I saw a headline recently that made me laugh out loud. It's from Christianity Today, and it reads, “The Current No. 1 Christian Artist Has No Soul.” The piece is all about an AI-generated gospel artist, Solomon Ray, reaching the top of the Christian music charts. Get it now? It’s pretty hilarious. 

The AI artist Solomon Ray has an entire persona. He’s a “Mississippi-made soul singer carrying a Southern soul revival into the present,” according to his Spotify bio. He’s also got more than 324,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. He is also really attractive and well-dressed in the videos posted to Instagram of him singing. Also, his songs are good, and that scared me. 

So I set out this week to ask more questions about AI music and figure out why it seems so ascendant this year. Because Solomon is not alone. AI artists have been topping the country and R&B charts in 2025. Super producer Timbaland even created his own AI singer. And singer Khelani spoke out late this year against an AI R&B singer who just got a $3 million record deal. 

In the middle of an interview with TIME Magazine correspondent Andrew R. Chow — all about AI music’s rise — I found out that for weeks, I had been duped by AI music myself. My jaw dropped to the floor when I found out the most popular song on the viral Internet right now, “We Are Charlie Kirk,” was made by AI. I know/hope/pray I am not alone in being deceived. You can check out this Tuesday’s episode to hear my jaw drop, and stay for more on AI and how it’s changing music as we know it. (Spoiler alert: the labels aren’t helping, and the streamers really aren't either!)

But I’d like to stop here and ask for your take on AI in 2025. AI music, AI actors, AI videos. All of it. I’m taping a year-in-review episode next week, and AI will be a big topic of discussion. I really think 2025 is the year we all took a turn with artificial intelligence. It became a nonstop news story. It took over the stock market and the Internet. It changed the way we search online. And the real-world infrastructure needed to keep AI afloat began to show cracks. 

What did AI mean to you in 2025? Respond to this email and let me know, and I’ll try to fold in y’all’s thoughts to the conversation we tape next week. 

And if you’re looking for something *real* to cleanse the palette after all that, I recommend our second episode from this week: my chat with two-time Oscar-winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter. She’s behind the looks of classic films like Malcolm X, Do The Right Thing, and *both* Black Panthers. She also costumed her first horror film this year: the mega-hit Sinners. We talked about how she had to introduce blood into her costumes for the first ever with this movie, and why that was maybe just as hard as making all the sweat the film also required. It’s an illuminating chat, and it’s all about things that are real, not artificial. 

Have a great weekend, everyone.

– Sam

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