Bette Midler used an Instagram post to attack "Celebrate Me", the R&B anthem credited to the AI singer IngaRose, arguing that a machine trained on generations of human vocalists without paying them had produced it. She described it as a good song made from the phrasing and emotion of thousands of uncredited singers, and labelled the practice "cultural genocide".
The track was built with Suno and reached the top of the US iTunes chart, among others, in April; IngaRose has more than 315,000 TikTok followers. The act's own Instagram says the lyrics are written by people and drawn from real experiences, with Suno used to shape stems and arrangements. It also has a visual persona, a woman who appears in its TikTok and YouTube posts.
Most commenters sided with Midler, and Natasha Bedingfield said the vocal seemed to borrow heavily from Olivia Dean. Tyrese Gibson disagreed, saying AI is here to stay, that complaints only feed the song's popularity, and that it had moved him personally. He challenged human writers to do better rather than complain, naming Andra Day as the last real artist who had inspired him that way.
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