If you thought the AI apocalypse would arrive in the form of a steel-skeletoned robot crushing a human skull under its hydraulic foot, you were giving humanity far too much credit. We aren’t worthy of a cinematic extinction. No, our technological singularity has arrived, and it is wearing sequins, screaming over a generic deep house beat, and terrified of irrelevance. Liza Minnelli, the 79-year-old icon of a bygone era where talent actually required lung capacity and emotional trauma, has released her first new music in thirteen years. And because we live in a timeline written by a vengeful god with a cruel sense of humor, it is an AI-generated dance track.

The track is titled “Kids, Wait Til You Hear This,” which sounds less like a song title and more like a threat issued by a slightly confused grandmother holding a captive audience at Thanksgiving. It is also, conveniently, the title of her upcoming memoir. Synergy, after all, is the only religion left in the West. Minnelli, whose voice was once capable of shaking the rafters of Carnegie Hall with raw, unadulterated human pain, has now reduced her output to “spoken declarations” over a “pumping backing.” It is difficult to articulate the profound spiritual exhaustion one feels when reading the phrase “Liza Minnelli foray into deep house.” It implies a cultural mashup so grotesque that it defies the laws of aesthetics. It is the audio equivalent of watching a hologram of Judy Garland perform a TikTok dance. It is undignified, it is bizarre, and it is exactly what we deserve.

Minnelli, in a press release that was almost certainly drafted by a PR agent trying to convince themselves they aren’t dead inside, heralded these algorithmic abominations as “new tools in service of expression.” Let us pause and deconstruct that euphemism. “New tools” is the polite way of saying “I no longer wish to hire a band, an arranger, or a producer with a pulse.” It is the concession that human collaboration is too messy, too expensive, and too slow for the modern attention span. “Service of expression” is even richer. What expression is being served here? The expression of a beat that can be generated by a teenager with a cracked copy of FL Studio in six minutes? The expression of a vocal track that sounds like it was preserved in formaldehyde? This isn’t expression; it is content. It is a slurry of data points arranged to resemble a song, designed to be consumed by algorithms that will push it onto playlists for people who are too medicated to notice that the soul has been excised from the music.

But Liza is not alone in this race to the bottom of the Uncanny Valley. The compilation also features Art Garfunkel, a man whose entire career was defined by the transcendent beauty of human harmony—specifically, harmonizing with another human being whom he famously hated. Now, Garfunkel has ditched the troublesome Paul Simon in favor of an AI-generated piano backing. Think about the profundity of that surrender. One of the greatest voices of the folk-rock era, a man who sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” is now crooning over a MIDI file generated by a neural network that has never felt sadness, joy, or the cold touch of rain. Why bother with a session pianist who might bring nuance or interpretive flair when you can have a sterile, mathematically perfect sequence of notes that costs nothing and never asks for a royalty check?

This entire project is emblematic of a culture that has completely lost the plot. We have confused “can” with “should.” We have confused “processing power” with “creativity.” The Left will likely praise this as a stunning example of an elderly icon embracing the future, a brave subversion of ageist norms. The Right will ignore it unless they can somehow blame the AI on wokeness. Both reactions miss the point. The point is that we are witnessing the voluntary obsolescence of the artist. When legends like Minnelli and Garfunkel decide that the organic interplay of musicians is superfluous, they are effectively signing the death warrant for their own craft.

There is something deeply grim about the fact that this is tied to a memoir. It suggests that this music isn’t art, but a bookmark. It is a promotional tool using the buzzword of the moment—Artificial Intelligence—to generate headlines. And it worked. Here we are, talking about it. But at what cost? We are replacing the sweat and grit of performance with the cold efficiency of code. We are trading the smoke-filled cabaret for the server farm. Liza Minnelli used to sing about life being a cabaret. Now, life is just a prompt typed into a text box, waiting for the machine to spit out something that vaguely resembles humanity, while we dance mindlessly to the pumping, soulless beat.