Arooj Aftab on AI music: 'It is going to use your music to make AI music', pay artists

Grammy-winning Pakistani singer Arooj Aftab has added her voice to the musicians’ fight over artificial intelligence. In two Instagram stories this week she argued that artists should be paid twice: once when an AI system trains on their recordings, and again when it uses what it learnt to make new songs, The Express Tribune reported.

What did Arooj Aftab say?

The first story shared a campaign message calling for AI-generated music to be clearly labelled by everyone in the chain, from software makers and record labels to studios, distributors and shops, so listeners can tell what a human made. Her caption was blunt: “Even if you don’t use AI to make music - it is going to use your music to make AI music!!” She followed it with: “So let’s get the rules right and get on with it.”

In the second story she made the money argument. “The artist should be paid bec AI has already used my music to train itself, aka usage,” she wrote, adding that any new music an AI produces from that learning is “derivative work” that should pay the original artist too.

Whose campaign is this?

Both messages came from United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW), a US union for people who work in music. UMAW is pushing the Living Wage for Musicians Act, a bill first introduced in the US Congress in 2024 by Representative Rashida Tlaib. The bill would create a fund, paid for by streaming services, that pays recording artists directly, with a stated aim of at least one cent per stream, according to UMAW and DJ Mag. It has not become law.

Why this matters for Pakistani musicians

Arooj Aftab is one of the few Pakistani artists with real weight in the global industry: she won a Grammy in 2022 for Mohabbat and has toured worldwide. When she speaks about pay, international audiences and the industry listen.

The issue is not abstract for artists here either. Pakistani music now travels mostly through YouTube and streaming platforms, and the same AI tools being trained on Western catalogues can learn from Pakistani songs too. Labelling and consent rules decided in the US and Europe are likely to shape what happens to everyone else’s music.

The bigger fight

She is not alone. In 2024 more than 13,000 artists, including ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, signed a statement against the unlicensed use of human-made music to build AI. In February 2025 more than 1,000 musicians, Kate Bush among them, released a silent album to protest proposed UK copyright changes, the Tribune noted.

Aftab has not announced any action of her own beyond the posts. The next thing to watch is whether the Living Wage for Musicians Act moves in Congress, and whether streaming platforms adopt clear AI labels.