The Dictatorship

Why this R&B hit is causing alarm in the music industry

Published

5 months ago

November 8, 2025

Why this R&B hit is causing alarm in the music industry

Months ago, a musician named Xania Monet went viral on TikTok with a song called “How Was I supposed to Know?” In short videos, women in plaid shirts mouthed along to its mournful chorus under captions that read: “Pov: you found that one song that speaks for your soul.” Three-year-olds in the back seat of cars fumbled their way through its lyrics about growing up without a dad and falling in love with the wrong men. Listeners wept, alone in bathrooms.

There is no Xania Monet. She is a digital avatar created by a 31-year-old woman named Telisha Nikki Jones.

“How Was I supposed to Know?” made its way to radio, rose up the charts and just landed at No. 30 on the Billboard Adult R&B Airplay chart. Its success prompted Billboard to run an article marking the historic moment:

“The first known instance of an AI-based act to earn a spot on a Billboard radio chart.”

There is no Xania Monet. She is a digital avatar created by a 31-year-old woman named Telisha Nikki Jones from small-town Mississippi. Jones, an affable entrepreneur and a self-described creatorhas been writing poems since she was 24, and about four months ago she began teaching herself how to use artificial intelligence tools such as CapCut and fal.ai to create a digital persona. She uploaded her poems to an app called Suno, which set them to music. Other than Jones’ words, everything — from Monet’s voice to the melody it sang to the piano chords accompanying it — was computer-generated. Jones began to share the songs.

In short order, she was famous. Or Xania Monet was. Soon, Jones had a $3 million record dealprompting some human musicians — including R&B stalwarts Get down and SZA — to cry foul. But Jones sees the whole situation in historical terms.

“Anytime something new comes about and it challenges the norm and challenges what we’re used to, you’re going to get strong reactions behind it,” Jones told Gayle King this week on “CBS Mornings.” “And I just feel like AI — it’s the new era that we’re in. And I look at it as a tool, as an instrument. Utilize it.”

We tend to associate fears of replacement-by-machine with industrial laborers. But music has been central to the story of automation for a long time.

In the late 19th century, the invention of the the player piano — a self-playing instrument, programmed via something that resembled an early computer punch card — changed the industry. Player pianos were such a symbol of the threat of automation that in 1952, when Kurt Vonnegut wrote his famous novel about an automated society, he called it “Player Piano.”

Anytime something new comes about and it challenges the norm and challenges what we’re used to, you’re going to get strong reactions behind it.”

TELISHA NIKKI JONES

Musicians feared their livelihood would be threatened by recorded music. John Philip Sousa — he of the famous Sousa marches — was so alarmed he published a polemic in Appleton’s Magazine called “The Menace of Mechanical Music.”

“Sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang or Panama hats,” Sousa wrote, hopelessly dating himself, “comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song or play for us a piano, in substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul.”

Sousa was, in large part, writing to advocate that royalties from recordings — “mechanical rights” — should be paid to musicians. But he also worried that the phonograph, among other machines, would lead to “a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations.” To drive the point home, the article was accompanied by cartoons, one of which depicted a baby crying as a phonograph blared in its ear. Nobody tell him about Spotify’s “White Noise Baby Sleep” playlist.

Sousa’s screed was an early entry in what became an increasingly common modern genre. Every time a new music machine was invented — like, say, a synthesizer — the musicians union would oppose it. People like me would write articles like this decrying it, and users like Telisha Nikki Jones would explain that it’s a tool, an instrument, like any other. Then, 10 years later, the change would be so widespread that nobody really could remember what the fuss was all about.

If you, like me, are happy that we live in a world of recorded sound, then you may be tempted to think the mainstreaming of AI music is — much like the phonograph — no big deal. Or a big deal that we can and should metabolize.

I would like, though, to do my best Sousa impression and argue the opposite.

Tools like Suno have effectively recycled the work of musicians in the past without their permission, let alone their participation.

In her TV appearance, Jones shows King how she makes a song — pasting in the words of one of her poems and typing in a series of prompts: “Slow-tempo, rnb, deep female soulful vocals, light guitar, heavy drums.” And then she hits create and is presented with two finished recordings. It is perhaps for this reason that Monet’s first album, made in just a few months, has 24 songs on it.

