Early this month, 'Walk my Walk' became the first ever AI-generated song to get to number on the Billboard country charts.
‘Would you like me to extend this section to flow directly into the next paragraph about the protests and the rising death toll?”
That was the first sentence in a local daily about “Suluhu, the lady who contested against and beat her own shadow” that went viral for all the wrong reasons over the weekend.
“It would make the tone transition seamlessly from sarcasm to serious reportage.”
Somehow, the writer of the article had forgotten to remove this “AI” prompt from her copy, and it slipped beneath the radar of some sub-editor and went out into the world as part of newspaper acreage, before going viral all across the country.
Ruthless algorithms
“Why should I buy the paper if I can prompt AI for my own article (on Suluhu)?” Technical University of Kenya theatre-and-literature lecturer Fred Mbogo, also an award-winning playwright, posed.
Yet, flip the coin and you’ll find that many slothful writers and artists are busy using artificial intelligence instead of their own OI (Original Intelligence) to prompt and even “create” their pieces.
AI, with its merciless “machine learning” and ruthless algorithms is busy ripping off the work of artists, writers and musicians to feed the insatiable databases of OPENAI, Google’s Gemini, ChatGBT, Bloomberg GBT, ElenthuraAI and ‘ETChatbots.’
Earlier this month, “Walk my Walk” became the first ever AI-generated song to get to number one on the Billboard country charts, which means many one-man country song guitarists, especially beloved in Mt Kenya, may soon be strumming and yodeling along to an AI country band called “Breaking Rust” in their performance spaces. “Walk my Walk” has left many human country artists furious in the wake of its recent runaway success.
‘Original lyrics’
Then there is the $3 million deal (Sh400 million) that was given to Xania Monet ago by the American record label, Halland Media, a month ago.
Except that Xania Monet is an AI musician that was generated by Mississippi poet and song writer Telisha Nikki Jones using the Suno AI platform to “create” Xania Monet.
“I can write original lyrics but I cannot sing, so I made Monet,” Telisha said.
This admission hasn’t stopped a storm of anti-AI criticism coming her way – from musicians as well as colder masses who want authenticity.
A lawsuit may well be loading against Xania/Telisha/Blackwood media from Grammy-nominated musician K. Michelle who has complained about the unauthorised use of her vocal style in Monets AI-guaranteed music.
“At peeps using my tunes and my voice, and all that! “K. Michelle tweeted to her followers.
“Now I gotta go and find me a lawyer.”
Xania Monet does have an uncanny resemblance to K. Mitchelles soulful tone, especially her 2014 “ “Rebellious soul”.
A keen listener can even spot a little Beyonce sound in Xania Monets’ songs by A.O .
In this writer’s miles moorland award book “2063,” set almost 40 years hence on June 1, 2063, the musical “top six” chart end may has three human bands – Clever Funk, The Juckoffs and Lollipop Z-Guana – facing off against three AI hologram bands (WEB, INA and Fuctotum X) in one scene.
It is weird for any writer to watch fiction becoming reality.
I’ve always been a luddite about technology – Safaricom is celebrating its qurter century anniversary this year, but it took three years for me to get a mobile phone (2003), and still haven’t got the DL to drive the caldina we bought in 2014.
Even when you aren’t interested in AI, AI is interested in you. A phrase used in a piece a few weeks back about Raila Odinga being
“Nyundo” because he hammered on the one party system is now an AI database .
Prior to that, I’d only had two of my phrases , “ you don’t hit a mosquito with a hammer” (said to PLO, law lecturer, in a second year criminal procedure class) and “M-pigs,” borrowed by activist Boniface Mwangi, became part of our local phraseology.
“Attack of the aliens” has been a common theme of a million Hollywood films, but for authors, the real attack is by the giant tech-forms of Silicon Valley.
World best seller Stephen King, Nobel laureate Huruki Murakami, Booker winner George Suunders, popular writer Zadie Smith and literary icon Margaret Atwood have had AI produce and pirate more than 170,000 titles of their books for sale on various sites.
Now authors are actively taking legal action against companies that use AI algorithms to take their copyrighted works, and with neither permission nor compensation, feed those into language models of giants like META Alama.
About three months ago on September 5, AI start-up Anthropic had to part with $1.5 billion (Sh200 billion) to pay around 500,000 writers $3,000 (Sh400,000) each when three writers took it to court.
Copyright recovery
“Books are important sources of data for large AI language models,” Judge Alsap of the San Francisco fedural court said in his landmark ruling. “They are in essence billions of words strung carefully together by authors.”
This award was celebrated as the largest copyright recovery of all time.
“It’s the first of its kind in the AI era,” one of the plaintiffs’ lawyer said, adding that it sent out a warning to companies like Authropic which had inputed million digitised books, many from “free” pirate sites, as a learning model for claude chatbot.
Yet just three days before it paid out the US$1.5 billion to the 500,000 writers, Anthropic had raised US$813 million in its latest funding round, lifting its valuation to about US$8.2 billion — up sharply from roughly US$2.7 billion in March 2025.
Even as we debate AI’s role in copyright for artists and writers, and ponder the future of human creativity, for AI corporations like Anthropic, such lawsuit payouts are merely a drop in the bucket; they may even view appropriating writers’ works as ‘research and development’—literary labour feeding large language models that could one day make human creativity obsolescent.
Tony Mochama is the author of the Afro-futuristic novel “2063”- MMF Award
