Cher

Cher (b. 1946, El Centro, California) is one of the few performers with an Oscar, a Grammy, an Emmy and a Cannes Best Actress award — a six-decade career running from “I Got You Babe” with Sonny Bono through Moonstruck to “Believe,” the 1998 hit whose pioneering use of Auto-Tune made her, ironically, an early face of voice-altering technology in pop.

“Somebody did me doing a Madonna song”

In an October 2023 Associated Press interview, Cher described her alarm at discovering an AI-generated clone of her voice covering a Madonna song: “Someone did me doing a Madonna song, and it was kind of shocking.” The imitation was imperfect — “they didn’t have it down perfectly” — but the principle enraged her: a lifetime spent building an artistic identity, taken without permission by whoever runs the model.

Her conclusion was blunt: unauthorized cloning of an artist’s voice and likeness “seems like it should be illegal.” The comments placed her alongside a wave of legacy artists demanding consent rights over AI replicas — the same fight Céline Dion waged against viral fake duets and that Nashville took to Congress with the NO FAKES Act.

Cher’s objection is to theft of identity, not studio technology as such — this is the artist who turned a vocoder effect into a signature. She has not campaigned against AI tools used with consent; her line is drawn where someone else profits from a synthetic Cher.