Zara Larsson

Zara Larsson (born 1997) won Sweden’s “Talang” at age ten and grew into one of Scandinavia’s biggest pop exports — “Lush Life” and the Clean Bandit collaboration “Symphony” made her a fixture of global charts, and she later bought back her master recordings and founded her own label, Sommer House.

The AI fruit drama

In March 2026 Larsson reposted videos from “Ai Fruit Stories,” a TikTok account producing AI-animated soap operas about anthropomorphic fruit, joking about the drama between characters named Chocolatina and Strawberto. Fans revolted, citing generative AI’s environmental cost and the flood of “AI slop” undercutting creative industries.

Rather than apologize, Larsson posted a response video standing her ground: “I am just a girl with a phone at the end of the day,” she said, clarifying that she does not use AI to make her music — “I don’t use it for my art. I don’t use it to create… But I do use ChatGPT, I’m sorry.” She predicted the technology would inevitably become cleaner — “It just has to use less water, less energy” — and concluded that she doesn’t ever see society going back to not using it. The clip went viral, with critics retorting that opting out of generative AI remains a choice.

Larsson’s stance is notable for its ordinariness: not an artist deploying AI in her work, but a major pop star refusing to perform contrition for consuming and using it — a rare public position in a music industry where Billie Eilish and hundreds of peers signed letters warning against AI.