It’s worth keeping in mind that all of this is only possible because, as per Suno’s court filings in response to a lawsuit filed by Universal Music Group, Capitol Records, Sony Music, Atlantic Records, Warner Music and the Recording Industry Association of America, Suno was trained on “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet.” Tens of millions of recordings, many lifetimes’ worth of creative labor, hidden beneath the create button.

Up until now, the dominant music technologies have been about music capture and reproduction. They do make it easier to make music, but someone has still always needed to compose that music, even if it takes fewer and fewer people to record a song. AI music obviates that need, and it accomplishes this because tools like Suno have effectively recycled the work of musicians in the past without their permission, let alone their participation. And, perversely, it could lead to such a glut of music that the economies of listening would be increasingly unfriendly to human-made songs.

This is what concerns me most. The vast majority of AI-generated music will be bland and enervating. But in our overwhelming media ecosystem, some people may just stop caring. Spotify has already been caught replacing real bands with fake ones to avoid paying royalties on streamed music via its Perfect Fit Content program. Many of us let algorithms dictate what we hear next, as they guide us through a never-ending stream of background music we have never heard before, will never hear again and are slowly becoming inured to entirely. Under the circumstances, who’s going to notice if that music is being generated, rather than curated, by an AI?

There is something unsettling about Billboard’s announcement of Monet’s historic achievement. It’s hedged. The publication calls “How Was I supposed to Know?” the “first known instance of an AI-based act to earn a spot on a Billboard radio chart.” It’s a “potentially historic development.”

It becomes clear that the famed charts have absolutely no faith that they can tell whether or not a song made by AI has come their way before. The difference here is that Jones has disclosed it.

“I literally was crying in my bathroom to your music,” one commenter wrote on Jones’ Facebook page. “And then I found it was AI.”

How were they supposed to know?

Ben Naddaff-Hafrey

Ben Naddaff-Hafrey is a writer and senior producer at Pushkin Industries, where he appears on Revisionist History and The Last Archive. You can follow his newsletter here.

The Dictatorship

TSA lines worsen as airports face mounting strain…

Published

16 hours ago

March 24, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

TSA lines worsen as airports face mounting strain…

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s decision to order federal immigration agents to U.S. airports to help with security during a budget impasse is drawing concerns that their presence may escalate tensions among air travelers frustrated over hourslong waits and screeners angry about missed paychecks.

Trump made clear on Sunday that he was going ahead with the plan to have immigration enforcement officers assist the Transportation Security Administration by guarding exit lanes or checking passenger IDs unless Democrats agreed to fund the Department of Homeland Security. Democrats are demanding major changes to federal immigration operations and showing no sign of backing down.

Hundreds of thousands of homeland security workersincluding from the TSA, U.S. Secret Service and Coast Guard, have worked without pay since Congress failed to renew DHS funding last month.

“Bad idea,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, about the new airport security plan, which Trump said would start Monday.

“What we need to do is, we need to get the DHS issues resolved, we need to get the TSA agents paid,” she told reporters at the Capitol, where the Senate held a rare weekend session. “Do you really want to have even additional tensions on top of what we are already facing?”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs speaks at the oversight hearings to examine federal policies governing Indian water rights settlements, including S.953, to provide for the settlement of the water rights claims of the Navajo Nation, the Hopi Tribe, and the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, March 11, 2026, in Washington, (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Senators advanced the nomination of Sen. Markwayne MullinR-Okla., to be Trump’s next homeland security secretary by a largely party-line vote, 54-37, with two Democrats joining most Republicans. A vote on the confirmation could come as early as Monday. Mullin has tried to make the case that he would be a steady hand after the tumultuous tenure of Kristi Noem, Trump’s first DHS secretary.

Border czar heads up airport security effort

White House border czar Tom Homan, named by Trump to lead the new airport security effort, has also been meeting with a bipartisan group of senators over the partial shutdown. While he characterized those sessions as “good conversations,” he said they were “not at a point yet where we’re in total agreement.”

Meanwhile, Homan said in Sunday news show interviews that the increased role of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at airports — its specific duties and numbers — was subject to discussions with the leadership of TSA and ICE. DHS spokeswoman Lauren Bis said “hundreds” of ICE officers would be deployed, but she would not disclose the airports where they would go, citing security reasons.

