The AI song Bette Midler called cultural genocide is 'Celebrate Me' by IngaRose

Bette Midler posted a black card to Instagram on Friday, August 21, 2026, attacking an AI-generated song she never named. “THIS SONG, CURRENTLY ON THE CHARTS, IS AI GENERATED,” it opened, and closed on the hashtag #culturalgenocide. The song is “Celebrate Me” by IngaRose, an act built with Suno.

If you came here trying to work out whether IngaRose is a real singer, the short answer is no. There is no performing vocalist behind the name.

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It's a good song, created and sung by a machine that stole every lick, every riff, every thought, phrasing style, every choke in the voice, every sorrowful sound from thousands of human artists since the beginning of recorded music, with zero compensation for the artists on whom they trained the machine.

Who is IngaRose, and how AI is “Celebrate Me”

IngaRose surfaced in April 2026 and went straight to number 1 on the US iTunes chart, the global iTunes chart, and the charts in several other countries. Showbiz411 traced the project to a producer working out of Greenville, South Carolina. The act now has more than 315,000 followers on TikTok.

The act’s own Instagram bio makes a narrower claim than Midler’s post does. It says the lyrics are human-written and come from real stories, and that the stems and arrangements are refined using Suno. Nobody outside the project can verify the split, and IngaRose has not published the working files, so the claim sits unaudited.

The song itself is a soul-leaning survival anthem. “Ain’t nobody clapping for me so I’m clapping for myself,” the vocal goes, before landing on “Oh, I celebrate me, for everything I survived.” An AI act singing about staying alive is the detail people keep catching on, and it’s the reason the track travels.

Tyrese Gibson turned the comment section into the actual argument

Midler’s post drew the two camps into one thread. Tyrese Gibson, six-time Grammy nominee, took the other side in public. “AI isn’t going anywhere,” he wrote, said the song had moved him personally, and threw down a challenge: “What HUMAN writer and SINGER IS gonna write a song that’s better than this??”

Natasha Bedingfield lined up with Midler and said the vocal reminded her of Olivia Dean. That reads as a listener’s impression, and neither Bedingfield nor anyone else has produced evidence of a specific voice being modelled. Treat it as an unproven claim until someone shows the training set.

The chart-eligibility rules are still catching up to acts like this. The majors’ AI-assisted definitions and River Cain’s iTunes run show how much of the argument now happens on the charts rather than in a courtroom. Xania Monet’s Hallwood record deal is the version where the human behind the persona is named up front.

Platforms are moving faster than the discourse. IngaRose is exactly the profile Spotify’s AI Persona badge was built to flag from mid-September, and Apple Music’s “Made With AI” tag will depend on whoever distributes the track ticking the box. On the other side of the same week, Dr. Dre said he uses AI in his own studio work and called the fear a creativity problem.