FKA twigs
Musician
The avant-pop artist built her own authorized AI deepfake — trained on her voice and personality — and testified to the US Senate to demand rules against everyone else’s. Her line is explicitly “consent and control, not prohibition,” which lands her squarely between the camps.
In her words
AI cannot replicate the depth of my life journey, yet those who control it hold the power to mimic the likeness of my art, to replicate it and falsely claim my identity and intellectual property.
In the past year, I have developed my own deepfake version of myself that is not only trained in my personality, but also can use my exact tone of voice to speak many languages.
Biography
FKA twigs — Tahliah Debrett Barnett, born 1988 in Gloucestershire, England — is one of experimental pop’s defining auteurs: a dancer, director and producer whose albums LP1 (2014), Magdalene (2019) and Eusexua (2025) fuse avant-garde electronics with total control of image and movement. That control is the through-line of her AI politics.
Testifying with her own deepfake
On April 30, 2024, she appeared before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property alongside Warner Music CEO Robert Kyncl to support the NO FAKES Act, which would create federal protections against unauthorized AI replicas of a person’s voice and likeness. Her testimony’s twist made headlines: she had spent the previous year training “AI twigs,” a deepfake of herself intended to handle fan interaction and press in multiple languages so the human twigs could stay focused on art.
What is not acceptable is when my art and my identity can simply be taken by a third party and exploited falsely for their own gain without my consent due to the absence of appropriate legislative control.
Her position is therefore more precise than most in this archive: the technology is welcome in the artist’s own hands, and intolerable in anyone else’s without permission. She framed regulation as the mechanism that makes the difference enforceable.
Where they stand in the war
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/fka-twigs