“It’s a work in progress,” Homan said. The priority, he said, was “the large airports where there’s a long wait, like three hours.”

White House border czar Tom Homan enters the U.S. Senate on Capitol Hill on Friday, March 20, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Tom Brenner)

Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens issued a statement Sunday night saying officers from ICE and Homeland Security Investigations would be deployed to the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport starting Monday morning.

At the airport on Sunday, some travelers waited in line for nearly six hours at the main security checkpoint, where only two TSA agents were on hand midafternoon to check IDs. Many missed their flights and scrambled to book later flights or add themselves to standby lists that were already dozens of names long.

Dickens said all federal personnel would report to TSA and be assigned tasks such as line management and crowd control. “Federal officials have indicated that this deployment is not intended to conduct immigration enforcement activities,” his statement said.

Homan said immigration officers, as an example, could cover exits currently monitored by TSA agents, freeing them to work screening lines. Another option, he said, was having ICE agents check identification before people enter screenings areas.

“We’re going to be a force multiplier,” Homan said, while also acknowledging there were limits.

“I don’t see an ICE agent looking at an X-ray machine, because we’re not trained in that,” he said. He pledged to have “a plan by the end of today, where we’re sending — what airports we’re starting with and where we’re sending them.”

But Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 50,000 TSA employees, condemned Trump’s plan, saying in a statement that ICE agents are not trained or certified in aviation security.

“Our members at TSA have been showing up every day, without a paycheck, because they believe in the mission of keeping the flying public safe,” Kelley said Sunday. “They deserve to be paid, not replaced by untrained, armed agents who have shown how dangerous they can be.”

People wait in a TSA line at the John F. Kennedy International Airport, Sunday, March 22, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)

Budget talks stall as airport worries worsen

Democrats have said they are willing to fund TSA and most other parts of DHS as they press for changes to immigration operations after the deaths of two U.S. citizens at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis during an immigration enforcement operation. ICE officers are largely being paid during the partial shutdown, thanks to an influx of cash from Trump’s big tax breaks bill last year.

“There are lots of ideas swirling right now,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D. “The good news in all that is people realizing this has to get fixed, it has to get solved.”

As budget talks stayed behind closed doors Sunday, senators said they had few details of which airports or how many immigration officers were being dispatched. Some welcomed the effort.

“I don’t think it can hurt,” said Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D. “They can help relieve some of the pressure.”

Trump said in a social media post that on Monday, “ICE will be going to airports to help our wonderful TSA Agents who have stayed on the job” despite the partial government shutdown. He further criticized Democrats.

Travelers at some airports worried about reaching their gates Sunday.

At Atlanta’s airport, lines wrapped from one end of the airport to the other.

The scene appeared more chaotic at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. Large crowds of anxious travelers piled toward security checkpoints, and TSA staff shouted through megaphones to tell people not to push one another.

For Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, one concern is the uncertainty that passengers are facing over possible wait times at any airport on any given day.

“Do I have to come an hour and a half early? Do I have to come four hours early? They d on’t know until the day of or the afternoon of their flight,” he said. “So if we can alleviate that, again, the president wants to take away that leverage point for Democrats and make travel easier for the American people.”

Homan appeared on BLN’s “State of the Union” and “Fox News Sunday,” while Duffy was interviewed on ABC’s “This Week.’ ___

Associated Press writers Collin Binkley in West Palm Beach, Fla., Anthony Izaguirre in Lindenhurst, N.Y., Yuki Iwamura in New York, Nicholas Riccardi in Denver, Kate Brumback in Atlanta, Margery Beck in Omaha, Neb. and Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed to this report.

The Dictatorship

Trump’s shifting strategy on the Strait of Hormuz drives criticism

Published

16 hours ago

March 24, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Trump’s shifting strategy on the Strait of Hormuz drives criticism

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — At war with Iran, President Donald Trump is cycling through an increasingly desperate list of options as he searches for a solution to the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. He has jumped from calls to secure the waterway through diplomatic means to lifting sanctions and now escalating to a direct threat against civilian infrastructure in the Islamic Republic.

