Alt-Pop Trickster 1010Benja Is Not Scared to Admit He’s Using Generative AI
“If you have it broken down as organic versus AI, the AI is gonna win our world. The good guy doesn’t win this one.”
When I reach 1010Benja on the phone, he’s just blocked someone who blew up at him online because of his use of generative AI. “He was going crazy,” Benja says of the irate listener. “He said I was destroying art.” Benja sighs. “I just wish he could understand it from the perspective of an artist: I was born into a world where art was destroyed, and yet it persists.”
The Kansas City, Missouri musician has received several disgruntled messages since he released his latest EP, Time Has Nothing to Do With What You Choose, last month. To make the EP, Benja and a few of his longtime friends wrote and recorded original, organic vocals, beats, and instrumentation, and then used gen-AI tools like Suno to augment, subvert, and generally fuck with those recordings. The results are often too odd—and, to be honest, too genuinely mesmerizing—to simply be dismissed as “slop.” Instead, this music comes from a liminal creative space that artists are just beginning to explore, and that listeners are only starting to wrap their heads around.
“Semiramis’ Dream,” a highlight from the EP, is a cloudburst of drum’n’bass, hyperpop, and shapeshifting vocals. Some of the singing comes courtesy of an uncanny children’s choir; then there’s Benja’s all-too-human voice at the center of the song, pleading lines like, “Kissing you makes me feel clean!” It’s the first song created with gen AI to capture my imagination, and I’m afraid it’s not the last.
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