something [SPOILER ALERT] from episode three spoke to me on another level. During the episode, a Guardians recruiter approaches Stewart to enter the Green Lantern Corps. Part of the test to see if he has the mind to create a vast array of objects using the Green Lantern ring (if you have no idea what this means, here’s your cheat sheet) is having Stewart draw the building they’re in from his memory. He sketches the building perfectly and is invited to his next test. As a former art school student, the scene resonated with me deeply. The ability to imagine things and then render them is, in my mind, a kind of superpower, even if the final result is just a drawing, painting, or sculpture.

Aaron Pierre as John Stewart in a scene from HBO’s *Lanterns*.

Like Green Lantern’s ring, generative AI allows anyone to render images and video of nearly anything with just a prompt. But in the real world, that prompt requires no internal imagination or talent. As a result, the human superpower of imagination rendering things into reality is often artificially muted. Sure, some will argue that generative AI is just another tool, and that those with true talent will produce far more impressive images and videos compared to those just randomly prompting images into existence. Maybe that’s true, we’ll know for sure in the next 5-10 years.

Nevertheless, the Lanterns scene reminded me of our ineffable human ability to manifest our unique ideas into the real world with the power of our imagination. Others might opine that the fictional Green Lantern ring is just a different kind of generative AI, allowing any user to create anything they can imagine. If that’s true, then why give Stewart the drawing test? Why test his imagination?

The answer is that technically anyone can slip on the Green Lantern ring (or, AI), but only those with the requisite psychological profile, willpower, and imagination can really make it produce wonders. But if the person wielding the ring, or AI, has no other self-derived practice in the realm of imagination, what novel or fantastic things can they produce beyond the most pedestrian creations? I think this is the fundamental tension many of us are grappling with right now regarding generative AI. Everyone can see the power of generative AI, but only those already tapped into the power of human imagination understand that it shouldn’t mean the end of doing the cognitive work that distinguishes unremarkable “things” from transcendent “art.” ✍︎