Trump and his allies insist they were always prepared for Iran to block the strait, yet the Republican president’s erratic strategy has fueled criticism that he is grasping for answers after going to war without a clear exit plan. On Saturday came his latest attempt, via an ultimatum to Iran: Open the strait within 48 hours or the United States will “obliterate” the country’s power plants.

Trump’s aides defended the threat as a hard-edged tactic to press Iran into submission. Opponents framed it as the failure of a president who miscalculated what it would take to get out of a geopolitical mire.

“Trump has no plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, so he is threatening to attack Iran’s civil power plants,” said Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass, adding: “This would be a war crime.”

“He’s lost control of the war and he is panicking,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., responding to Trump’s post.

Over the course of about a week, Trump has repeatedly shifted his approach on the crucial waterway for global oil and gas transport. There is growing urgency for Trump as soaring oil prices rattle global markets and pinch American consumers months before pivotal midterm elections.

Trump and diplomacy

Trump tried his hand at a diplomatic solution last weekend when he called for a new international coalition to send warships to the strait.

Allies turned him down. Trump then said the U.S. could manage on its own. On Friday he suggested other countries would have to take over as the U.S. eyes an exit. Hours later he indicated the waterway would somehow “open itself.”

“You can’t all of a sudden walk away after you’ve kind of created the event and expect other people to pick it up,” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C. told ABC’s “This Week.”

Trump’s Treasury Department on Friday made its latest attempt to get a handle on soaring gas prices, by lifting sanctions on some Iranian oil for the first time in decades. That relieved some of the pressure that Washington traditionally has used as leverage against Tehran.

The goal was to send millions more barrels of oil into the global market. It is not clear, however, how much of a dent that would make in lowering pump prices or how the administration could prevent Iran from cashing in on the renewed sales.

The administration earlier temporarily lifted sanctions on some Russian oil.

An ultimatum to Iran

Trump’s ultimatum, conveyed while he spent the weekend in Florida, carries a threat of remarkable aggression. His previous messaging mostly focused on U.S. success in hitting Iran’s air force, navy and missile production. This time, the threatened target is the energy infrastructure that powers hospitals, homes and more.

His social media post — 51 words, much of it in capital letters — did not have the appearance of a message that underwent the careful legal scrutiny needed to justify an attack on civilian infrastructure, said Geoffrey Corn, a law professor at Texas Tech University and a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army who served as a military lawyer.

“It certainly has a feeling of ready, fire, aim,” Corn said of Trump’s moving strategy.

“He overestimated his ability to control the events once he unleashed this torrent of violence.”

That type of widespread attack would probably be a war crime, Corn said. For military leaders, it could force a choice between obeying an order to carry out a war crime or refusing and facing criminal sanction for willful disobedience, he said.

Laws governing warfare do not explicitly forbid attacks on power plants, but the tactic is allowed only if an analysis finds that the military advantages outweigh the civilian harm, legal scholars say. It is seen as a high bar to clear because the rules of war are, at their core, designed to separate civilian and military targets.

Iran’s U.N. ambassador, in a letter to the Security Council, warned that the deliberate targeting of power plants would be inherently indiscriminate and a war crime, according to the state-run IRNA news agency.

The White House has already faced intense backlash after the U.S. was blamed for a missile strike on an Iranian elementary school that killed more than 165 people.

Trump aides justify latest attempt to rein in the crisis

Trump provided scant detail on which plants might be targeted and how. He gave Iran until Monday to reopen the strait or else the U.S. will strike “various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!”

Trump’s team came to his defense Sunday, offering justification for striking Iran’s energy grid.

Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Iran’s Revolutionary Guard controls much of the country’s infrastructure and is using it to power the war effort. He said potential targets include “gas-fired thermal power plants and other types of plants.”

Speaking on Fox News, Waltz said he wanted to get ahead of “hand-wringing” from the global community, calling the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. “The president is not messing around,” he said.

NATO’s secretary-general, Mark Rutte, who has allied himself closely to Trump, tried to calm tensions. He said he understood Trump’s anger and stressed that more than 20 countries are “coming together to implement his vision” of making the strait navigable as soon as possible.

Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Yechiel Leiter, cautioned against an all-out attack like the one Trump threatened. “We want to leave everything in the country intact, so that the people who come after this regime are going to be able to rebuild and reconstitute,” he told BLN’s ”State of the Union.”

