Beyoncé

Beyoncé Knowles-Carter (born 1981 in Houston) went from Destiny’s Child to the most decorated artist in Grammy history — 35 awards, capped by the long-withheld Album of the Year for Cowboy Carter in 2025. She is famously interview-averse and controls her image as tightly as any star alive, which makes her few words about AI carry unusual weight.

Choosing real instruments

Beyoncé’s clearest statement was a production choice, not a soundbite. Announcing Cowboy Carter in March 2024, her official press release framed the album as a turn away from the machine: “The more I see the world evolving the more I felt a deeper connection to purity. With artificial intelligence and digital filters and programming, I wanted to go back to real instruments.” On an album already about reclaiming Black musicians’ work from appropriation, the rejection of AI and algorithmic processing was deliberate — she spent the money and the studio time to keep humans in the loop.

The voice everyone wants to clone

When “Texas Hold ’Em” hit No. 1 in February 2024, AI-generated covers — her cloned voice singing other songs, other voices singing hers — spread across TikTok nearly as fast as the original, a problem Axios flagged as the new tax on every hit. In her September 2024 GQ cover story, she added that an AI song had imitated her closely enough to scare her, and that it had become impossible to truly know what is real.

The enforcement runs through her label. In March 2026, at the launch of the IFPI’s Global Music Report, Sony Music disclosed it had targeted more than 135,000 AI “deepfake” tracks for removal from streaming platforms, naming Beyoncé — alongside Queen and Harry Styles — among the most-impersonated artists on its roster. Her likeness is abused well beyond music: in 2025, deepfaked videos of her appearing to praise Burkina Faso’s junta leader circulated in West Africa. Like Taylor Swift, she ranks among the most-deepfaked people on earth — a status neither woman sought and both have publicly named as a fear.