‘Someone take AI away from Nicki’
Remember Gag City? Last December, Nicki Minaj’s fans flooded social media with AI-generated images of a Barbie-pink metropolis in anticipation of the rapper’s new album Pink Friday 2. Arguably the biggest AI meme of the year next to Balenciaga Pope and Trump’s mugshot, Gag City, the fake utopia ruled by Minaj and her Barbz, went so viral that users began sharing hilarious images of celebrities like Ariana Grande and Trisha Paytas pulling up to Minaj’s kingdom. Even brands like Pizza Hut and Oreo jumped onto the meme bandwagon, which is obviously cringe, but nevertheless a win for Minaj, whose Pink Friday 2 is now the fastest album by a female rapper to surpass one billion streams on Spotify.
But it turns out that it’s not easy being queen. Earlier this week, Minaj’s fans took to social media to air their frustration after the rapper shared a selection of her own AI-generated images to promo her latest single “Press Play” – a collaboration between her and Future. The images in question? An all-pink Rolex, a Rolls Royce and (my personal favourite) a bedazzled iPod with the words ‘manio’ and ‘nail’. Eager stans familiar with the rapper’s lore could point out that the images are clearly a response to Gag City – it’s the same cringe, soulless and hyper-realistic art that looks like it’s come straight out Midjourney’s text-to-image generator. But that hasn’t stopped others from criticising Minaj’s attempts at self-promo. “Someone take AI away from Nicki” said one comment. Another, which reads “When the richest ppl can’t be bothered to pay artists anymore to make their ads who is”, has over 2,000 likes.
It’s a sad day when one of the biggest (and richest) female rappers of all time decides to shamelessly churn out boring AI images to promote their newest release, especially when said rapper has previously made claims such as the viral, “I hate lazy people”. Joining the lineage of Celebrities Who Make Bad Art along with the likes of Britney Spears and Brad Pitt, Minaj’s foray into the artistic wasteland of poorly generated images could, too, be interpreted as laziness. And given the last album’s commercial success, it’s unlikely that she’s strapped for cash. What’s more, haters could say that Minaj is using AI for her financial gain. By engaging in the hyperrealistic mimicry of human creativity, she’s taking away jobs from the actual artists, whose artworks are likely training its datasets. When you consider all the young cash-strapped creatives trying to make imaginative work against all odds, Minaj’s efforts feel particularly mediocre.
OK hold up. Record scratch. Isn’t this all just a play on Gag City? Well, yes, it probably is – in which case, why the drama? To some extent, there shouldn’t be – chances are we’ve all shared an AI image onto IG at some point in the past year, though there’s obviously a big difference between a casual internet poster and a mega-celebrity with millions of followers and big-money brand deals. Surely, Nicki just wanted to show solidarty to her Barbz by joining in on the joke? But just like brands using AI art as an edgy way to sell products is cringe, so, too, is using it to sell records. The reason why many stans turned to crappy AI art in the first place is because it’s free and easy – this of course plays into the campness of the gag. In contrast, Minaj has already profited massively from Gag City’s viral meme machine – to play by the same rules, and share unoriginal content made by a bot, comes across as disappointing.
Then again, the problem isn’t that Minaj is using AI to create artwork. It’s that the art is bad. As Hito Steyerl writes in his essay ‘Mean Images’, AI-generated art converges “around the average, the median; hallucinated mediocrity”. To create an AI artwork that appears even remotely compelling takes time and effort – in short, simply pressing ‘generate’ doesn’t really cut it. But isn’t all press good press? For all its viral hype, Minaj has clearly got us all talking – and maybe that’s the real gag.