Trump’s threat could prove counterproductive: If it’s carried out, Iranian leaders said they would completely close the strait and retaliate against U.S. and Israeli infrastructure.

___

Associated Press writer Seung Min Kim in Washington contributed to this report.

The Dictatorship

Trump and his border czar say ICE will arrive at airports on Monday

Published

2 days ago

March 23, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Mar. 22, 2026, 5:08 PM EDT

President Donald Trump and top administration officials said Sunday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will arrive at the nation’s airports on Monday to handle security at exceedingly long lines driven by a shortage of TSA workers.

“I look forward to moving ICE in on Monday, and have already told them to, ‘GET READY.’ NO MORE WAITING, NO MORE GAMES!” Trump said on Truth Social.

Tom Homan, the White House border czar who will lead the effort, provided few details but confirmed the plan on BLN’s “State of the Union,” saying, “It’s a work in progress, but we will be at airports tomorrow.” DHS spokesperson Lauren Bis said later that “hundreds of ICE officers” would be deployed to airports “adversely impacted,” but she did not specify which airports.

It was unclear whether ICE officers would be conducting pat-down procedures but Homan suggested their focus would be on security instead of screening. “A highly-trained ICE law enforcement officer can cover an exit, that relieves TSA to go to screening,” he said, adding that the priority will be on “those large airports where there’s a long wait, like three hours.”

DHS and ICE did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment on whether officers will be wearing masks at the airports to which they are deployed. But Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy suggested Sunday that Democrats are the reason why federal immigration and border officers wear masks.

“Democrats want ICE to take off their face masks. The problem with that is we know the Democrats are going to want to dox those ICE agents, go to their homes, harass their kids,” he said on ABC News.

The ongoing partial government shutdown, which began after funding for the Department of Homeland Security lapsedon Feb. 14, has forced Transportation and Security Administration workers to go unpaid —with hundreds of them quitting or not showing up for work, severely disrupting air travel.

Duffy said security lines will “get much worse” this week. He predicted more TSA agents will quit by Friday, when they’ll go without another paycheck unless lawmakers reach a deal.

Trump said on Saturday that ICE agents would “do Security like no one has ever seen before, including the immediate arrest of all Illegal Immigrants who have come into our Country, with heavy emphasis on those from Somalia.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, whose city has been ground zero for the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, said Sunday on MS NOW’s “The Weekend” that Trump “doesn’t actually mean that he’s going to keep people secure.”

“We all know that’s not the goal. The goal is to terrorize people,” Frey said. When asked if he thought the president was racist for his targeting of Somalis, the mayor said, “I think the answer is yes.”

Speaking on the Senate floor during a rare weekend session on Sunday, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., lambasted Trump’s plan to send ICE agents to airports, calling it “really disturbing.”

“It’s a plan that has no planning. It’s another impulsive action from Donald Trump,” Schumer said. “When he acts impulsively there’s usually trouble. Whenever Donald Trump acts impulsively with no follow through, there’s trouble.”

Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska also criticized Trump’s plan, saying that “air dropping” agents to airports is “not a fix.”

The Association of Flight Attendants said ICE officers lack the kind of specialized training that the TSA’s transportation security officers get. “Furthermore, the introduction of ICE agents into airports creates contradictory missions, as attempts to question passengers about immigration status may distract them from ensuring airport security,” the union said.

And Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employeesthe largest federal workers’ union, said, “More than 50,000 TSA employees have worked without pay for over five weeks. Hundreds have quit. And Washington’s answer isn’t to pay them. It’s to send ICE agents to do their jobs.”

Congress remains gridlocked over DHS funding, with Democrats demanding reforms to ICE operations after the fatal shooting of two U.S. citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti— in Minneapolis. Republicans have rejected proposalsto reopen much of Homeland Security, which includes TSA and ICE.

Airline executives from United Airlines, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines and others last week called on Congress to end the shutdownwriting in a joint letter that federal employees working without pay is “simply unacceptable.”

“This problem is solvable, and there are solutions on the table,” they wrote. “Now it’s up to you, Congress, to move forward on bipartisan proposals that will get federal aviation workers—including TSA officers, U.S. Customs clearance officers at airports and air
traffic controllers—paid during shutdowns.”

Mychael Schnell and Emily Hung contributed to this report.

Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.