By Nokulunga Maqubela
I’ll be honest.
I haven’t been able to stop listening to Still Where We Were.
It’s one of those albums that sneaks up on you. The kind that makes you replay songs because surely they can’t be that good on a first listen. The writing is thoughtful, the melodies stick, and the production is polished without feeling sterile.
It’s a really, really good album. And maybe that’s what makes this entire situation so disappointing. Not because AI was used, but because of how the conversation around it unfolded. We’ve spent the last few weeks arguing about whether AI belongs in music when I think we’ve been asking the wrong question: It already belongs, that ship has sailed.
The real question is: what do artists owe their audiences when they use it?
Credo initially downplayed AI’s role in his music, describing it as one of the many tools used during production. As public scrutiny grew, he later spoke more openly about the extent of AI’s involvement in his creative process, shifting the conversation from whether AI was used to “how much” it shaped the finished product. That’s not a small distinction, trust matters – especially in music.
Music has always sold us the idea that we’re connecting with another human being. We buy into the stories, the heartbreak, the vulnerability, the imperfections. Whether it’s gospel, amapiano, hip hop or indie folk, we’re buying into the person behind the record just as much as the record itself. So when audiences feel like information was withheld, the backlash is almost inevitable.
But here’s where I think South Africa missed something, or rather where Credo missed an opportunity. Imagine if he had walked into this conversation differently. Imagine if the album dropped with a documentary breaking down his workflow. Imagine if he hosted workshops titled “How I Built an AI Album.” Imagine if producers, musicians and students left those sessions knowing how to prompt AI, refine outputs, layer human performance over generated ideas and build something genuinely original. Imagine if he became South Africa’s leading voice on AI-assisted music. That’s a completely different headline.
Instead of defending himself, he’d be educating an industry. Instead of reacting to criticism, he’d be leading a movement. Because whether people are ready to admit it or not, prompting is becoming a creative skill. People love reducing AI to “you typed a sentence.” Anyone who’s spent more than an hour with these tools knows that’s nonsense. Good prompting is iterative. It’s taste, it’s direction, it’s knowing what to reject just as much as knowing what to keep. The same way knowing how to work a camera doesn’t make you a photographer, knowing how to open ChatGPT or Suno doesn’t make you an artist. The human is still making thousands of creative decisions, and that’s worth talking about. Instead, we’ve spent days debating authenticity.
Then came the live performances. To be fair, every artist has bad nights. Even the greats have missed notes. Credo acknowledged that himself after criticism of one performance, while his team also pointed to technical challenges. But context rarely goes viral, clips do. And when you’ve already got questions hanging over how your music was created, every off-key note suddenly becomes part of a much bigger narrative. Fair or unfair, that’s how public perception works. The irony is that none of this changes how I feel about the album, I still think it’s excellent. Which raises another uncomfortable question; If a song makes you feel something, does it matter how it was made? That’s the debate AI is forcing us to have. Not just in music: In film, advertising, journalism, and in design. Every creative industry is about to wrestle with the same questions.
South Africa just happened to have its first high-profile case play out in music. History has a funny way of remembering the first people through the door. Sometimes they’re remembered as visionaries and sometimes they’re remembered as cautionary tales. The difference usually isn’t the technology – It’s the transparency. Because AI isn’t the future anymore, it’s the present. The artists who embrace it openly will help write the rules. The ones who don’t will spend their time explaining why everyone else got the story wrong.
And that’s why I keep coming back to the same question: Is Credo V. Daniels a fraud, or is he simply a talented creative who introduced South Africa to the future before figuring out how to introduce himself?
